The Folds of Honor QuikTrip 500 at Atlanta Motor Speedway marks the 2,500th Monster Energy NASCAR Cup Series races. Check out some of these stats about the first 2,499 NASCAR races.
First NASCAR race
The very first race in the Cup Series (then Strictly Stock Series) took place at Charlotte Speedway in Charlotte, N.C. on June 19, 1949. Jim Roper won the first race.
First NASCAR champion
Red Byron won the first NASCAR Cup Series championship in the No. 22 Oldsmobile. He won two of the six races and finished in the top-10 in four of the six.
Most NASCAR championships
Richard Petty, Dale Earnhardt, and Jimmie Johnson have all won seven Cup Series championships. Petty was the first to accomplish the feat in 1979. The next year, Earnhardt won his first and grabbed his seventh in 1994. Johnson won five straight from 2006 to 2010 and captured his seventh in 2016.
186 drivers have won races
Kyle Larson’s win at Michigan in 2016 made him the 186th different Cup Series winner. Of the 186 winners, 63 have only made it to Victory Lane once. A total of 59 drivers have won double-digit races.
Most race wins
Richard Petty’s 200 wins make up eight percent of all NASCAR wins, and are the most in the sport’s history. The 10 drivers with the most wins in Cup Series history make up 36.6 percent of all wins.
156 tracks
There are currently 23 tracks that the Monster Energy NASCAR Cup Series races on each season. From the early days of southern dirt tracks, there have been a ton of different tracks where Cup Series sanctioned events have taken place.
Most raced track
Daytona has hosted 140 races, the most by any NASCAR track. Martinsville is a close second with 136 races and is the oldest track in NASCAR.
224 drivers have sat on the pole
There have been 224 different drivers who have sat on the pole in the 2,499 NASCAR Cup Series races. Of those, 78 only captured one pole. The top-10 pole winners have accumulated 28.6 percent of all NASCAR poles.
Most pole wins
Richard Petty sat on the pole 123 times and went to Victory Lane when starting 1st, 61 times. The next closest is David Pearson with 113 poles and 37 victories from the first spot. Ken Schrader won 23 points in his career but never won the race after starting first.
2,536 drivers have started a race
The maximum amount of drivers allowed in a Cup Series race in 2017 is 40. In the early days of NASCAR, as many as 50-60 cars could be entered in a single race weekend. In 1954, 136 cars entered the 100-mile Modified-Sportsman race at Daytona, the largest NASCAR field ever.
7 series names
When NASCAR started running stock cars in 1949, it deemed the division as Strictly Stock. The following season, the top series was renamed the Grand National Series until Winston became the sponsor in 1971.
The Winston Cup Series lasted from 1971 until 2003 when pressure against the tobacco industry led to NASCAR aligning with telecommunications company, Nextel.
In 2006, Nextel merged with Sprint and the series name changed to the Sprint Cup Series in 2008.
After Sprint announced it wouldn’t renew as the title sponsor, Monster Energy signed on at the beginning of the 2017 season and will be the title sponsor for at least two years.
