NASCAR at Bristol: Where to watch, live stream, lineup, race preview, pick to win for the Food City 500

In the southeast, the scope of the thunder of stock car racing is not limited to the Carolinas alone. A little ways past the northeastern corner of North Carolina, just beyond Boone, you can easily go back-and-forth between the state lines of Virginia and of Tennessee. And in doing so, you may at one point pass through a mountain town right on the state line that maintains the right to call itself Thunder Valley.

For the first time in 2025, the NASCAR Cup Series visits Bristol Motor Speedway for the annual Food City 500, renewing a springtime tradition at one of the sport’s signature short tracks. A half-mile with high banked corners, 500 laps at Bristol are no small task, especially not given this track’s long-held penchant for action and attrition.

Denny Hamlin has won two of the last three trips to Bristol including this race one year ago, and he returns to Thunder Valley looking to follow up victories at Martinsville and Darlington with his third straight win — which would give Joe Gibbs Racing two three-peats and six combined wins in the first nine races of the year.

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Where to watch the NASCAR Cup Series at Bristol

When: Sunday, April 13 at 3 p.m. ET
Where: Bristol Motor Speedway — Bristol, Tennessee
TV: FS1
Stream: fubo (try for free)

Storyline to watch

The underlying variable in the Food City 500 will once again be tires and tire wear, especially given what happened in this race one year ago. A perfect storm of circumstances created extreme tire falloff and an action-packed Bristol spring race a year ago, sparking NASCAR and Goodyear’s move towards softer tire compounds with more wear over the course of a run at more tracks on the Cup Series schedule.

Although the net effect has been received as a positive across NASCAR as a whole, it’s still unclear whether or not the type of tire wear seen in last spring’s Bristol race is the exception or the rule. The current right side tire compound used at Bristol was introduced in September 2023, and tire wear proved to be far more stable — arguably at the detriment of passing — during Bristol’s annual Night Race last fall.

In a media release this week, Goodyear general manager of global race tires Stu Grant made note of how track prep influences the racing at Bristol as it pertains to tire wear, and the track will once again be treated this weekend with PJ1 traction compound to help create Bristol’s traditional racing line around the bottom of the track.

NASCAR news of the week

• There is a pall over race weekend in Bristol, as the past week has seen three deaths in the NASCAR community.

  Shigeaki Hattori, a former driver turned championship-winning owner in the Craftsman Truck Series, was killed last Saturday in a traffic accident in Huntersville, North Carolina. Hattori, a native of Okayama, Japan, who moved to the United States in 1995, began his U.S. racing career in open wheel and became one of eight Japanese drivers to compete in the Indianapolis 500 before moving to the Truck Series and making 10 starts during the 2005 season.

  Hattori’s success in NASCAR would come later as the owner of Hattori Racing Enterprises, which won 14 times in the Truck Series and also won the 2018 series championship with Brett Moffitt behind the wheel. Hattori was 61.

  Wednesday then saw the passing of longtime NASCAR journalist Al Pearce, who covered the sport for the Newport News Daily Press and later Autoweek, at the age of 82 after health issues. Pearce, a Vietnam veteran, covered a record 56 Daytona 500s and wrote a total of 13 books on auto racing.

  Finally, the NASCAR community was rocked Thursday by the unexpected death of Jon Edwards, the director of racing communications at Hendrick Motorsports. Edwards was the longtime PR representative for NASCAR Hall of Famer Jeff Gordon, and he had been serving in the same role for Kyle Larson, handling the 2021 Cup Series champion’s media availabilities and requests among other matters.

• 23XI Racing and Front Row Motorsports have requested financial information from Formula 1 as part of the discovery process in their antitrust lawsuit against NASCAR, seeking information concerning how much revenue is shared with F1 race teams, valuations of current teams, and F1’s constitution, by-laws, and collective bargaining agreement. F1 has used a Concorde Agreement since the 1980s, which serves as a contract between the sanctioning body and race teams outlining how the sport is run from a commercial standpoint.
• Legacy Motor Club has obtained a temporary restraining order against Rick Ware Racing, which will likely prohibit the team from being able to do anything with its charter for 2026 in the interim after a dispute emerged over the terms of Rick Ware Racing selling one of its charters to Legacy Motor Club.
• Katherine Legge has picked up sponsorship from e.l.f cosmetics to expand her schedule of NASCAR races to at least seven. Legge will race in the Xfinity Series at Rockingham and Charlotte, and then return to Cup Series competition at Mexico City in June. Legge made her Cup Series debut last month at Phoenix, where she became the first woman to compete in a Cup Series race since 2018.
• Cup Series champions Joey Logano and Ryan Blaney were honored this week at the White House, as President Donald Trump hosted an event honoring Team Penske’s racing champions from NASCAR and beyond. In addition to Logano and Blaney, two-time Indianapolis 500 champion Josef Newgarden and the winning team from the Rolex 24 Hours of Daytona — Nick Tandy, Felipe Nasr, and Laurens Vanthoor — were all honored along with their cars on the White House lawn.

Pick to Win

Kyle Larson (+450) — Based on what happened the last time NASCAR raced at Bristol, Larson is a natural pick for this weekend. In the Night Race back in the fall, Larson led 462 of 500 laps on his way to victory, the most any driver had ever led in a single Bristol race since Cale Yarborough led all but five in 1977. 

As it stands, you’ll be hard pressed to find any driver in Cup better at Bristol than Larson is right now. Since joining Hendrick Motorsports in 2021, Larson has been on a streak of five-straight top five finishes, including two wins, in the last five Bristol races on concrete.