NASCAR is going to have to wait yet a few more days before beginning its 2026 season, with wintery conditions in Winston-Salem, N.C., again forcing a second postponement of the Clash exhibition race at Bowman Gray Stadium, this time from Monday to Wednesday.
The annual non-points race that begins each season was originally scheduled for Saturday and Sunday, then was condensed just to Sunday, before later being pushed to Monday night. The new rescheduled race date is Wednesday night. The 200-lap main event is slated for 6 p.m. ET, with the last-chance qualifying race at 4:30 p.m. and practice and qualifying at 1:30 p.m. The Clash and the LCQ will be televised by Fox, with practice and qualifying on FS2.
The continual reshuffling is due to a weekend winter storm that smacked much of North Carolina, with nearly a foot of snow falling in Winston-Salem. The volume of snow, combined with icy roads and snow still on the ground from last weekend, prompted the North Carolina Department of Transportation to issue a travel advisory warning people to stay home unless absolutely necessary.
While NASCAR has continually worked to remove the snow from the Bowman Gray track and get the venue race-ready, with snow and ice still impeding travel throughout the area, the conditions left officials with little recourse but to delay the Clash by another day.
“When you have storms roll up like this, it actually makes it more difficult than maybe other venues that we may visit,” NASCAR official Justin Swilling, who oversees Bowman Gray on behalf of the league, told the media on Saturday morning. “Primarily because if a parking lot here is snowed out or iced out or flooded or anything like that, at any other venue, we may just be able to shift efforts from one side of the property to the other. Here, we don’t have that luxury, and we’ve got to get very, very creative, and we’ve really got to prioritize the real estate that we have in terms of the essential elements of the property.
“We always try to do that with the fan in mind. We always try to do that with the competitor and our broadcast partners in mind. But it certainly does make it more challenging, probably more challenging than any other venue that I can think of.”
Should the race be held Wednesday night, it will likely be one of the coldest in NASCAR’s nearly 80-year history. The National Weather Service forecasts the temperature to be a low of 43 degrees Wednesday night. The record-coldest race is a February 1990 race at Richmond (Va.) Raceway where the race-time temperature was 31 degrees, according to NASCAR Insights.
“The weather is going to be interesting to follow, obviously, from just the schedule side of things and how much track time we get or don’t get, and if that becomes a factor,” Wood Brothers Racing driver Josh Berry said last week. “I think the biggest thing is prioritizing getting heat in your tires early in runs, early in practice and obviously qualifying. That’s the biggest thing that stands out when it’s cold like this is just making more of an effort to do that, but, really, inside the car, it doesn’t change too much outside of that.”
Bowman Gray, a historic quarter-mile oval with deep ties to the sport’s roots, is hosting the Clash for a second consecutive year. The race was formed in 1979 and has always been held in a warmer locale, either Florida or Southern California. But with last year’s race proving popular with competitors and fans alike — and not being impacted by weather — NASCAR took its chance that Mother Nature would again not interfere and brought the Clash back to Bowman Gray.
“In year one, we hit the jackpot,” Swilling said. “This year, I wouldn’t say we’ve lost the bet, but we rolled the dice, and unfortunately, Mother Nature didn’t want us to stay on schedule.”