On the whole, the 2024 NASCAR season was a memorable one for a lot of reasons.
There was pretty good competition on the big tracks during the summer months, continued progress on short tracks with the third year NextGen and an expected fight that was seemingly always destined for the courts.
The playoffs had no shortage of drama, the schedule continued to evolve into a mixture of old and new, while Silly Season lived up to expectations. There was even a crew member firing over a Hawk Tuah girl reference.
Here are the 50 most memorable moments from NASCAR’s 76th season.
50. Winston Cup Museum closes
An important archiver of NASCAR history was closed just before the start of the year following a years-long dispute with the relatively new RJ Reynolds Tobacco copyright holder. While the NASCAR Hall of Fame in Charlotte got all the attention, this hidden gem felt like its authentic and unauthorized counterpart in all the right ways.
It still doesn’t make a lot of sense, from both sides, why it had to happen this way.
49. JD Motorsports shutters
This felt like a significant storyline purely from the standpoint of the number of NASCAR careers that passed through Johnny Davis and his red and yellow underfunded team cars. Numerous relevant drivers, crew chiefs and industry insiders have passed through his South Carolina doors at one point or the other.
JD Motorsports was a NASCAR Xfinity Series staple.
48. Busch v. Lajoie
Inconsequential in the grand scheme of things as nothing significant came from this, but the incident between Corey Lajoie and Kyle Busch at Pocono did generate some bombastic quotes from ‘Rowdy’ when he made his regular appearance on the Pat McAfee Show a week later.
47. Deegan leaves NASCAR
For whatever reason, be it the equipment or the driver, this just didn’t work out. This is going to have a non-zero impact because her fan base and social media prowess could have made a difference if the daughter of action sports star Brian Deegan had been more competitive. Instead, she left AM Racing halfway through her debut Xfinity Series season and will race in Indy NXT next year in the pursuit of an IndyCar Series career.
46. Clash moved up a day
It was a rare example of common-sense prevailing, consummated likely from the fact that the Clash was just an exhibition race in advance of a historic storm that otherwise would have left NASCAR trapped in Los Angeles for almost a week. It sucks for would-be attendees who couldn’t make it but was still better than the alternative.
45. Full Speed documentary
No one is confusing the NASCAR Netflix documentary for Formula 1 Drive to Survive in terms of impact but this was a very good documentary that captured the tone of the Cup Series product. A second season has been green lit but it appears delayed, likely in part due to the underlying legal issues between NASCAR and two race teams who would have to sign over their IP to be featured in the show.
44. Corey Day arrives
This is a sneaky under-the-radar inclusion that could feel like a really big deal a decade from now. But it has to feel like a big deal with a superstar teenaged Sprint Car and Midget ace decides to go NASCAR racing before his 19th birthday and will race full-time in its second-highest level before turning 20. Hendrick Motorsports is banking big on finding its next superstar in the same world as one of its current stars.
43. Corey Lajoie, Justin Haley trade
Its extremely rare and strange to see a driver trade similar to what you see in stick-and-ball sports but that’s exactly what happened in September when Spire Motorsports and Rick Ware Racing executed a Corey Lajoie and Justin Haley trade. Haley spent the rest of this past season at Spire where he will run in 2025 while Lajoies future remains unanswered.
42. Ty Majeski wins Truck Series championship
It’s always a good story when a driver makes it to NASCAR and wins championships purely on merit. Majeski, 30, has been a force on short tracks for over a decade and recently stuck in the Truck Series, first as an engineer, now as a driver and won a championship. They don’t do it like Majeski did often anymore.
41. Justin Allgaier wins Xfinity Series championship
It’s not just that literally everyone loves Justin Allgaier, which they do, but also that the JR Motorsports No. 7 team overcame a lot of adversity on the way to being the last to celebrate in November at Phoenix Raceway. Allgaier had the best season on consistency but kept having mechanical issues or ill-timed crashes that nearly eliminated him on multiple occasions. He even had to overcome a lot on championship day just to get to that moment. It made it all the sweeter when it came to fruition.
