2026 Dover Race Results: The Good, The Bad, The Ugly

Denny Hamlin won the first All-Star race run at Dover Motor Speedway. It wasn’t a points race, but there’s something to learn from every race. Here’s my opinion on the good, the bad and the ugly.

The Good: Full-Width Resin Application

I saw a lot of posts on twitter that were basically “Why was anyone ever talking about not racing at Dover?” Well, duh, it’s because NASCAR made a significant change that vastly improved the racing.

NASCAR, of late, uses the All-Star Race to test new things: double-file restarts, softer tires and stage breaks. This time, they didn’t change the car. Although there had been talk of a new splitter, production issues made that impossible. The format changed and I’ll address that later.

This is the first time resin has been used across the entire width of the track in all four turns.

“The resin was unbelievable,” Chase Briscoe said, and he meant that in a really good way.

“They did an amazing job with the track,” winner Denny Hamlin said. “The track didn’t seem as aerosensitive,” he added. He felt that it didn’t matter which lane he was in, he could run the same time. That’s what makes the 1.5-mile track racing so good, he said.

Dover had a history of being a ‘follow the leader’ track, where the bottom groove was the only way around. That was definitely not the case on this warm May afternoon in Delaware. The track widened out, giving drivers a chance to try out multiple lanes. Connor Zilisch diamonded corners, while other drivers found different lanes depending on how much wear their tires had.

It will be interesting to see whether NASCAR decides to use the resin at Nashville Superspeedway, another concrete track, in two weeks when the Cup Series visits.

A Second Good: Tires

This was a new combination of tires for Dover. Teams had experience with the left-side tire that was first used in Bristol last month. The right-side tire was “new” for Dover, but Chris Gayle, the winning crew chief, pointed out that the most significant change was more stagger.

Stagger is the difference between the circumference of the right-side and left-side tires. At oval tracks, the right-side tires are bigger around than the left side tires, which means that the car turns left all by itself.

The All-Star Race’s left-side tires have a circumference of 2249 mm, while the right-side tires were 2279 mm. That’s a stagger of 30 mm or 3 centimeters or 1.18 inches. At the last Dover race, the left-side tires had a circumference of 2254 mm. I know that seems like a small change, but it does make a difference.

For the majority of drivers the tires hung on well until about 60 laps, then started to get slower much more quickly.

The Bad

The lap 1 crash was embarrassing for the series, but it was downright scary for Ryan Preece. The rear end of his car caught on fire and sustained a much larger fire than I think I’ve ever seen in a Gen-7 car.

It’s unlikely that the fuel cell was breached, but it’s possible that one of the fuel lines was torn off or ruptured. Given that cars are full of fuel at the start of the race, this could have been a much worse event. As it was, the primary impact was a red flag.

The Secondary Bad

Both Chase Briscoe and Ross Chastain had been dealing with a bug during the week. It’s not fun to have to put on a helmet and race when you feel like crap. It’s especially not fun when you get wrecks, as Chastain did, before the main event.

The Ugly

Bring back the All-Star Open. Chase Elliott and Ross Chastain’s cars were damaged so badly that they couldn’t participate in the final 200 laps, despite having already qualified to be in it. Kyle Larson’s car was damaged so badly that he had no chance of winning the race.

The All-Star Format didn’t need fixing. I’m a big fan of NASCAR’s openness to change, but change for the sake of change makes no sense. Everyone who has earned their way into the All-Star Race deserves to get to run it. It should be special. It should be the 26 (or whatever) best drivers.

Let the rest of the drivers run the Hooligan’s Race and qualify that way. Heather Gibbs pointed out that winning the Open gives a driver “street cred” — something to brag about.

That’s my 2026 Dover: The Good, the Bad, the Ugly.