2026 San Diego: Friday Notes

Thought I’d collect my 2026 San Diego Notes for Friday in one place this weekend. Just getting here has been a logistical adventure: background checks, lines and finding my way through the idyllic but narrow streets of Coronado in a humungous Chevy Blazer. I’m used to a Mustang.

And then there’s the three-hour time change. So perhaps a little less cogent than usual, but I’m here.

Jeff Gordon “A Little Jealous”

Jeff Gordon reported that he told William Byron (who drives Gordon’s old No. 24 car) that he was ‘a little jealous’ he didn’t have a chance to run the first NASCAR race on an active naval base. Given Gordon’s history of back issues, he might be rethinking that watching the trucks going up in the air and landing hard on the downhill portion of the course.

Speaking of the Track…

When asked to point out where the trouble spots were in the track, Shane van Gisberben earned the 2026 San Diego Friday Notes award for quotability. He said “start with (Turn) one and count to 16.”

Kevin Magnussen, who will drive Trackhouse Racing’s Project 91 car, callled the track “the most extreme track that I’ve ever driven.” That’s not necessarily a bad thing. Magnussen went on to say that it would be “an experience in itself, and yeah, just looking forward to it.”

Drivers and crew chiefs have been surprised that the grip in some parts of the track is very different from what they had anticipated. Brad Keselowski said that the tarmac, concrete they expected would have good grip, didn’t. The older asphalt sections of the track, according to Keselowski, had more grip than expected.

“The simulators are good,” Keselowski said, “but they’re never perfect.”

Earlier in the day, Gordon mentioned that each of the manufacturers had the opportunity to LIDAR-scan the course. LIDAR is an optical method that is good at measuring surface roughness. However, the degree of roughness doesn’t directly tell you the grip. Materials also matter, and there are six or seven different types of surfaces.

Drivers were feeling their way around the track, especially in the earliest practice sessions. You can tell that by the fact that many drivers were much slower their first lap or two, then got into a rythym. But that makes it hard for us to tell much of anything about lap-time fall off. Some crew chiefs in trucks and ORAPS opined over the radio that the fall-off was larger than they had anticipated.

Beating and Banging

There’s been a lot of beating and banging, but none of it between cars — yet. Roughly half of the trucks made contact with parts of the track during their two practice sessions and qualifying.

The ORAPS drivers seem to have learned a little from the trucks, with the exception of Brandon Jones (No. 20), who hit the Turn 1 wall and the No. 17 of Corey Day, who had problems in Turn 4. Both drivers will go to backup cars.

Prior to practice, Points leader Tyler Reddick noted that the risk vs. reward was heavy on his mind. He was planning on feeling out the track for the first few laps. That’s essentially what most of the drivers did.

The Track is Still a Work in Progress

According to van Gisbergen, NASCAR did some additional work on Turn 4 overnight. Turn 4 is where the railroad tracks cross the race track. The cranes that service ships require those tracks, so NASCAR could not cover them up. The tracks aren’t perpendicular to the direction of travel; they’re sort of oblique. That makes it just a little trickier for the cars.

SvG also noted that the wall leading to pit road seemed to be displaced. “…it veers to the right, and then you got this pit lane kind of sticking out,” he said. “It won’t be trouble in practice, but I can see that being an issue in the race, so hopefully they maybe pull that wall to the right.”

Lap Time Fall Off

Practice speeds for the Cup Series are challenging to interpret for a couple reasons:

1. There was no inspection prior to practice.
2. Teams had different agendas for what they wanted to accomplish during practice.

Among drivers for whom there were trends, I saw two general types: bad lap-time falloff and worse lap-time falloff.

Surprisingly, SvG is an example of the second. He said that his tires were ‘killed’ by lap five and the graph shows they sure were.

It didn’t get any better on SvG’s second run. Same thing: Pretty good lap times until laps four to six in a run, then pttthhhffff.

A few drivers showed much less lap time falloffs: Todd Gilliland, Michael McDowell, Kyle Larson, Austin Hill and, to some extent, Ty Gibbs.