Photo Credit: Noel Lanier
Not mathematically eligible to win the championship, Matt Crafton did the next best thing that he could – win the race. He would dominate the Ford EcoBoost 200 en route to scoring his sixth victory of the 2015 season.
” Tonight’s win was awesome,” he commented. “Like I said, the last two years we haven’t been able to race here, and to be able to take the gloves off and don’t worry about a championship and just go out and win, and that’s all we had to do was worry about winning, and I said nothing else was going to make us happy. So that’s what we did tonight.”
Starting from the pole position, Crafton would lead throughout the night, leading 93 of the 134 laps en route to the checkered flag. Despite having one of his best seasons statistically, Crafton fell out of championship contention after being involved in a wreck last weekend.
“We had a phenomenal season,” Crafton added. “Six wins and 700 — I think they said 780 laps we led. That’s a pretty good season. We just had one column that was bad for us: DNFs. I made mistakes and everybody made mistakes. But I promise you one thing, it’s going to make us stronger for 2016.”
Instead of Crafton making it three in a row, it’d be 19-year-old Erik Jones from Byron, Michigan scoring the championship with a sixth place finish in his first full season on the tour. Jones become the youngest series champion, breaking a record previously held by Austin Dillon (age 21).
“I think a lot of it was just being with a great team here in Kyle Busch Motorsports and bringing great Tundras to the race track every week,” Jones said. “I think there were definitely times in the year when I didn’t think we’d be able to do this and looking back and seeing the deficit we were in at some points and just being able to really pull together and make this all happen here at the end of the year, it was just so, so special for everybody here. I couldn’t think of a better way to thank them.”
John Hunter Nemechek, whom impressed many throughout the season, finished second in the Ford EcoBoost 200 for his third runner-up in the past five races. Tyler Reddick would finish third to finish second to Jones in the championship standings, 15 points behind.
“I’ve got to say I’m really proud of our BBR Music Group Ford F-150,” he stated. “We had a great year all year long, but just came up a little short. That’s how championships are won, just being consistent week in and week out. We’ve just got to clean up some of our dirty days and I think we’ll be fine. We had some really consistent running there, probably more consistent than the other guys, but my bad nights were really bad so we have to work on that and clean that up a little bit for next year. We weren’t far off. One race changes or makes your championship for you and that’s how it shook out.”
Red Horse Racing rounded out the top-five with Ben Kennedy and Timothy Peters, followed by Jones, Johnny Sauter, Daniel Hemric, Cameron Hayley and John Wes Townley.
The 134 lap race ran clean for the most part, only having four caution periods throughout. Daniel Suarez would have a disappointing ending to the year after running strong throughout, causing two of the cautions as he would spin at lap 62, while getting into the wall to cut a tire at lap 84.
