What a wild ride the Quaker State 400 was at EchoPark Speedway on June 28, 2025! The track, once just plain old Atlanta Motor Speedway, turned into a chaotic cousin of Daytona and Talladega with not one, but two massive multicar wrecks that shook up the race. Stage 1 ended with a Christopher Bell-triggered pileup, and Stage 2 opened with a 23-car disaster sparked by Denny Hamlin, taking out heavy hitters like pole-sitter Joey Logano, points leader William Byron, 2023 champ Ryan Blaney, and Christopher Bell.
Those crashes flipped the script on the inaugural $1 million In-Season Challenge, where 32 drivers faced off in head-to-head matchups. Sixteen, including top seed Hamlin, got knocked out, while the other half, led by winner Chase Elliott, moved on to Chicago’s street race. The carnage opened the door for winless drivers to shine, and the Georgia crowd roared as hometown hero Elliott clinched his first victory of 2025. The nonstop action, with lead changes galore, had everyone buzzing, and one NASCAR legend couldn’t help but sing Atlanta’s praises.
Richard Petty, “The King” himself, has officially jumped on the EchoPark bandwagon, calling it his top track over the iconic Daytona and Talladega. That’s a bold move for a guy whose name is synonymous with superspeedway glory.
Richard Petty’s take on Atlanta’s wild ride
In a recent Instagram video, Richard Petty didn’t hold back his excitement for EchoPark’s chaos. “It made it interesting, there was a bunch of dadgum passing up front, buddy. On a track like that that’s a Daytona or Talladega wreck. You’d see very few of them that’s that big when the race was over. There wasn’t but 4 cars that wasn’t in a wreck or spin or something all along. That was what interesting there was somebody passing somebody there a last every lap,” he said.
And he wasn’t exaggerating, as the Quaker State 400 was a passing frenzy. Chase Elliott’s win came after a back-and-forth battle, trading the lead with Brad Keselowski, Zane Smith, Alex Bowman, and Ricky Stenhouse Jr. in the final laps. Elliott’s last-lap pass in Turn 2 sealed the deal by 0.168 seconds, sending the grandstands into a frenzy.
Petty’s love for Atlanta’s action stems from its superspeedway-style intensity, but with a unique twist. Unlike the traditional superspeedways like Daytona and Talladega, there were multiple lead changes, 46 to be precise, in Atlanta. Drivers were willing to give up the lead, drop out of the draft and make the move to gain track position. If anything, the 1.5-mile track in Atlanta is a perfect hybrid that delivers the product of intermediate racing and the thrill of superspeedways.
For Petty, tracks like Daytona and Talladega have turned into survival games, not pure racing. “To me it’s not racing, it’s just running,” he had said, comparing their chaos to figure-eight racing. Atlanta’s wrecks, like the 23-car pileup in Stage 2, echoed that, but the constant lead changes among Keselowski, Smith, Bowman, Stenhouse, and Elliott, all taking turns up front, gave it a competitive edge. Not just King Petty, but even his son, Kyle, joined in the conversation.
Kyle Petty hails Atlanta as NASCAR’s best track
Kyle Petty, NASCAR analyst and son of The King, took it a step further, crowning EchoPark Speedway the best track on the NASCAR calendar on his Kiss My Asphalt podcast. For years, Atlanta was lumped in with mile-and-a-half ovals like Texas and Charlotte, but its 2021 reconfiguration transformed it into a beast of its own.
The high banks and tight drafting now rival Daytona and Talladega, but with a distinct flavor. The Quaker State 400’s final laps, with Elliott, Keselowski, and others swapping the lead, showcased racing you can’t find anywhere else. Petty raved about how Atlanta “busted out of its genre” to become a one-of-a-kind track.
“It is the one and only Atlanta Motor Speedway. We don’t see racing like this anywhere else… We saw it in the last five, six, seven laps of the race, some of the best racing that we’ve seen in the first Atlanta race. This racetrack puts on a show for the fans, so I think it’s great racing… This race track allows these drivers to do things here that they can’t do at Daytona, that they can’t do at Talladega. They can’t do it at Charlotte or Kansas, they can only do this at Atlant,a and it’s fascinating to watch,” Kyle Petty said this via NASCAR on YouTube.
Even if some fans griped about the changes, the “old” Atlanta’s solid racing has evolved into something spectacular at EchoPark Speedway. For Kyle, it’s the kind of show that could run every week and never get old.
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