40. Dale Jr. returns in the 8
This isn’t really a NASCAR story since it happened at Florence Motor Speedway in an end of the year Late Model Stock Car race. However, when you deliver Lionel Collectables the top-selling diecast in just a month, it serves to remind the racing world just how popular Dale Jr remains even as a part-time racer and media analyst. This makes the list purely because seeing this car in person evokes a decade’s worth of NASCAR memories.
Earnhardt nearly won this race, too.
39. Maybe Dale Jr’s last NASCAR race
Never say never in this industry, and certainly Earnhardt himself knows that better than anyone, but the Cup Series icon indicated in September that the fall Bristol Xfinity Series race might be the last time he takes a green flag in a national touring event.
38. Zilisch wins in Xfinity debut
It felt like a really big deal that NASCAR’s biggest rising young star, already a Rolex24 winner, would win in his Xfinity Series debut at Watkins Glen in September. After all, Trackhouse signed Connor Zilisch to a development contract and loaned him to JR Motorsports, expecting big things along the way. That delivered in his very first start at the second highest level portends big things for the decades to come.
37. Harvick practices the 5
It was a surreal visual if nothing else, Kevin Harvick donned in the Hendrick Motorsports No. 5 gear while Kyle Larson was practicing for the Indianapolis 500. It was good business for Harvick to stay attuned with the car for his television role but also for Rick Hendrick who never could find the right place and right time to have the 2014 champion drive one of his race cars.
36. Short tracks are slowly getting there?
On one hand, the fall race at Martinsville was the best race yet for a short track package on the NextGen, thanks to the softest tire compound Goodyear has placed on these cars yet. It was directionally positive three years into directional progress. On the other hand, these cars still make too much grip, turn too good and stop too good on the short tracks, historically the most action packed in -the sport and the industry demands further progress with this sub-discipline.
35. Chase Briscoe signs with JGR
This is a big deal because Chase Briscoe did everything the right way. He swept floors in Chad Bryant’s shop while moving from Indiana to North Carolina, sleeping on one of his best friend’s couches, all while trying to make a career in NASCAR. He won in everything his talent put him in, got to drive his hero’s car at Stewart-Haas, and now gets signed to drive one of the most coveted rides in the sport — all over other free agents who might have been safer picks at first blush.
This was all made possible due to …
34. Martin Truex Jr retires
This felt inevitable after taking most of 2024 trying to decide if he wanted to come back, which he did. Truex accomplished a great deal in a lot of the right ways on merit just like the driver replacing him. Truex won championships at the two highest levels and carried himself with professionalism. His career also endured a challenging start in the first decade of his tenure, never finding himself in ideal situations at Dale Earnhardt Inc. and Michael Waltrip Racing but becoming a superstar once joining Furniture Row and then Joe Gibbs Racing.
33. Joey Logano’s webbed glove
Joey Logano, in what now seems like a silly distant memory, was fined $10,000 for wearing a webbed gloved during qualifying at Atlanta designed to redirect air in a aerodynamically beneficial way. He was shamed by the industry at large but there was also a sense of appreciation for the ingenuity of what teams will try to do for an extra tenth of a second.
32. NASCAR clamps down on boys have it
Be it the record fine for Ricky Stenhouse punching Kyle Busch or how NASCAR responded to the post-race Bubba Wallace on Alex Bowman door slam, it became clear that the powers-that-be are taking a much stricter approach to stock car theatrics than any front office that came before them.
31. Race control blunders
It wasn’t a banner year for NASCAR’s race control, whether these are all fair gripes are not. There was how cars were reordered after the big crash at Talladega, inconsistent application of the rules regarding the damaged vehicle policy and everything that happened during the Brickyard 400.
NASCAR says they don’t have a lot to clean up but the garage area certainly feels differently. We’ve all seen too much of Elton Sawyer this year, respectfully to one of the nicest guys in the garage.
NASCAR schedules Mexico
Be it Mexico or Canada, NASCAR was going to take its Cup Series product international in 2025. It was just a matter of where and when. The date is June 13-15 and Autódromo Hermanos Rodríguez in Mexico City is the venue. In an era where all American sports are taking their shows abroad, Mexico and an event co-promoted by the Mexican Grand Prix group will be a test of NASCAR’s popularity south of its border.
29. Burton wins Daytona
This win had so much consequence. For one, it was the 100th win for the Wood Brothers in NASCAR and even though Burton was already set to leave the team, it cemented their three years together. It denied Kyle Busch a win that would have extended his streak to 20 straight years. It also punched a playoff ticket for a driver that was the worst statistical entry in the division this year.
28. New Roval layout delivers
There was a lot of skepticism about the reconfigured Charlotte Motor Speedway Roval, especially concerning an abrupt elevation change and a long straight that approaches a 90 degree angle. In hindsight, Marcus Smith, Steve Swift and company got this one right. The racing was compelling and the new turns never produced the kind of disaster crashes that many in the garage feared.
27. Briscoe wins Southern 500
That’s why Joe Gibbs hired Chase Briscoe. With a team set to shut down in mere months, and nothing at face value to race for, Briscoe went off and held off an equally desperate Kyle Busch to send Stewart-Haas to the playoffs in its final season and provide a blue collar racer turned Cup star a crown jewel victory.
26. Legacy struggles worsen
It’s been a rough two years for Legacy Motor Club, first suffering through a lame duck final season with Chevrolet and then a struggle in its debut season with Toyota. Erik Jones, who most recently won the Southern 500 with the team in 2022 when it was Petty GMS just has been hapless ever since. John Hunger Nemechek led the divisions in being involved in crashes. They finished 28th and 34th in the standings, respectively.
Legacy has spent the summer and autumn completely revamping its competition and engineering departments in the hopes that a second year with Toyota will be more fruitful.
25. Wallace, Almirola fight
The details still haven’t been made publicly clear but the consensus is that Aric Almirola escalated a physical confrontation with Bubba Wallace at a Toyota meeting and it resulted in the part-time Xfinity Series driver and semi-retired Cup veteran suspended through the summer months. Almirola came back to race in the playoffs and nearly won an owners championship for JGR in what might have been his swan song as a NASCAR driver.
24. Loudon finishes on wet tires
NASCAR’s two-year flirtation with racing on a wet track culminated with finishing a race that otherwise would have been rain shortened at lightless New Hampshire Motor Speedway. In addition to getting the race resumed, the product was actually tremendously entertaining with usable grooves from the apron to the wall at the typically single-file track in New England.
23. Larson versus Hamlin
For awhile, it looked as if Denny Hamlin and Kyle Larson were on a direct course to race each other for the championship in some way at Phoenix. They were still the 1a and 1b of this past season based purely on pace and performance. And when you run up front that frequently, things happen. There were high-profile run ins at Pocono and Nashville. They were both loathe to call it a ‘rivalry,’ but the increased tension over the past two years has tested a longstanding friendship.
22. Byron wins Daytona 500
The Great American Race came down to a four-lap shootout with William Byron and Ross Chastain side-by-side. Byron ultimately cleared Chastain with Austin Cindric and Corey Lajoie in tow. Byron faded high to cover Chastain. Simultaneously, Chastain darted low right as Cindric got tagged by Lajoie.
Chastain and Cindric went spinning into the infield grass and the race ended under caution right as Alex Bowman nearly carried momentum to the win but Bowman was leading at the time of caution.
21. Denny Hamlin, Marcus Smith Twitter spat
In hindsight, this was the first clear sign that Denny Hamlin was going to be unwavering in the charter negotiations process that turned into a lawsuit. It was also one of the most surreal moments as it occurred roughly around Midnight and was so viciously personal that it almost read as staged. Hamlin felt very adamant that Speedway Motor was not appropriately investing revenue into its facilities and Sonoma’s failed-at-first repave provided an opening to express it. Smith took it extremely public exception to that notion.
20. Brickyard 400 returns … and is good
The Indianapolis Motor Speedway oval historically wasn’t the best venue for NASCAR Cup cars from an entertainment standpoint. That’s why the race transitioned to the IMS road course for three years. But to celebrate the 30th anniversary of the event, NASCAR moved its race back to the oval and the NextGen car proved to be pretty dang compelling on the 2.5-mile circle track. Kyle Larson won in a paint scheme intended to be run in his ill-fated Coca-Cola 600 appearance and added yet another historic crown jewel in the process.
