Saturday Pit Stop: Races this Weekend - August 7-9, 2026

Indy NXT Series - Race at Portland @ Portland International Raceway
• Qualifying: Saturday, August 8 at 3:00 PM EST - FS1
• Race: Sunday, August 9 at 2:00 PM EST - FS1
Nikita Johnson holds a razor thin one point lead over HMD's Enzo Fittipaldi with just four races left in the season, so this title fight is going down to the wire.

IndyCar Series - Grand Prix of Portland @ Portland International Raceway
• Warmup: Sunday, August 9 at 1:00 PM EST - FS1
• Race: Sunday, August 9 at 4:00 PM EST - FOX
Alex Palou rolls in with an 83 point cushion and a shot at a record tying fourth straight championship. At this point it's less a title race and more a victory lap.

MotoGP - British Grand Prix @ Silverstone Circuit
• Race: Sunday, August 9 at 7:30 AM EST - FS1
MotoGP comes back from its summer break with Jorge Martin still on top, but Ai Ogura has closed to within 14 points and the top five are separated by just 24, the tightest championship battle at this stage in series history.

NASCAR Cup Series - Iowa Corn 350 @ Iowa Speedway
• Qualifying: Saturday, August 8 at 3:00 PM EST - truTV
• Race: Sunday, August 9 at 3:30 PM EST - USA
Denny Hamlin leads Tyler Reddick by 86 points and heads into Iowa as the betting favorite, looking to tighten his grip on the regular season title before the Chase.

Silverstone Circuit

Before Silverstone had corners named Copse and Maggotts, it had runways full of Lancaster bombers. The site was RAF Silverstone, an active Royal Air Force bomber station from 1943 to 1946. When the RAF cleared out, the Royal Automobile Club moved in, laying out early races along the old perimeter roads and runways. The circuit opened for competition in 1948.

Two years later, on May 13, 1950, Silverstone hosted the very first round of the Formula 1 World Championship, and it came with a flex no other British race has ever matched: King George VI was in the crowd, the only time a reigning monarch has attended a British motor race in person. Giuseppe Farina took pole and the win in his Alfa Romeo 158, beating fellow Italian Luigi Fagioli by 2.6 seconds to kick off the World Championship era in style. This weekend, MotoGP takes over that same hallowed ground for the British Grand Prix. 

Portland International Raceway

Most tracks are built on farmland or old airfields. Portland International Raceway is built on top of an entire city. Before it was a raceway, the site was Vanport, a WWII era housing project thrown up in under a year to house Kaiser shipyard workers. At its wartime peak, Vanport was home to more than 42,000 people, making it Oregon's second largest city at the time. On May 30, 1948, a railroad berm holding back the Columbia River gave way and wiped Vanport off the map in a matter of hours.

For over a decade afterward, all that remained were paved streets and building foundations poking up out of the ground, and that is literally what local racers used. The first Rose Cup races ran on those leftover Vanport streets starting in 1961, with drivers dodging concrete slabs and the occasional pond until the track finally got a proper paved surface in the 1970s. This weekend's IndyCar and Indy NXT action at the Grand Prix of Portland runs on a circuit built quite literally from the bones of a lost city.