The participating field for NASCAR’s In-Season Challenge was set after the Cup Series race at Nashville. The 32 drivers who are at the top of the points table will contest over the next five races to win a prize money of $1 million. In fourth place on the table, Denny Hamlin is one of those who will join the competition. However, he is not very thrilled about it for one reason.
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He said in Nashville, “I was really excited until I saw the tracks on it. You got a superspeedway, you got road courses in there. To be truthful, we are going to have to get pretty lucky. Or have such a good draw that things just work out. I wish it held more conventional ovals but it’s just the way the schedule works out.”
He also admitted that these races don’t arrive in his prime part of the season. The tracks in the challenge are the Atlanta Motor Speedway, Chicago Street Course, Sonoma Raceway, Dover Motor Speedway, and the Indianapolis Motor Speedway. The brackets for the challenge will be seeded through three races before these events.
Those races will be at the Michigan International Speedway, Autódromo Hermanos Rodríguez (Mexico), and the Pocono Raceway. So, how does one advance through each round? The driver who finishes higher than the other in each head-to-head matchup “wins” that matchup and advances to the next round. This goes on till only two are left at the Brickyard.
Brad Keselowski about the In-Season Challenge
The RFK Racing co-owner is the 32nd driver on the points table and has scraped through into the entry list for the challenge. He told the press before finishing 23rd in Nashville that he hadn’t thought a lot about the contest and that he was only focused on winning the weekend. But he did admit that it should be good for the sport and the fans.
He said, “It will be fun to talk about when it gets going. It’s good for the sport, good for our fans. It’s a competition and if it is a competition, we want to win it. With that said, our heads are down and focused on one week at a time, really one day at a time, and that is Nashville and it is hard to look further ahead than that.”
Since 2022, Keselowski has secured just one victory. In 2025, he has just one top-10 finish. Wanting to win the In-Season Challenge might be a shelf too high to reach for him at this juncture.
