Preston Pardus

Preston Pardus is NASCAR's resident road-racing specialist, a New Smyrna Beach, Florida native who has built his O'Reilly Auto Parts Series career around the schedule's twisting stuff. Look at where his starts have come: Road America, Watkins Glen, Circuit of the Americas, the Indianapolis road course, the Charlotte Roval, the streets of Chicago. When the series turns right, Pardus shows up. The approach has paid off with his best finishes, headlined by a seventh on the Charlotte Roval in 2021, when he carved forward from 37th on the grid, and an eighth at Road America in 2020. Pardus's background is in road racing rather than ovals, and it shows: the deep braking zones and rhythm sections that unsettle oval veterans are exactly where he makes his living. Specialists occupy a unique niche in modern NASCAR, parachuting into the races that suit them and disappearing again until the next one. Pardus has made that niche his own, one apex at a time.

Written by Richard R. Glover, NASCAR Reference