When Terry and Bobby Labonte retired from NASCAR in the late 1990s and early 2000s, Texas lost its star power at the highest level of America’s most popular motorsport. The Corpus Christi brothers piled up three Cup Series championships and 43 Cup wins.

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Chris Buescher has done his level best to keep the Lone Star flag waving. The 33-year-old from Prosper in the Metroplex drives the No. 17 Ford Mustang for RFK Racing. Buescher won championships in Legends retro cars and scored series titles in ARCA as a teenager in 2012 and the NASCAR Xfinity Series in ’15. He has won six Cup races, the latest being on the Watkins Glen road course in ’24.

NASCAR AT COTA

When/where: Friday-Sunday at Circuit of the Americas (12:10 p.m. Saturday NASCAR qualifying/practice on Amazon Prime, 2 p.m. O’Reilly 250 race on CW; 2:30 p.m. Sunday NASCAR Texas Grand Prix on Fox).

Tickets: Single-day or weekend passes available at nascaratcota.com.

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“I feel I’ve had a pretty solid career, but you always think about the close calls and near misses,” said Buescher, who lives with his family in North Carolina.

MORE: Our top storylines from this year’s NASCAR race at COTA

He’s posted three top-10 finishes in a row at in the Cup race at Circuit of the Americas and is definitely a name to watch for Sunday’s DuraMAX Texas Grand Prix. Buescher was seventh in the season-opening Daytona 500 and 15th in Atlanta. He looks forward to seeing Texas family and friends in Austin this weekend.

“I always look forward to coming down here,” said Buescher, who has been around long enough to have raced at Thunderhill in Kyle, which has been closed for nearly a decade. “I’ve done Christmas here, New Year’s Eve music on Sixth Street, mountain biking in the Hill Country and we always find our way to Terry Black’s.”

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MORE: COTA’s road course gives NASCAR drivers an early switcheroo this year

Tripleheader Saturday: It will be a hectic day on the track Saturday. The International Motor Sports Association (IMSA) has a race doubleheader, separated by Cup practice and qualifying and the O’Reilly Series Focused Health 250 race.

Road course wizard Shane Van Gisbergen, teenage wunderkind Connor Zilisch and Ross Chastain, who won the 2022 Cup race at COTA, are doing double duty in the O’Reilly race and Texas Grand Prix. Austin HIll, a former season champ in O’Reilly and the truck series, leads the points after two races. Rajah Caruth, a 23-year-old driver from Atlanta, is second with 82 points, followed closely by Sheldon Creed and Jesse Love.

The IMSA race doubleheader has plenty of local ties. In Le Mans prototype, Danny Soufi in the 11 car and Brady Golan in the 30 car are from Austin. Marc Austin, in the 22 car for the Grand Sport X, is a Buda resident.

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Be a-Ware of Cody: One of the more experienced drivers on these types of surfaces is Cody Ware, driver of the No. 51 Chevrolet for Rick Ware Racing. Yes, that’s his dad.

“NASCAR is a contact sport on road courses,” Cody Ware said. “Beating and banging is expected. It’s very different from the etiquette and thought process behind road racing anywhere else.”

Ware knows. He’s won races and titles in the Le Mans Series, Lamborghini Super Trofeo and IMSA LMP3 class.

“If you go anywhere else and you even breathe on someone the wrong way, you’re penalized and get a drive-thru penalty,” he said. “But not in this series, not here.”

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The 30-year-old from Greensboro, N.C., is ready for the scrum.

“Our cars can take the hits, they can take the rubbing, they can take the racing. They’re very durable. Our races have become more of a left-and-right-turn short-track race than a road-course race,” Ware said. “Sportscars are very fragile compared to stock cars. If you’re in a dedicated sportscar series, you give someone a donut, that can rip off a body panel, or if you hit them too hard from behind, their wing falls off.”

Ware said COTA has become a full-contact for NASCAR.

“The aggression level of the guys you have in front of you and behind you, it’s almost similar to a speedway race,” he said. “You don’t want to be around someone who approaches turn 1 like a wrecking ball. COTA takes a blend of everything. It’s finesse and perfection, but also ruggedness and manhandling.”

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Honoring the best: The Texas Grand Prix is celebrating this weekend more than 4,000 First Responders from Austin-area fire, police and EMS departments at COTA. They and their families are getting rewards and serving as grand marshals for the races.

Travis County EMS Captain Amber Price is the 2025 national community paramedic of the year; Phil Johnson is the ’25 Austin firefighter of the year and Austin police officer Tanner Cilento received the Star of Texas award.