The 2026 New Hampshire practice prospects come from a single 50-minute practice session where all drivers participated and teams had two sets of tires.
I plotted all the numbers on the same graph limits. That runs from the fastest to the slowest reasonable lap on the vertical axis and the first lap to the maximum number of laps any driver ran during this session.
Bubba Wallace
Wallace recorded one of the longer continuous runs. The yellow vertical lines show where laps are missing; that means either that this was a lap that included entering and staying in the pits or just a really slow lap for some reason.
The total fall-off here is 1.218 s over 43 laps (from lap 7 to lap 50.) It is, as often is the case, faster in the first laps and a little slower after about, say 15 laps. That’s not a ton of falloff compared to last week at Richmond, where we were seeing 3 seconds over roughly the same number of laps.
That low blip on lap 52 is the first lap on the second set of tires — a mock qualifying lap that turned out to be his fastest lap of the practice.
Ty Gibbs
Ty Gibbs also ran a lot of continuous laps. His fastest lap was just a little slower than Wallace’s lap. Looking at continuous laps, Gibbs was fourth in 30-lap average while Wallace was second.
Plateau-ing: Carson Hocevar, Ryan Preece, Chase Elliott
Hocevar had a weird laptime pattern. He had the same faster falloff over the initial laps, but then seemed to plateau after that. He only did it for the first tire run. His second run was significantly slower on the short run.
Ryan Preece had a similar pattern, but weirder.
It’s difficult to infer too much given that every team has its own priorities during practice. But a driver who can run the field average for 10-15 laps is definitely not wearing his tires too quickly.
Chase Elliott wasn’t fast in terms of single-lap speed, but he also had a decent laptime falloff curve for his first tire run. Remember that the dashed green line is the average of the field over all relevant laps run.
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