Garage 66 will return to Charlotte Motor Speedway for the Coca-Cola 600 and will put Timmy Hill back behind the wheel of the No. 66 — his second start of 2026 and one he does not need to qualify for because only two other open cars are locked into the race.
The entry caps a fragmented season for Garage 66. Four drivers have taken turns in the No. 66 this year; Josh Bilicki became the team’s fourth different driver of 2026 when he ran the road course race at Watkins Glen International, and his 35th-place finish stands as Garage 66’s worst result of the season. The team has recorded finishes both better and worse than that: Casey Mears finished 32nd in the Daytona 500 — Garage 66’s first appearance in the Great American Race since 2020 — while Chad Finchum managed a season-best 28th at Talladega Superspeedway and was 33rd at Texas Motor Speedway. The team also endured DNFs, including Hill’s at Darlington and Finchum’s at Bristol, both listed among results worse than Bilicki’s 35th. Garage 66 did not compete in the exhibition All-Star Race at Dover Motor Speedway.
Hill’s trip to Charlotte is threaded through recent patterns. His three most recent Cup Series starts — in 2024, 2025 and 2026 — have all come at Darlington Raceway. His only other Cup start since the end of the 2021 season was at Circuit of the Americas in 2024, and he has not raced a Cup oval that was not Darlington since the 2021 season finale at Phoenix Raceway. Hill’s last Cup start at Charlotte was on the Roval in October 2021; his most recent Coca-Cola 600 start came in May 2020, when Garage 66 ran the full schedule and Hill was the team’s full-time driver.
Those dates matter because Garage 66 operates as a non-chartered open team — the squad formerly known as MBM Motorsports — and open cars usually face a qualifying hurdle the charter teams do not. In this case Hill’s entry is effectively guaranteed because only two other open cars are currently locked into the Coca-Cola 600 field, a quirk of the entry list that relieves the team of a do-or-die qualifying session for a crown jewel race.
The season-to-date results underline the trade-offs inherent in Garage 66’s approach. Using multiple drivers has kept the No. 66 on track at tracks ranging from Daytona to Watkins Glen and Talladega, but the lineup churn and a handful of DNFs leave the team short on consistent finishes. Bilicki’s 35th at Watkins Glen is perhaps the clearest single marker: it is the low-water mark numerically, but DNFs at Darlington and Bristol show the team’s vulnerabilities in different forms — mechanical, contact or circumstance — that aren’t captured by one finish alone.
For Hill, the Coca-Cola 600 will be his second start of the year and his first in Charlotte’s 600-mile test since 2020. The endurance race presents a different challenge than the short, high-attrition stints at Darlington where his recent Cup work has concentrated. It also gives Garage 66 a public measure of whether its rotating-driver model can translate into a sturdy long-run performance when the No. 66 is guaranteed a spot on the grid.
The single question now is sharp: can Timmy Hill and Garage 66 turn a locked-in starting spot into a durable, trouble-free run in the Coca-Cola 600, or will the team’s scattered results and earlier DNFs at tracks this season predict another long afternoon? The answer will arrive after 600 miles at Charlotte.
