NASCAR confirm Cup Series driver will MISS Chicago race

The NASCAR Cup Series season returns to road course action this weekend, with the Grant Park 165 seeing the stars of the sport hit the streets of Chicago.

This year's event will be the third iteration of the street race, with Shane van Gisbergen and Alex Bowman having been victorious in Windy City in recent seasons.

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As is tradition ahead of a race weekend, NASCAR has released the official entry list for the event, but this time around, the document has thrown up an intriguing twist.

At present, 41 drivers are on the entry list for the action in Chicago, with 36 chartered entries listed, alongside five open entries in Corey Heim, Austin Hill, Will Brown, Katherine Legge, and Josh Bilicki.

Unfortunately, with that being the case, one driver will miss out on the race, with a maximum of 40 cars allowed to compete in a NASCAR Cup Series race, except for if there is an open exemption provisional (OEP) in place, which there is not this weekend.

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Who will miss the Cup Series race in Chicago?

NASCAR rules are very clear that chartered status means a guaranteed entry into the field of every NASCAR Cup Series race, as well as a portion of the purse for each event.

This means that it will be one of the five open entry cars to miss Sunday's race in Chicago, even if they were to all outqualify a chartered Cup Series entrant.

For example, let's say that Kyle Busch makes a mistake on his qualifying lap and ends up posting the 41st time, he will still race on Sunday because he is driving a chartered car.

In that scenario, whoever qualified in 40th would miss the race, and if that too was a chartered Cup Series entrant, it would move up to the driver in 39th, and so on.

Essentially, the driver to miss Sunday's race will be the lowest open entry car to qualify, not the lowest car to qualify overall.

This means that whilst all of Heim, Hill, Brown, Legge, and Bilicki will take part in qualifying on Saturday, one of them will miss Sunday's race.

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