Brickyard Bubba!

Bubba Wallace does a burnout celebrating his win in the 2025 Brickyard 400 Sunday afternoon at Indianapolis Motor Speedway. (Photo: Daylon Barr)

Brickyard 400:

Bubba Wallace etched his name amongst the greats of NASCAR by winning the 2025 Brickyard 400. Wallace's win snaps a 100-race winless streak and puts the driver of the 23 car squarely in the 2025 NASCAR Cup Series playoffs. Sunday's win was the third of Wallace's career and his first "Crown Jewel" win in NASCAR.

The race, overall, was ho-hum, but rather average by Indy's standards in NASCAR. Much of the race was driven by track position, pit strategy, and getting all you could get on the limited number of restarts throughout the day. Even with that, I thought it was a good race by Indy standards and TNT (specifically Letarte) did a great job keeping up with the strategies and explaining each of them. A few on track incidents did spice things up throughout the day: the 71 inadvertently turned the 1 car and sent him hard into the outside wall, the 43 car cut a tire and re-racked the field late in Stage 2, and our last two cautions set up the two OT attempts and really ratcheted up the intensity coming to the checkered flag. Throw those in with a spate of miscalculation of pit strategy by a few teams and tire failures for the 2 and 22 who likely with their strategy would have contended for and come close to winning the race. We had enough compelling things happen to keep me glued to the TV. But as the race wound down it appeared it was all Bubba Wallace. Bubba and the 23 team had executed flawlessly all day and put themselves in contention to win on the last run of stage 3. Even though Larson was charging hard, Bubba was cruising to the checkered flag until the rain fell and put us under the red flag for about 20 minutes. Coming out of the red flag we headed to OT attempt one. Bubba grabbed the lead but it was all for naught when CBell turned Zane Smith on the backstretch coming to the white flag causing a multi-car pileup that put us back under caution. This is when things got real tense with Wallace now unsure if they have enough fuel to make it to the checkered flag (as well as several other front runners). But Wallace's crew chief Charles Denike said eff it and kept the 23 car out front for OT number 2. And that call and their strategy paid off as Wallace quickly got out to the lead in turn 1 and did not look back. Bubba pulled away from Larson and took the checkered flag capturing his first win of 2025 locking himself into the playoffs with a kiss of the bricks to seal the deal.

Next up we head to the cornfields of the Mid-West with on track action in the Xfinity Series and Cup Series this weekend at Iowa Speedway while the truck teams have a weekend off before picking back up at Watkins Glen next weekend. The Xfinity Series will lead off the weekend with the Hy-Vee Perks 250 at 4:30 p.m. EST on The CW. The Cup Series will close out the weekend on Sunday afternoon with the Iowa Corn 350 Powered by Ethanol at 3:30 p.m. on USA.

Iowa Picks:

Trucks = Off

Xfinity = Taylor Gray

Cup = Ryan Blaney