Photo Credit: David Scearce
Each day of the week, the column will highlight a division, highlighting five drivers and mentioning things that you should know going into the next week of racing.
Each season while fans complain about the aero issues and lack of passing in the top two divisions of NASCAR, the NASCAR Camping World Truck Series continues to offer the top-notch competition with close racing and passing throughout each event. That hasn’t been different this year with fans raving about the competition each weekend. There was the close battle at Charlotte with Kasey Kahne and Erik Jones, only to be followed by Tyler Reddick passing Jones in the late stages at Dover to score the victory.
As the series heads off to Texas Motor Speedway this weekend for a standalone event, the focus will be on the stars with a majority of regulars and young kids in attendance, looking for their short of glory.
Tyler Reddick leads the young charge to Texas following his win at Dover International Speedway. Reddick ran up front all race long, and used his four tires at the end to make the pass on Erik Jones in the closing laps to score the victory. He currently sits second in points, 11 points behind Matt Crafton, following six races thus far this season. Reddick is having a great season for his first full year of competition, having posted a top-10 in five of the six races. He has also proven that he has the ability to be the champion, proving on a couple different occasions this year that he can fight back from adversity.
With two wins under his belt thus far this year, he heads into Texas with confidence and momentum. He also has last year on the mind, after finishing fourth after starting from the pole.
If he wants to win the event, though, he’ll have to make his way by Matt Crafton, who enters this weekend as the points leader and defending race winner. Starting from the second spot, Crafton led 118 of the 167 laps en route to scoring the victory. Texas seems to like Crafton as he has a win, 17 top-10s in an average finish of 10.2 in 28 starts.
Crafton has won the championship the past two seasons by being solidly consistent on a weekly basis. He kept that game going this past weekend by bouncing back from a pit road speeding penalty to post a fifth place finish. It marked his fifth top-five and sixth top-10 in the first six races, along with a pair of wins. No doubt Crafton enters this weekend as the favourite.
While Texas likes Crafton, it also likes his ThorSport Racing teammate Johnny Sauter, who has an average finish of 6.9 in 13 starts with two wins and 10 top-10s. Sauter is looking for a strong run, possibly a win, to gain ground in the points as he sits 40 points back of Crafton. He enters the weekend with momentum, though, following a solid ninth place finish at Dover.
Though statistically speaking, Joe Nemechek has the best record at Texas with an average finish of 5.5 in his two starts, both ending with top-10 finishes. A good run for Nemechek would mean a lot as he has only finished in the top-10 once in his three starts thus far this season.
With all that said, the eyes of many fans will lie on Erik Jones this weekend. The Kyle Busch Motorsports driver has dominated the past three events, only to come up short of reaching victory lane due to the various forms of strategy in the late stages of the races. No doubt Jones is looking to get back to victory lane after winning three races last season, while not having a win yet this season.
He has only one previous Texas start, though, which resulted in an 11th place finish. Still, Jones knows his way around the intermediate track, virtue of a win in the XFINITY Series earlier this year.
