The NASCAR Cup Series heads to Circuit of the Americas (COTA) in Austin, Texas, this weekend for the third race of the regular season.<\/p>\n
Kaulig Racing drivers AJ Allmendinger and Ty Dillon finished 12th and 16th, respectively, in Sunday\u2019s race at EchoPark Speedway near Atlanta. Dillon is now 17th in points, and Allmendinger is 18th.<\/p>\n
As with all road course races, AJ Allmendinger enters Sunday\u2019s race as one of the favorites. Teammate Ty Dillon has started the season strong and will likely race at the front of the pack as well.<\/p>\n
FOX will broadcast the race at 3:30 p.m.Sunday.<\/p>\n
CELSIUS: This marks the second of 9 scheduled NASCAR Cup Series races for CELSIUS this season. The brand made its debut at the Daytona 500, where AJ Allmendinger delivered a 19th-place finish.
\nCOTA Cup Experience: In five NASCAR Cup Series starts at COTA, Allmendinger’s best finish is fifth in 2021. He owns one top-five and two top-10s at the world class Circuit of the Americas.
\nCOTA Victories: Two of Allmendinger’s 18 O’Reilly Auto Parts Series victories occurred at Circuit of the Americas with Kaulig Racing in 2022 and 2023.
\nSeason so Far: Allmendinger finished 12th in the most recent NASCAR Cup Series race at EchoPark Speedway in Hampton, Ga. and collected a top-20 in the Daytona 500. He is currently 18th in the NASCAR Cup Series points standings.
\nAJ at Kaulig Racing: AJ Allmendinger began his 18th full-time season in the NASCAR Cup Series at Daytona International Speedway. It marks his fifth season with Kaulig Racing’s NASCAR Cup Series program.
\nCareer: Allmendinger is a three-time NASCAR Cup Series winner and owns 22 top-five, and 87 top-10 finishes in the division. This year he will make his 500th NASCAR Cup Series start at Sonoma Raceway. He is an 18-time winner in the NASCAR O’Reilly Auto Parts Series.
\nCrew Chief: Trent Owens joined Kaulig Racing in January 2022. The Darlington, S.C., native became Allmendinger’s NASCAR Cup Series crew chief in 2025. Owens has 20 years of experience in NASCAR and has won in all three of NASCAR’s top series in a crew chief role.
\nKaulig Racing: The Matt Kaulig team owns two NASCAR Cup Series victories and 27 NASCAR Xfinity Series victories.<\/p>\n
AJ Allmendinger:<\/p>\n
What stands out to you about COTA?<\/p>\n
\u201cIt\u2019s a unique racetrack with a unique blend of high-speed elevation changes and slow-speed corners. You\u2019ve got to get the balance right around all of them. It lends itself to a lot of passing opportunities. It\u2019s put on great racing every time we\u2019ve been there. We want to have a strong showing for CELSIUS and all of our partners on Sunday.\u201d<\/p>\n
How were your road course performances last year?<\/p>\n
\u201cYou know, for us last year, we struggled generally on the road courses. I\u2019ll put a lot of that on me\u2014when Goodyear keeps bringing a soft tire, trying to make it last. You know, I do think there were certain road courses where we didn\u2019t have a lot of speed. Watkins Glen (International) stood out to me. I thought we were tapped out, and we were kind of running on the edge of the top 10. We know we\u2019ve got to get better, and I\u2019ve got to get better in the car to get back to kind of where we were. I think, you know, for me, I\u2019ve studied everything that I can study car-wise, and I\u2019ll continually do it going into the weekend.\u201d<\/p>\n
How are you approaching new challenges this season?<\/p>\n
\u201cThe new situation is that we\u2019re kind of on our own. There\u2019s going to be weeks, I think, we show up and we nail it, and we\u2019ve got a lot of speed, and we\u2019re very competitive, and I think there are weekends when we show up and maybe we miss it, and there\u2019s nothing to lean on except for your old notes. We\u2019re going to make the best of every weekend. We\u2019re getting up to speed, kind of on our own. It\u2019s a new challenge. We\u2019re always going to have internal pressure that we put on ourselves, but I think externally people know the situation. For the first two races, we were just trying to survive to have a shot. Then the season kind of really starts at COTA, where we will see what we\u2019ve got.\u201d<\/p>\n
About CELSIUS<\/p>\n
CELSIUS is a premium, functional energy drink brand born in fitness and built for active lifestyles. Powered by its LIVE. FIT. GO.\u2122 mantra, CELSIUS delivers refreshing, zero-sugar energy designed to keep people moving \u2014 from elite athletes to everyday achievers. CELSIUS\u00ae is owned by Celsius Holdings, Inc. (Nasdaq: CELH).<\/p>\n
Patriot Mobile: Patriot Mobile will make its first appearance on Ty Dillon’s No. 10 this weekend in COTA. Patriot Mobile announced this week it will also join Dillon at the Dover, Michigan and St. Louis events in 2026.
