2026 Martinsville I Set Up Notes

My 2026 Martinsville I set up notes cover everything from the venue to the on-track action we’ve seen so far.

Constraints

• Teams are using the same tires as last fall: D-5262 on the left sides and D-5256 on the rights. The left sides were also used at this race last year.
• Teams have 80 more horsepower than last year and a different gear set.
• Temperatures will be colder compared to last year. The forecast predicts upper 50s to low 60s near race time.
• Practice yesterday was 10 degrees colder that is expected for the race. Many crew chiefs suggested practice won’t tell you much about the race.
• There were 10 cautions at this race last year, for 86 laps of 400 or 21.5% cautions, but most of those cautions involved just one to three cars.
• Most of those cautions were not race-ending. There was only one DNF at this race in 2025 and that was due to electrical issues.
• Twenty-two cars finished on the lead lap last year. Another five cars finished one lap down.

Brad Keselowski had an interesting observation about spring vs. fall races at Martinsville. He noted that the difference in length makes a big difference in terms of managing tires. The stages for the spring race (today) are 80, 180 and 400. The stages for the fall race will be 130, 260 and 500.

Keselowski noted that, with the longer stages, if you don’t manage tires, you’re much more likely to go down a lap if there are long GF runs. The shorter stages in the spring race make managing tires a little less valuable.

Practice Results

Despite crew chiefs’ pessimistic view of how well practice results might translate to the race, there are some interesting notes from practice that speak to how drivers manage tires.

Overall Notes

With lap times this short, there’s not a lot of time to differentiate yourself from the field. From first to 37th, there is just about 0.3 seconds of difference (0.296 s, to be precise.) That’s a 1.48% change relative to the fastest time.

Martinsville ends up being more about maneuverability and execution. At this race last year, the top five finishers all started no worse than eight; however, the rest of the top ten started at positions ranging from seventh through 25th.

Ryan Preece

The graph below shows practice laptimes for the No. 60 car of Ryan Preece. I found two feature of interest here.

Look first at the red box from laps 30 to 41. Over that stretch of laps, Preece ran almost constant lap times. Even after the tires had 30 laps on them, he had enough control to keep the lap time falloff minimal.

The second feature I call to your attention is the slope of the line through the first laps in this run. (Most drivers’ first four or five laps were much slower and I don’t show them here.) Preece has a much lower lap-time increase over the first 20 laps than I see in other drivers running comparable times.

For comparison, Daniel Suárez had an average lap-time increase for drivers running comparable speeds. I show his average increase in black and Preece’s in red in the graph below

Suárez, along with most of the other drivers, is losing time to the more controlled drivers like Preece. In his media availability, RFK co-owner and No. 6 driver Brad Keselowski complemented Preece’s ability to run Martinsville.

“My teammate, Ryan Preece, I thought, was one of the best cars here in the fall race, so we learned a lot from him, and trying to apply that. So that’s kind of the strength of having a three-car team and having a teammate like Ryan that’s really, really smart, really good on these tracks.” — Brad Keselowski

He went on to mention Preece’s win at the Clash at Bowman Gray, which is probably the most similar track to Martinsville.

Qualifying

A lot of crew chiefs made their primary mission during practice burning off fuel so they’d have a lighter car for qualifying. That’s reflected in a couple anomalous qualifying results when compared to the list of practice laps.

• The top four qualifiers (Denny Hamlin, William Byron, Josh Berry and Ty Gibbs) had fastest laps in the top nine.
• Shane van Gisbergen qualified fifth, but has the 34th-fastest practice lap
• Austin Cindric qualified sixth, but had the 31st-fastest lap in practice.
• Carson Hocevar, who was fighting brake issues throughout practice and qualifying, qualified seventh, but had the 28th-fastest practice lap.
• Tyler Reddick qualified eighth and had only the 21st-fastest practice lap
• Joey Logano was 21st in terms of fastest practice lap, but qualified ninth.
• Chase Elliott rounds out the top 10, having laid down the fourth-fastest practice lap.

What About Another Reddick Win?

Doubtful. In his three spring Martinsville races with 23XI, Tyler Reddick has an average finish of 15.7, with one top-ten and no top-five finishes. That’s considering an not-too-bad average starting position of 11.3. He’ll start today’s race from P8, his second-best starting position in the spring race.

Reddick’s victories this year have relied on having a fast car, but that doesn’t provide the advantages at Martinsville that it does at a larger, less crowded track.

A number of drivers said yesterday that you’ll be able to tell the contenders by what happens when they reach the lap cars. The ones with the best chance of winning the race are the ones that can successfully navigate lap traffic. So you need not only a good-handling car, but also the respect of other drivers. Martinsville is great place to payback someone without having to turn them. You just make it really hard for them to pass you.

That’s the 2026 Martinsville I Race Setup!