NASCAR Cup Series

Will Texas reveal something about contenders for Sprint Cup title?

Published Apr. 10, 2015 9:08 a.m. ET

Larry McReynolds

Outside of a road course, we have been to about every style track we race on. Texas Motor Speedway this weekend will mark our third mile-and-a-half-track we've visited in seven races. To get an idea of who will be strong this weekend, I suggest going back and looking at those teams that ran well at both Atlanta and Las Vegas.

Saturday night's Duck Commander 500 (FOX, 7:30 p.m. ET) is another 500-mile race, which can be fairly hard on equipment. It's also going to be our first points race under the lights of 2015. I look for some of the strategy we saw in Atlanta to be repeated Saturday night. As the grip level at Texas continues to wear down, these drivers are going to be wanting new tires every chance they get.

Joe Gibbs Racing ran really well at Auto Club Speedway before some issues took them out of contention. Then two weeks ago, Denny Hamlin won at Martinsville plus JGR had three of its four cars finish in the top five there. So after this past off-weekend, I'll be keeping my eye on them to see if they can continue to progress.

I'm also going to be watching Roush Fenway Racing. As I mentioned in some of my previous columns, they are really struggling. Despite their offseason changes, there really hasn't been any improvement there. So I am curious to see if they come out of the box stronger after the Easter weekend break.

It's hard to believe that we are already getting close to being one-fourth through our 26-race regular season, as we call it. Six races down and 20 races to go may not sound like a lot, but remember, we don't have another break in the action until Father's Day weekend in June.

So we're going to be getting to a point in these next two months of racing of finding out who the pretenders are and who the real contenders are for the NASCAR Sprint Cup championship.