Matt McLaughlin

It’s that time of year again. Overnight, four NASCAR Cup Series drivers were eliminated from the Round of 16 championship-eligible drivers down to the Round of 12. Somehow the indifferent old sun did what it always does and went ahead and rose Sunday morning. My guess is that it will …

Typically this time of year, things are quiet on the NASCAR news front as the sport and the country slowly begin emerging from the summer doldrums. As the long hot August summer afternoons give way to the earlier sunsets of September, leaves changing color and occasional morning chills punctuated by …

With Labor Day weekend marking the traditional (though not actual) end of the summer season, I fear other plans might have caused some of you to miss Saturday’s (Sept. 5) NASCAR Xfinity Series event at Darlington Raceway. If you did, that’s too bad, because it was arguably one of the …

During Friday night’s NXS race at Daytona, the ugly specter of team orders once again reared its ugly head. It was no great surprise to anyone that the trio of Kaulig Racing teammates worked well together to dominate much of the race, often in positions one, two and three. Late …

There are only so many weekends in a calendar year, and COVID-19 has tossed an Ozark into the cesspool in 2020. The various racing sanctioning bodies are doing their damnedest to reschedule their events and sometimes those schedules are going to overlap. Still, I found it a bit disheartening that …

Where has the time gone? This time of year, I’d normally be preparing for my annual family trip to the Jersey Shore. But this year, with all the travel restrictions and the variability of what businesses can and can’t be open, when they can and can’t be open, and how …

Way back when, in an era when the Earth was still cooling and the war in Vietnam was still heating up, there was a less than charming saying that went, “Life is like a crap sandwich. The more bread you have, the less crap you have to eat.” Of course, …

“If you build it, they will come.” Such was the tag line to Field of Dreams, a much-awarded movie that was a hit back in the late ’80s. Coincidentally, that was the beginning of NASCAR’s soaring popularity as well. And the mindset at NASCAR corporate headquarters and in the boardrooms of …

Few of you need me to remind you that all of us are living in extraordinary times right now. By “extraordinary,” I don’t mean to imply this is a great time to be alive, though being alive right now still beats the alternative. Man, it’s summertime, AKA, “the sweet, sweet, …

As our long-time friend Michael Lee Aday (aka Meatloaf) used to tell us in one of his operatic, overly bombastic, teenage testosterone-fueled hits, two out of three ain’t bad. NASCAR’s annual All-Star event has fallen out of favor with most of the race fans I communicate with regularly. If the All-Star …