Miata Mania: MX-5 Cup Series to Race at NASCAR’s Martinsville Oval

And now, for something completely different: IMSA, the NASCAR-owned sports car sanctioning body, has announced that its Mazda MX-5 Cup series, which has hitherto competed only on street circuits and road courses, will race at the (NASCAR owned) Martinsville Speedway in Virginia, the 0.526-mile oval that has been around since 1947. It began hosting NASCAR races in 1948, the year NASCAR was invented.

It may be worth noting that this official announcement, from IMSA, the MX-5 Cup series, NASCAR and Mazda itself, never uses the word “Miata,” even though Mazda still calls the Miata a “Miata” on its own website. It’s a Miata, folks: Nobody says MX-5.

Anyway, the MX-5 Cup race cars, which are all built in a shop just up the road from NASCAR’s office in Daytona Beach, will compete on the same bill as the NASCAR Whelen Modified Tour’s season finale at Martinsville on Saturday, October 26.

The event will be a 300-lap doubleheader called the “Virginia Is For Racing Lovers 300,” with the Mazdas taking to the track for 100 laps, directly followed by a 200-lap NASCAR Whelen Modified finale. The MX-5 Cup race doesn’t count towards season points, but the winner does get $15,000. And a grandfather clock.

The MX-5 Cup schedule lists 14 races this year, which began in January at Daytona International Speedway, and end October 9-12 at Michelin Raceway Road Atlanta. The Martinsville race will be two weeks after the MX-5 Cup season finale, so the competitors get all winter to rebuild their cars!

“Martinsville Speedway has such a unique and rich history of racing, and we couldn’t be more excited to add another incredible event to that history,” said Martinsville Speedway President Clay Campbell. “It’ll be the first time we’ll have open-top cars racing on track since our early days in the 1950s, tapping into our past and also our roots as we host the NASCAR Whelen Modified Tour finale on the same weekend. We’re excited to bring the Mazda MX-5 Cup to Martinsville, and I know this will be one the fans enjoy.”

A hat tip to Clay Campbell, whose grandfather built the track, for only using “excited” twice in one paragraph, though he made up for it with an “incredible.” Jonathan Applegate, senior manager for Mazda Motorsports, would like to add his own “excited:” “We’ve seen increased interest in the series from drivers with NASCAR aspirations who want to grow their skill set. Racing at Martinsville is a unique opportunity to capitalize on that, and we are really excited about this opportunity.” Well, he did use “opportunity” twice in one sentence.

The press release also says that entries are “open for all racers and are not limited to MX-5 Cup or IMSA drivers and teams,” so go to Flis Performance to buy your new, not-street-legal MX-5 Cup race car; they don’t let you build one yourself. A lot goes into converting a street car to a proper racer, though it does start with a Miata, shipped straight to the shop from Hiroshima, Japan. For a long time, Mazda and the series really managed to hold down the price of a turnkey MX-5 Cup car: It began at $53,000, a bargain, when the series started in 2016. By the time they’d sold the first 150 cars, the price was still low at $58,900. Now it’s $99,000, and as of last month they’ve sold 300 of them. But that’s still a bargain.

The MX-5 Cup drivers are responsible for some of the closest, most cutthroat racing on the planet; just ask future NASCAR phenom Connor Zilisch. At 17, he is already under contract to Trackhouse Racing (currently home to NASCAR Cup drivers Ross Chastain and Daniel Suarez). Zilisch races in the NASCAR Xfinity and Craftsman Truck series; he’s the youngest winner in Trans-Am series history, and he won his class in the 2024 Rolex 24 Hours at Daytona and the Mobil 1 Twelve Hours of Sebring. Zilisch began racing in MX-5 Cup in 2022. This year, he has competed in the series eight times, and has won only once. Those Miata drivers are tough, despite any rumor to the contrary.

Martinsville is always a very physical, fun train-wreck of a race. Whatever the crash record is for a 100-lap event there, Mazda’s portion of the Virginia Is For Racing Lovers 300 will break it on October 26.

And Flis Performance is already filling out a deposit slip for all the new parts they’re going to sell on October 27.

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