Most Cup drivers spend playoff-bubble week doing playoff-bubble things: simulator hours, sponsor appearances, maybe a quiet round of golf. Ryan Preece is spending his in a Late Model at a Vermont bullring on Thursday night, a Modified at “The Magic Mile” on Saturday afternoon, and — if the racing gods cooperate — fighting for his first points-paying Cup win on Sunday. Same driver, three different cars, three different racetracks, three straight days.
It isn’t a scheduling accident, and it isn’t a publicity stunt his team is merely tolerating. It’s who Preece has always been showing up at the exact moment his Cup season needs him to be somebody else entirely.
Thursday: A Vermont Late Model Finale
Thunder Road International Speedbowl in Barre, Vermont, runs its 47th Vermont Lottery Governor’s Cup 150 on Thursday night, the championship finale to the track’s 2026 Squier Cup Late Model Triple Crown presented by Milton CAT. Thunder Road’s own event advisory lists Preece in the field for the special 6:30 p.m. green flag — alongside his RFK Racing teammate, Brad Keselowski, who normally shares a Cup garage stall with him, not a Late Model pit stall.
It’s a guest entry, not a full-season Late Model campaign, and neither driver has ever run the Vermont short-track scene full-time. But it’s a real, sanctioned car in a real championship-deciding field, on a quarter-mile paved oval that rewards patience and setup far more than horsepower — a sharp contrast to the mile-plus superspeedways and intermediate tracks that make up most of the Cup schedule.
Saturday: Chasing His Second Home-Track Modified Win
Two days later, Preece trades the Late Model for a NASCAR Whelen Modified Tour car in the Mohegan Sun 100 at New Hampshire Motor Speedway, the centerpiece of a Saturday doubleheader that also includes the NASCAR Craftsman Truck Series’ Team EJP 175. This one isn’t a novelty booking, either. Preece won the 2013 Whelen Modified Tour championship, has 26 career Modified victories, and took the Mohegan Sun 100 itself in 2021 — a result he’s now trying to add a second Modified Tour win at his home track, per New Hampshire Motor Speedway’s own preview of the race.
Ask the Modified regulars why the race matters and the answers get specific fast. Justin Bonsignore, who won the Mohegan Sun 100 in back-to-back years before last season, calls it the Tour’s version of the Daytona 500. Tyler Rypkema, the defending winner, points to the drafting: the Whelen Modified Tour is one of the only NASCAR national touring series where big rear tires and low-drag bodies let cars run in packs and trade the lead multiple times a race, something the Next Gen Cup car — with its full underwing and higher-drag aero package — simply isn’t built to do at a mile oval. Preece, who came up through exactly this style of racing before Cup ever came calling, put it plainly in the same NHMS preview: “You’re not gonna want to miss it.”
Sunday: The Race That Actually Counts
All of that is prelude to Sunday’s Dollar Tree 301, New England’s only Cup Series date on the 2026 schedule, at 3 p.m. ET on USA Network. Preece goes in 17th in points, and NASCAR.com’s own post-Richmond standings analysis has him sitting 50 points behind Shane van Gisbergen for the final transfer spot into the 16-driver Chase field, with only Loudon and Daytona left on the regular-season calendar. He led the field in passes made at Richmond and still finished 17th — the kind of number that says the speed is real even when the finishing spot doesn’t show it.
That bubble got tighter last weekend, when Joey Logano’s Richmond win reshuffled the math for everyone chasing the final playoff spots. Preece’s margin isn’t as dire as some of the names below him, but 50 points with two races left is not a comfortable cushion.
Preece isn’t calling Loudon his home track as a throwaway line, either. In RFK Racing’s own recap of Richmond, he said flatly: “Heading to New Hampshire though, my home track, so ready to strike there and just look ahead.” He has the résumé to back it up — that 2021 Whelen Modified Tour win at the track and a 14th-place Cup finish there last year. A win Sunday would be Preece’s first points-paying Cup Series victory, distinct from his exhibition win in this year’s Cook Out Clash at Bowman Gray Stadium, and under NASCAR’s current 16-driver Chase structure, a regular-season win locks its driver into the playoff field regardless of where they sit in points — which would make all of Preece’s bubble math irrelevant in the best possible way.
The Case Against — and For — Running All Three
The obvious argument against this schedule is risk. A Late Model and a Modified are both far less structurally protective than a Next Gen Cup chassis, which carries a chassis-mounted crash structure, a composite body and a greenhouse engineered specifically around the driver survival cell. Short-track pavement cars, by contrast, are still fundamentally lighter, simpler tube-frame builds — brutally effective machines for what they’re built to do, but not vehicles with anywhere near the same crash engineering. Any team letting a driver climb into one of them 48 hours before a playoff-cutoff Cup race is making a calculated bet that the promotional and competitive upside outweighs the downside of a bent wrist or a wrecked week.
The case for it is just as real. Both Thunder Road and New Hampshire Motor Speedway are explicitly selling this weekend on Preece’s name — NHMS built an entire preview around him and Bonsignore and Rypkema, and Thunder Road put him and Keselowski in its own event advisory. For tracks trying to fill grandstands on a Thursday and a Saturday afternoon, a Cup regular with deep Modified roots is a built-in storyline. For Preece, seat time in a drafting pack of Modifieds or a momentum-dependent Late Model is also its own kind of practice, sharpening the car-feel and traffic management that carry over into short-track Cup racing even though the equipment is completely different. None of it guarantees anything for Sunday. But it’s hard to argue a driver who’s spent two decades racing short-track equipment forgets how to do it just because his day job now pays in Cup points.
The Fan Takeaway
There aren’t many drivers left in the Cup garage who can credibly do what Preece is doing this week — hop from a Vermont Late Model to a New Hampshire Modified to a playoff-cutoff Cup start without looking like a tourist in any of the three. That’s the payoff of a career built at short tracks rather than around them. New Hampshire’s Saturday doubleheader is its own reminder that NASCAR’s short-track weekends increasingly stack playoff-relevant racing across multiple divisions into a single compressed window, and Sunday’s Dollar Tree 301 is the one that will actually move Preece’s championship picture. Watch Thursday and Saturday for the racing. Watch Sunday for the stakes.
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