Rain Pushes Texas Cup and Nationwide Races to Monday; Cup Begins at 9 am (PDT)

FORT WORTH, Texas -- For the second consecutive day, steady rain at Texas Motor Speedway wiped out racing -- but Sunday it meant both a Sprint Cup and Nationwide series event were rescheduled to Monday.

At 4:30 p.m. ET Sunday, NASCAR pulled the plug on both events when a rainstorm that began Saturday morning and has continued virtually unabated since then, coupled with an ominous forecast for the evening, left NASCAR unable to dry the track and start the race in a reasonable time.

The front plaguing the area is forecast to begin leaving by midnight local time Sunday. Monday's forecast calls for mostly cloudy skies with a high of 66 degrees and eight-to-10 mph winds from the northeast, with a 20 percent chance of rain. The temperature at the green flag for Monday's Cup Series race is expected to be 56 degrees.

The Samsung Mobile 500, a 334-lap event, now is scheduled to take the green flag at just past noon ET. The only time in TMS's 14-year history that a NASCAR event had to be run on Monday occurred in 2002, when Matt Kenseth won the Samsung/Radio Shack 500 on April 8.

It's the second time in the past three Cup races that an event will be run on a Monday. Three weeks ago at Martinsville Speedway the Goody's Fast Pain Relief 500 was run on Monday and won by Denny Hamlin.

The Nationwide Series' O'Reilly 300, which originally was scheduled to run Saturday afternoon and is the first series race postponed this season, now is scheduled to run after the Cup Series event, with the green tentatively set for about 5 p.m. ET.