19. Coca-Cola 600 resumption called off
Races get rained out all the time. Whatever. The fact that NASCAR and Charlotte Motor Speedway put hours into drying the track, almost getting it there, and then calling off the resumption left a bitter taste in a lot of people’s mouths. Even race winner Christopher Bell felt uneasy about celebrating recognizing that something felt off. This one still doesn’t particularly make sense. It especially proved problematic to Kyle Larson, who didn’t even get to turn a lap upon his return from the rain-delayed Indianapolis 500.
18. Rowdy’s Win Streak Ends
Kyle Busch had won at least a single race 19 years in row but none since his third win of the 2023 season last summer. There were near misses in 2024, like the three-wide Atlanta defeat and the final restart at Daytona but the season ended with the two-time champion ultimately failing to extend his Cup Series record to two full decades. Still, what an incredible run oF longevity and more likely an indictment of the current state of Richard Childress Racing’s equipment at present time.
17. Alex Bowman’s ROVAL DQ
Alex Bowman, believed by many to be racing for his job, advanced to the Round of 8 until his Hendrick No. 48 was found to be light across the scales after the race at the Charlotte Roval. NASCAR gave them multiple chances to move weight and clear the scales but they weren’t even close, at least 17 lbs light. They owned it too but it really stings for Bowman, who did so much right. As a result, a disqualification moved Joey Logano into the Round of 8 instead and the Penske No. 22 capitalized on the second breath and took it to the championship.
16. Five OTs at Nashville
It was easily the most ridiculous finish of the season, the Ally 400 requiring an extra 31 laps as drivers kept crashing and running out of fuel in the pursuit of a playoff spot or additional playoff points. In the end, Joey Logano won and he may not have even made the playoffs that resulted in a championship had all this wackiness not even have taken place.
15. Hamlin’s engine penalty
In hindsight, this was an infraction that altered the course of the playoffs. Toyota failed to properly seal an engine used in winning the spring race at Bristol, which was a race where there was so little on-throttle time, indicating there was nothing nefarious about what happened.
Nevertheless, the resulting loss of 75 points and 10 playoff points denied Hamlin valuable bonus points that would have seen him through to the final four otherwise.
14. Homestead finish
The finish at Homestead represented everything good about the southernmost race track, the NextGen car on big tracks and even the playoff format. Tyler Reddick, Kyle Larson and Denny Hamlin, all needing to win to make the final four, delivering a show that was peak post-modern era NASCAR Cup Series racing.
13. Hamlin, Gabehart split
After 22 wins in 209 starts across six seasons, Chris Gabehart was split from Denny Hamlin to take over as competition director at large for Joe Gibbs Racing. The public-facing reason, and maybe it really is true, that Gabehart is better served strengthening the entire company but it also risks weakening its senior driver, who will be paired with Chris Gayle next season.
12. Kansas photo finish
It was the equivalent of one inch, specified to be 0.001 seconds, but also needing a replay review to confirm that Kyle Larson defeated Chris Buescher in the closest finish in NASCAR Cup Series history at Kansas. The finish, which was also the conclusion to an exceptional overall race, also had Chase Elliott and Martin Truex Jr. in the picture. Kansas Speedway is NASCAR’s best track, for all three national touring divisions, and the May race validated that perception.
11. Larson wows in Indianapolis 500
Kyle Larson marveled in his Indy 500 debut, starting fifth in his inaugural qualifying attempt in the event and was running inside top-10, as he had all race, when a pit road speeding penalty relegated him to 18th at the finish. Larson did lead a lap on the pit cycle and also impressed with his race craft and pure pace in his IndyCar Series racing debut.
10. Larson’s waiver decision
NASCAR drug out the playoff fate of Larson for missing that race for over a week before ultimately deciding to grant the playoff waiver. And in the weeks that followed, stories made the round that it took so long because there were those in NASCAR’s glass offices that really wanted to exclude him from the 10-race championship as a result of choosing the Indianapolis 500 over his primary responsibilities, NASCAR.
