The Cook Out Clash at Bowman Gray Stadium is an annual non-championship pre-season NASCAR Cup Series exhibition event held in February before the season-opening Daytona 500.

When Sprint left NASCAR after the 2016 season, Advance Auto Parts became the title sponsor in 2017 and the event was renamed to its original name of "The Clash".

The following year, the event was moved out of Daytona International Speedway for the first time in its history, where it was held inside of the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum as part of launching the seventh-generation chassis.

Roberts had been successful introducing Mercury into racing while working at Ford, and had also been a part of Ontario Motor Speedway.

The initial format was set up as a 50-mile sprint race, with no pit stops, with a field consisting of the previous season's pole position winners.

The race established an incentive for drivers to earn pole positions during the NASCAR season, which up to that time, still offered relatively tiny cash prizes.

Previously, the weekend before the Daytona 500 featured only minor support events, and the Winston Cup competitors ordinarily would not have taken to the track until Wednesday.

The Busch Clash allowed the Winston Cup regulars to kick off the week live on CBS.

NASCAR then moved the renamed Busch Light Clash to the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum, meaning the event would be held away from Daytona for the first time, and during the NFL's off-week between the conference championship games and Super Bowl LVI, which was held in nearby Inglewood for the first time.

The 2024 Clash was bumped up from the traditional Sunday race and moved to Saturday due to weather projections, thus making it general admission.

For 2014, voting set the starting lineup per final practice speeds and required mandatory pit stops after the second segment.

The race was planned with the seventh-generation car changeover happening at the Daytona 500, which was postponed a year by supply chain and development issues from the pandemic lockdowns that severely altered the previous season.

As a result, the race was moved to the road course using the previous sixth-generation cars to save teams resources and ensure the single-source new chassis (which teams did not have enough at the time) would not be potentially destroyed in crashes during the event after the previous season's Clash ended with incidents that few cars were remaining, to curb the blocking that created massive crashes.

On September 14, 2021, NASCAR announced that the Busch Clash would move to the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum.

[2] On January 21, 2025, NASCAR announced changes to the Busch Clash, increasing the number of transfer positions from five cars per heat.