Pocono Raceway in Long Pond, Pa., has been a popular NASCAR destination in the Northeast for more than a half-century, and it’ll again have a three-day weekend of races next year.
After taking a year off from hosting the Craftsman Truck Series, the trucks will race again at the “Tricky Triangle” on June 11, 2027, with the O’Reilly Auto Parts Series race a day later on June 12. The weekend will culminate with the NASCAR Cup Series on June 13.
Pocono Raceway has sold out the NASCAR Cup Series race for four straight years and had a record of roughly 115,000 people in the stands for its races this past June. But instead of having the Truck Series on Friday, the ARCA Menards Series took its place.
Ben May, Pocono Raceway’s president, cited the absence of NASCAR’s Truck Series this year as an agreement between NASCAR and the racetrack to not host that series because this year “there was conflicts with production on the World Cup side.”
“That’s an important piece of our business. To have the [Craftsman] Truck Series, the O’Reilly [Auto Parts] Series, and the Cup Series three days in a row is massive for us,” said May, who has been Pocono Raceway’s president since 2017. “The discussion was, ‘OK, we understand that the trucks won’t be here.’ The World Cup’s maybe a once- or twice-in-a-lifetime thing for a lot of folks, so we’ll step out of the way and not get in the way of that conflict, knowing that the trucks would be back here in 2027.
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“To have [the trucks] back, the fans love the trucks. They’re a cool machine.”
Pocono was a biannual racetrack for NASCAR for 40 years until 2022, when NASCAR added other courses to its yearly schedule. Similarly, Dover Speedway in Delaware and New Hampshire Speedway, two other premier tracks in the Northeast, also went from two races to one in the last nine years.
Despite having just one race each summer for the last five years, May believes “treating people like family” keeps fans coming back.
“I think that’s a little bit of the secret sauce that some tracks and other sports in general or arenas or stadiums can’t really replicate,” May said. “And a lot of the folks that worked here knew our founders. They know the family. It’s just a little bit of our magic. Outside of that, we don’t try to over engineer our experience. … The best example has always been, for me, the infield, where we have a dog park and a playground.
“We created this massive $30 million fan zone, and it’s all things that our fans want that we’ve talked to them about. And we make them come to life, and the whole little magical mix starts to work.”
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Single-day tickets for next year’s Cup Series race are on sale, starting at $65.