NASCAR DFS: EchoPark Texas Grand Prix Track Breakdown

COTA weekend is here! Personally, I have been wanting this track on the NASCAR schedule for a while now as it’s a great road course and a world-class facility to give elite drivers a great test at a lot of different skills over the course of a 20-turn layout.

It’s a track that hasn’t been raced on before at any level of NASCAR which leads to another challenge this week as the drivers will only have one practice session, on track of course, to get the layout down and figure out how to handle each of the turns and where the passing zones are on the track as well as the braking zones. Obviously, the teams have been using the simulators as much as possible and three drivers did do a Goodyear tire test here in March, however that’s still not a ton of on-track time. We will have qualifying this week as well, though it’ll be run a few hours before each race and will be a bit of a de facto additional practice session for each level, though Truck and Xfinity will have to start the race on the tires they qualified on whereas the Cup cars can swap out to new tires.

With road courses for DFS, the strategy is a bit different as the laps led don’t rack up nearly the points that we see elsewhere, and especially here with only 68 laps in the Cup race, and so we’re looking more for finish position and position differential to build around with a bit more selling out for laps led in tournament builds in the hopes that one driver stays up front for a good chunk of the race. There are a couple of other things to keep in mind on courses with right turns as well, cautions are usually tough to come by unless a car is truly stuck where they are or there are a few cars involved in an incident or of course for debris on the track. So if a driver simply spins, it’s likely a caution flag isn’t thrown.

If you look at the track map, you’ll see just how challenging of a layout this 3.41-mile circuit is. While the speeds aren’t necessarily fully accurate, they do give you an idea of the changes in speed and heavy braking spots over the 20-turn lap. This is also a very interesting layout in that the start/finish straight is more so uphill than anything and Turn 1 is the highest point of the track, 130 feet above the start/finish line and leads to a blind corner that narrows quite a bit. There are plenty of tricky spots on this track to cause havoc with even the most experienced road racers in the field and setting up turns a couple of turns in advance will be important for running fast and clean laps.

It'll be the 750-horsepower, low down-force package on the cars this week as is the case with all road races this year. From all accounts the racing surface in some or the corners is newer while about two-thirds of the surface is rougher and will be harsh on the tires, not to mention that turning that much and getting on the curbing that much will wear down the tires quite quickly. This is a new tire combination for this weekend but it will be used at a few other road races this year across all series. There is rain in the forecast this weekend and rain tires will be part of the allotment in the pits.

Watch the video below for Kyle Busch breaking down some hot laps at COTA: