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All right, everybody. Welcome back to another edition of The Teardown. My name is Jeff Glock. I'm along with Jordan Bianchi. We are motorsports writers for the athletic. And today we're here to talk about the Las Vegas race. I'm here in Las Vegas. The first true test of the season it was being billed as because it was the first

intermediate track of the season, at least not a super speedway version. And of course, this is the race where I always

jump to conclusions about what's going to happen this season. You jump the conclusions every week.

Like this is, now you have a valid excuse, though, of why you're jumping the conclusions.

Like, it's legit this week.

Well, yeah, I mean, there's, in the past I've said, oh, you know, like, Stuart Haas may be good.

A couple years ago, I was trying to tell you, Stuart Haas might be good.

Oh, last year I told you, Josh Barry is now broken out as the fourth Penske car, and we're

going to see more of that.

But, well, don't laugh at me.

I think that was a perfectly valid thing.

You probably said that, too.

However, I do think that what we learned here today was a validation

of what we thought was pretty much going to happen, which is the JGR cars, the Toyota's,

they looked great again, as they did last fall when they finished four of the top five.

The Hendrick cars with their new body, the new Chevy body,

they looked just fine. Uh, it didn't seem to, they weren't off or anything like that.

They were sort of the second best to Toyota, uh, and to the, the JGR cars, which is what

it was last fall as well. And they were very competitive, obviously, could have easily won this

race. Um, then you look at, look at the 2311 cars. They were pretty solid, but kind of faded a little bit on that last green flag run, but they were about top 10 cars. The Penske cars, we would have thought, you know, as part of the big three, we'd see a little bit more from them. They were going to finish. They're probably going to have two cars in the top 10, but Ryan Blaney and Austin Cynchrick got caught on that last pit cycle. And so they weren't able to get back up there. Lugano was like 15th all day, though. They weren't very good. So Penske, a little bit of head scratcher. The best Ford team, though, I think, took a step up,

and we got confirmation on them being better this year,

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