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| Special Championship Week BONUS Lap Zero! |
Saturday will be the final race for the “Xfinity Series”, as the communications giant ends its sponsorship of the second-tier Nascar circuit. Here’s a look back at some highlights from their 11 year run:
2015: Ryan Reed wins the first-ever race under Xfinity’s title sponsorship, the Alert Today Florida 300. He would’ve described the racing as being “as fast as Xfinity internet” but the servers were down and had an undetermined fix time.
2016: Daniel Suarez becomes the first foreign-born driver to win a major Nascar Series championship. Since then he’s raced for approximately 19 different Cup teams.
2017: This marks the sixth straight year that the owner’s title is taken by either Joe Gibbs Racing or Team Penske. Nascar—names are made here (but primarily just two of them).
2018: The GMS Racing 23 car has a slew of drivers behind the wheel, including Alex Bowman, AJ Allmendinger, Chase AND Bill Elliott, the ghost of Johnny Mantz, and Junior Senior Jr.
2019: Tyler Reddick wins his second straight Xfinity Series championship. Fun fact—no one has won more than two Busch/Nationwide/Xfinity Series championships. Well, not so much a “fun fact” as “something to mention awkwardly on a date just before she leaves for the bathroom and never comes back.”
2020: The pandemic puts the season on pause, as we go more than two months without a race. That also be as long as we’d go without Mark Martin NOT winning a race in the Winn-Dixie car.
2021: We get one of the longest race names in series history, with the Drive for the Cure 250 presented by Blue Cross/Blue Shield of North Carolina. Or, if you need to save space, the DftC250pbBC/BSoNC.
2022: Ty Gibbs compares himself to Jesus.
2023: Cole Custer wins the championship in the iconic #00. Hey—anything Buckshot Jones did is iconic in MY book.
2024: NBC shows just how much they care about Nascar by shafting Xfinity Series coverage to The CW months ahead of schedule.
2025: We all enjoy the final year before the O’Reilly jingle gets permanently stuck in our heads (OW!).
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