STEWART-HAAS RACING
Coca-Cola 600
Date: May 29, 2023
Event: Coca-Cola 600 (Round 14 of 36)
Series: NASCAR Cup Series
Location: Charlotte (N.C.) Motor Speedway (1.5-mile oval)
Format: 400 laps, broken into four stages (100 laps/100 laps/100 laps/100 laps)
Race Winner: Ryan Blaney of Team Penske (Ford)|
Stage 1 Winner: William Byron of Hendrick Motorsports (Chevrolet)
Stage 2 Winner: Chris Buescher of RFK Racing (Ford)
Stage 3 Winner: Ryan Blaney of Team Penske (Ford)
Race Finish:
● Aric Almirola (Started 23rd, Finished 25th / Running, completed 400 of 400 laps)
SHR Points:
● Aric Almirola (26th with 233 points, 213 out of first)
Race Notes:
● Ryan Blaney won the Coca-Cola 600 to snap a 59-race winless streak and deliver team owner Roger Penske a sweep of the Memorial Day weekend as Team Penske’s Josef Newgarden won the Indianapolis 500 on Sunday.
● This was Blaney’s eighth career NASCAR Cup Series victory, his first of the season and his first on the 1.5-mile oval at Charlotte. His margin over second-place William Byron was .663 of a second.
● Blaney was the 10th different winner in the 14 NASCAR Cup Series races run this season.
● This was Ford’s 722nd all-time NASCAR Cup Series victory and its second of the season.
● This was Ford’s 33rd all-time NASCAR Cup Series victory at Charlotte. The manufacturer won its first race at the track on Oct. 16, 1960 with Speedy Thompson.
● There were 16 caution periods for a total of 83 laps.
● Twenty-five of the 37 drivers in the race finished on the lead lap.
● Ross Chastain remains the championship leader after Charlotte with a one-point advantage over second-place Blaney.
Sound Bites:
“It was a good night for our Smithfield Ford Mustang. It’s an honor and privilege to race on Memorial Day and it was an honor to fly Lance Corporal Daniel M. McVicker’s name on the windshield. Wish we could’ve brought it home a little bit better for them. We were running 10th with 20-somethng to go and got caught up in that restart wreck in the middle of (turns) one and two and got a lot of heavy damage that really hurt the racecar after that. Hate that we didn’t get out of here with a top-10. I felt like we certainly had a top-10 racecar. I got loose on an early restart, bent the right-rear toe-link, we fixed it, got two laps down, and then got all of our laps back and drove from the back and into the top-10. So, just really proud of the effort and the fight, but not the result. We fought hard and we’ll go get ready for Gateway. That was a really good track for us last year.” – Aric Almirola, driver of the No. 10 Smithfield Ford Mustang
Next Up:
The next event on the NASCAR Cup Series schedule is the Enjoy Illinois 300 presented by TicketSmarter on Sunday, June 4 at Gateway International Raceway in Madison, Illinois, near St. Louis. The race begins at 3:30 p.m. EDT with live coverage provided by FS1 and SiriusXM NASCAR Radio.