Daniel Suarez is a driver to watch this week. Photo via: Wiki Commons.
The NASCAR Cup Series makes its second visit to the famed Atlanta Motor Speedway this week for the Quaker State 400. As we saw the last time they came here, this is not your father’s Atlanta Motor Speedway. We will continue to see the pack-style racing that we saw in the spring, and let's hope that the tires can hold up better than they did then. This has been a season of parity, we have seen 13 different winners, five of them being first-timers. Because of the many changes we have seen to the track, there is a legitimate chance we see a fourteenth different winner on Sunday. The key to the race this weekend will be figuring out how to manipulate the draft and finding the right person to work with, just like we see at Daytona and Talladega. Obviously, when you have big groups of cars, there is always a risk of a major pileup. The biggest cause of these crashes has been flat tires. Every driver will be sweating bullets trying to manage their tires and while we haven’t had too many major issues over the last few weeks, the high rate of speed that the cars are traveling will cause a fair amount of concern all throughout the day.
Last week, Tyler Reddick scored his first career win at Road America. The race was akin to what we are accustomed to seeing in F1, with lots of strategy, very little drama, and only two drivers in Chase Elliott and Tyler Reddick being in the hunt for the win. The opening two stages were won by Chase Briscoe and Ryan Blaney as they stayed out longer to try and get the stage victory. This came back to bite them as they would fall to the back and be out of the hunt. In the late stages, the race ultimately came down to the final pit stop as Reddick followed Elliott into Pit-Lane and was able to keep pace with him exiting, thus setting up the race-winning pass.
After this week, the future remains unclear for Road America. With a race on the Chicago Street Course looming, one track will need to be removed and unfortunately, Road America is looking like it will be that track. While it’s certainly never ideal to see a racetrack lose its date, the silver lining is how many forms of racing there are at this track. Many F1 drivers have said they would love to race there, so the future remains bright.
As I mentioned earlier, NASCAR is almost more than certain to host its first race ever on a temporary street course. Ever since the 1980s, NASCAR has tried to keep up with its open-wheel opposition, but hasn’t ever been able to make a street course race happen. Whether the cars were too heavy to race on that type of surface or certain cities wouldn’t oblige. As hard as they tried, NASCAR just couldn’t seem to make it happen. Fast-Forward nearly 40 years and now it seems as if we are on the cusp of seeing the first-ever NASCAR Street Course in Chicago in 2023. What was once an idea is now becoming reality, and I for one, am extremely excited to see how this plays out.
While Chicago is on the horizon, the focus this week remains on Atlanta and the driver I predict will win this weekend is Daniel Suarez. For many, this seems like an out of left field type of pick, but if you have been following this season, he is in the midst of a career year. This year, Suarez has scored six top tens with four top-fives and has led 203 laps, the most in his career. There have been many occasions this season where he’s had the fastest car on the track, but something would come along to mess everything up. In the spring, he had a great car and finished fourth. If he can show the same type of speed on Sunday, he should be a serious threat to win.
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Jan 10, 2025, 2:32 pm
Everyone raved about the leadership of second-year quarterback C.J. Stroud this week as the Houston Texans prepared for their wild-card playoff game against the Los Angeles Chargers.
Everyone, that is, except the man himself.
“I don’t think I’m a great (leader),” Stroud said sheepishly. “I don’t know. That’s probably a bad thing to say about yourself, but I don’t think I’m all that when it comes to leading. I just try to be myself.”
But the 23-year-old Stroud simply being himself is exactly what makes him the undisputed leader of this team.
“C.J. is authentic, he’s real,” coach DeMeco Ryans said. “It’s not only here, it’s in the locker room around the guys and that’s what leadership is to me. As you evolve as a leader, you just be authentic to yourself. You don’t have to make up anything or make up a speech or make up something to say to guys. C.J. is being C.J.”
Sixth-year offensive lineman Tytus Howard said he knew early on that Stroud would be special.
“He has that aura about him that when he speaks, everybody listens,” he said.
Stroud has helped the Texans win the AFC South and reach the playoffs for a second straight season after they had combined for just 11 wins in the three years before he was drafted second overall.
He was named AP Offensive Rookie of the Year last season, when Houston beat the Browns in the first round before falling to the Ravens in the divisional round.
His stats haven’t been as good as they were in his fabulous rookie season when he threw just five interceptions. But he has put together another strong season in Year 2 despite missing top receiver Nico Collins for five games early and losing Stefon Diggs and Tank Dell to season-ending injuries in the second half of the season. He also started every game despite being sacked a whopping 52 times.
“He’s taken some crazy shots,” Howard said. “But even if he’s getting sacked and stuff like that, he just never lets that get to him. He just continues to fight through it, and it basically uplifts the entire offense.”
He also finds ways to encourage the team off the field and works to build chemistry through team get-togethers. He often invites the guys over to his house for dinner or to watch games. Recently, he rented out a movie theater for a private screening of “Gladiator II.”
“He’s like, ‘I want the guys to come in and bond together because this thing builds off the field and on the field,’” Howard said. “So, we need to be closer.”
Another thing that makes Stroud an effective leader is that his teammates know that he truly cares about them as people and not just players. That was evident in the loss to the Chiefs when Dell was seriously injured. Stroud openly wept as Dell was tended to on the field and remained distraught after he was carted off.
“It was good for people to see me in that light and knowing that there is still a human factor to me,” he said. "And I think that was good for people to see that we’re just normal people at the end of the day.”
Stroud said some of the leaders who molded him were his father, his coaches in high school and college, and more recently Ryans.
His coach said Stroud has been able to lead the team effectively early in his career because he knows there are others he can lean on if he needs help.
“Understanding that it’s not all on him as a leader, it’s all of our guys just buying in, doing what they have to do,” Ryans said. “But also, C.J. understanding a lot of guys are looking up to him on the team and he takes that role seriously. But it’s not a heavy weight for him because we have other leaders, as well, around him.”
Stroud considers himself stubborn and though some consider that a bad quality, he thinks it’s helped him be a better leader. He's had the trait as long as he can remember.
“That kind of carried into the sport,” he said. “Even as a kid, my mom used to always say how stubborn I was and just having a standard is how I hear it. It’s stubborn (but) I just have a standard on how I like things to be done and how I hold myself is a standard.”
And, to be clear, he doesn’t consider himself a bad leader, but he did enjoy hearing that others on the team consider him a great one.
“I just don’t look at myself in that light of just I’m all-world at that,” he said. “But I try my best to lead by example and it’s cool because I don’t ask guys and to hear what they have to say about that is kind of cool.”
Though he doesn’t consider himself a great leader, Stroud does have strong feelings about what constitutes one. And he’s hoping that he’ll be able to do that for his team Saturday to help the Texans to a victory, which would make him the sixth quarterback in NFL history to start and win a playoff game in both of his first two seasons.
“That would be making everybody around you better,” he said of great leaders. “Kind of like a point guard on the offense, the quarterback on the football team, the pitcher on a baseball team — just making everybody around you better.”