\nBirthday Boy: Ty Dillon turns 34 on Friday.
\nSeason so Far: Dillon finished 14th in the Daytona 500 and 16th at Atlanta. He is 17th in points.
\nLast Race in COTA: Dillon has four Cup starts at COTA, finishing 28th last year. He finished 11th there in the 2024 NASCAR CRAFTSMAN Truck Series race.
\nNASCAR Career: Dillon owns a career-best third-place finish at Talladega Superspeedway in the fall 2020 race. He has three truck series wins (Atlanta in 2012, Kentucky and Texas in 2013) and a NASCAR O’Reilly Auto Parts Series victory at Indianapolis Motor Speedway in 2014.
\nCrew Chief: Andrew Dickeson, 43, a native of Melbourne, Australia, joined Kaulig Racing before the 2025 season after years in Australian racing and as an engineer at Richard Childress Racing.
\n2025 NASCAR In-Season Challenge: Dillon authored one of the greatest “Cinderella” stories in NASCAR history last year. He entered the 32-driver bracket as the No. 32 seed \u2014 the lowest possible \u2014 and went on a miraculous run, defeating Denny Hamlin, Brad Keselowski, Alex Bowman and John Hunter Nemechek before falling to Ty Gibbs in the championship round, just short of the $1 million prize. Throughout the competition on social media, Dillon jokingly called out fans of the drivers he beat, posting: “I beat your favorite driver.”
\nThe 2026 NASCAR In-Season Tournament seeds lock in after the June 14 race at Pocono Raceway, with competition featuring the TNT-broadcast races at Sonoma, Chicagoland, Atlanta, North Wilkesboro and Indianapolis.\ufeff<\/p>\n
\ufeffTy Dillon:<\/p>\n
What is the biggest difference between the No. 10 team this season?<\/p>\n
\u201cI think for one thing, it\u2019s not our first year working together, and for me, that\u2019s a big thing. It\u2019s probably been seven years since I showed up to Daytona and didn\u2019t have to learn a new crew chief, a new team, and a whole new system. This year, we\u2019re able to work on notes and improve on last year\u2019s work. Our whole team\u2019s pretty much the same, other than maybe one or two people. So that\u2019s exciting for me. I think we will improve a lot just based on our knowledge of each other, and going back to the places we now have notebooks on. So we know our weaknesses, we\u2019ve talked about them, and we\u2019re going to work on them this year. If we improve those, we believe we\u2019ll see a massive jump in points there. And just minimizing mistakes as a team, on pit road, as a driver, penalties, and things that we know we are better than. I think if we manage that this year, we\u2019re going to do a lot of great things. We showed a lot in that in-season challenge when we\u2019re performing at our best, where we should be, and the teams that we should be beating. I think that\u2019s going to be our standard this year, and hopefully we carry it all through the year.\u201d<\/p>\n
What is your COTA Strategy?<\/p>\n
\u201cI have one of the greatest road course racers in NASCAR history as a teammate in AJ Allmendinger, so my plan is to just follow and learn from him, and we will be fine.\u201d<\/p>\n
Kaulig Racing PR<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The NASCAR Cup Series heads to Circuit of the Americas (COTA) in Austin, Texas, this weekend for the…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":181646,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[11],"tags":[72781,132,134,133,72782,72783,10241,4104,1810,37700,1726,1813,72784],"class_list":{"0":"post-181645","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-austin","8":"tag-72781","9":"tag-austin","10":"tag-austin-headlines","11":"tag-austin-news","12":"tag-craftsman-truck-series","13":"tag-daytona","14":"tag-fox","15":"tag-international","16":"tag-motor","17":"tag-nascar","18":"tag-series","19":"tag-speedway","20":"tag-xfinity-series"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/181645","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=181645"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/181645\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/181646"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=181645"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=181645"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=181645"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}