Coca Cola 600

Coca Cola 600 : What channel is the NASCAR race on today? What time does the NASCAR race start? These are the questions that plague race fans every Sunday, when each Monster Energy NASCAR Cup Series race will be on either FOX or FS1 for the first half of the 2019 season with differing start times.

As for Sunday's Coca-Cola 600 at Charlotte Motor Speedway, the channel that will broadcast the race is FOX. The start time for the Coca-Cola 600 is 6 p.m. ET, and the start time for the pre-race show on FOX is 5:30 p.m. ET.

MORE: Watch the Coca-Cola 600 live with fuboTV (7-day trial)

The 6 p.m. ET start time for Sunday's Coca-Cola 600 signals the fourth night race of the 2019 season. As for the TV channel, the NASCAR Cup Series returns to FOX after three straight weeks of races on FS1. As part of FOX's TV deal with NASCAR for the 2019 season, FOX was slated to show nine Cup races this year, and FS1 was scheduled to show eight, including last week's All-Star Race.

The Coca-Cola 600 at Charlotte Motor Speedway is like no other on the schedule.

It is the longest race of the year, but the environmental forces throughout the weekend are ever changing. Drivers practiced in the daytime before qualifying late in the evening on Thursday. After letting the track sit idle on Friday, the final two practice sessions were in the morning on Saturday. The race will be run starting late in the afternoon and can go very late into the night.

Because there will be radical changes to the track surface during the race, building adjustability into the car is critical. When something technical is required to find the optimum setup, we most often favor veteran teams. But there is also an element of intuition that goes into getting the setup just right and that skews the results.

For the second consecutive weekend, the Monster Energy NASCAR Cup Series will be racing at Charlotte Motor Speedway (6 p.m. ET, FOX). However, this time instead of an All-Star shootout, drivers are in for a grueling 600 miles in the Cup Series’ longest race of the year.

Charlotte is a 1.5-mile oval with a relatively old surface that was repaved back in 2006. We saw from the All-Star Race that tires did make a difference and that track position was also extremely important, so this race should provide a good blend of multiple 1.5-mile tracks.

The most recent 1.5-mile points-paying race was also a night race at Kansas Speedway. In that race, the top five in average green-flag speed all showed up in the top nine in 15-lap speed in Happy Hour, despite the race being at night and final practice during the day.