Hendrick Motorsports hadn’t won a race with a full-time driver in NASCAR’s second-tier series since Kyle Busch was a rookie in 2004. That drought ended Saturday at Talladega Superspeedway when 20-year-old Corey Day drove his No. 17 Chevrolet to the yellow and checkered flags on the final lap of the Ag-Pro 300.
Day led exactly one lap — the only one that mattered.
The race itself was remarkably clean by Talladega standards, producing just four caution periods, the fewest since 2022, and 38 lead changes, the most at the track in over a decade. Jesse Love started on the pole in his Richard Childress Racing Chevrolet and led a race-high 37 laps before getting swallowed by the pack with six to go.
That set up a furious three-wide battle between Haas Factory Team’s Sheldon Creed on the top, Sam Mayer on the bottom, and Day threading the middle. With two laps remaining, Mayer was scored the leader. Then Talladega did what Talladega does.
Contact from behind turned Mayer’s No. 41 Chevy into the wall, collecting Jeb Burton and Harrison Burton along the way. Mayer, who had led three times for eight laps, finished 25th. Day was already ahead when the caution lights came on.
He cruised home under yellow.
“I sure as heck didn’t think it would be at a superspeedway,” Day said, grinning. “My 17 guys just built a rocket ship.”
It was Day’s second win of the week. On Tuesday night, he won a High Limit Racing sprint car feature at Eagle Raceway in Nebraska. The kid from Clovis, California, has long been earmarked as the next Kyle Larson — a dirt-track prodigy funneled through Hendrick’s pipeline.
He podiumed the Knoxville 410 Sprint Car Nationals in 2024, the same weekend Larson won his second. The parallels are getting harder to ignore.
Rookie Brent Crews finished a career-best second in the No. 19 Joe Gibbs Racing Toyota. Creed took third but walked away with the $100,000 Dash 4 Cash bonus for the second consecutive week. “Hard to be too mad at that here when so much happens and very easily could have been in one of those crashes at the end,” Creed said.
Sammy Smith ran fourth in the No. 8 JR Motorsports Chevrolet, extending that team’s remarkable top-10 streak to 68 races, second-best all time in the series. Owner-driver Jeremy Clements grabbed fifth, his small independent team’s best result since 2022.
The day had a sideshow worth mentioning. Former Philadelphia Eagles center Jason Kelce suited up as a guest crew member for Day’s team, hauling tires on pit road in Hendrick blue. He picked a good weekend to play NASCAR.
JRM teammates Carson Kvapil and Justin Allgaier won Stage 1 and Stage 2 respectively, but both were hit with mid-race penalties for impeding during the final stage. Allgaier limped home 23rd — his worst finish of the season — but still holds the championship lead by a comfortable 105 points over Creed.
Post-race inspection cleared Day’s car without issues. The Nos. 2, 8, and 19 will head to NASCAR’s R&D Center in Concord for teardown.
Next Saturday the series rolls into Texas Motor Speedway, where reigning Cup champion Larson is the defending winner. Day, Crews, Creed, and Smith will be Dash 4 Cash eligible. For Hendrick, the bet on a sprint car kid who races midweek on dirt and weekends on asphalt is starting to look like the shrewdest investment the organization has made in its feeder program in two decades.
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