9. Atlanta three-wide photo finish
On one hand, this was memorable because it’s an epic three-wide photo finish and how could you not be entertained by that? On the other hand, it wasn’t until months later that the consequences of that night became even more present. Kyle Busch didn’t win, but it would have changed his entire season and extended that 19-year winning streak if he had. If Ryan Blaney wins, Daniel Suarez isn’t a playoff driver and Ross Chastain is. It’s a real butterfly effect kind of moment.
8. Martinsville Finish
It took 30 minutes after the penultimate race of the season to even determine who was going to advance to the Cup Series championship race. The final spot came down to Christopher Bell and William Byron, the latter who was at risk of losing too many spots and getting passed in points. Bell got into the wall, and stayed in the gas to commit something akin to a ‘Hail Melon’ but Byron had the support of a Chevrolet blockade preventing him from getting passed … all under orders from Chevrolet. Bell was penalized and the spot went to Byron but there were light consequences for race manipulation. Bell felt robbed.
7. Bristol Spring Race
More than likely, this race will go down as one of the great mystery and enigmas in NASCAR history. To this date, no one can really explain why the tires degraded the way they did that night, producing one of the most unpredictable and wildly entertaining races of all-time. It single-handedly led NASCAR down the rabbit hole of trying to fix short track racing through tire wear but no one knows exactly why this played out the way it did. Maybe Denny Hamlin was right and someone at Goodyear peed in the formula.
6. Stewart-Haas Racing shuts down
It was quite a year the sense that Stewart-Haas Racing went from undergoing a rebrand and the threat of major changes if things didn’t turn around to three charters being sold and Tony Stewart exiting stage left likely to rarely being seen in a NASCAR environment moving forward.
It was just 16 seasons but SHR made an undeniable mark at the highest level with two championships and 70 wins at the highest levels. What’s left of SHR, just the Gene Haas portion, will remain in NASCAR as Haas Factory Team.
5. Joey Logano wins third Cup
Joey Logano is the most successful champion of the elimination playoff era, having celebrated at the end of the year three times in 11 years. But his pathway to the 2024 championship left fans frustrated at the playoff format and could eventually force an adjustment to the system. Nevertheless, there is something to be said about how Logano responds to the most pressure packed moments.
4. Austin Dillon wins Richmond
It was one of the wildest post-race scenes in recent memory. Its not just that Austin Dillon blatantly wrecked someone to win the summer race at Richmond but that he wrecked two someones in Joey Logano and Denny Hamlin and in one corner on the final lap no less. It was such an egregious act that Dillon was stripped of his playoff eligibility following a review of his radio transmission and telemetry data that night.
A line in the sand was crossed that night.
3. The All Star Fight
No moment during the 2024 NASCAR season garnered the industry more mainstream attention than Ricky Stenhouse suggesting that everyone needed to stick around until after the race to see what would happen between him and Kyle Busch after he was wrecked out the All-Star Race and delivered on that promise by popping the two-time champion in the temple.
In fact, instead of fining Stenhouse $75,000, NASCAR should have split that much money and given it to all the participants as a bonus.
2. Charter negotiations conclude
After two plus years of tumultuous negotiating, NASCAR presented Cup Series teams what amounted to a take it or leave it final offer that modestly increased the enterprise value of owning a race team but also left some owners dissatisfied with both the process and final package. Ultimately, 13 of the 15 team owners signed their documents and the remaining two sued the sanctioning body on allegations of antitrust violations.
1. The lawsuit
No matter what happens, there will be a before and after period of NASCAR based on the results of 23XI Racing and Front Row Motorsports bringing an antitrust lawsuit against NASCAR and CEO Jim France. Looked at it another way one of the sport’s biggest assets in Michael Jordan is now challenging the status quo alongside Denny Hamlin and Bob Jenkins.
While this ultimately comes down to revenue sharing, there are also elements to this involving intellectual property rights and governance.
The end result of this lawsuit will eventually change the day-to-day operations of NASCAR one way or the other.