Photo Credit: Ted Seminara/SpeedwayMedia.com
After not having a ride for a full year, Parker Kligerman returned to NASCAR competition on Friday night in the Camping World Truck Series, placing the No. 92 Valvoline Advance Auto Parts BTS Tire Ford in the third spot for Ricky Benton Racing.
Kligerman ran up front through part of the race, though lost a bunch of track potion when he got blocked in on pit road. Sitting there deep in the field, he could see the action picking up with everybody going three-wide, and knowing that it wasn’t going to work out.
“The third doesn’t work,” he stated. “It’s all aerodynamics and essentially what happens is you have the two lanes need to get away from each other because when trucks get side by side or cars, they take their cowl tire pressure. So you see a truck come up or a car — Dale (Earnhardt) Jr. does this better than anyone. He comes up to the left rear tire or right rear tire, gets up to the door and gets away. You don’t want your cowl pressure to match. When the engines are stewing over each other, you’re going to go nowhere, so eventually what happens when three wide like that, we’re just stealing cowl pressure from each other. No one is gonna go anywhere because you can’t side draft and can’t get away from it.”
As a result, he backed off and waited to see what happened.
“There eventually comes a point where you can see the race kind of take a character, it’s almost like a class, like a class becomes a funny class, group of kids, very serious, they want to work hard,” he said. “Suddenly a race takes like a shift and suddenly is hitting each other as hard as they can, and I could just see it happening.”
Being one of the only few drivers to escape the wreck, Kligerman was able to restart inside of the top-five for the late-race restart. As the laps drew to a close, Kligerman was in fifth, tucked up behind the No. 17 of Timothy Peters, pushing him as hard as he could on the bottom, as Peters looked to find a way around Ryan Truex, that was blocking both sides of the street in hope of keeping the leading.
After crossing the start-finish line, Christopher Bell who was the second truck in line in the top line behind Sauter, would get loose, and slide down into Peters. As a result, that’d cause to go sliding down through the infield while Bell went back across the track, making contact with the outside wall, before tumbling over and over.
“It was cool for him to be in the lead,” Kligerman said in relation to Truex. “He and I have been in similar situations since our rookie endeavors in Cup in 2014, kind of on the outskirts, so it was cool to see him leading. I was pushing the 17 as hard as I could. I saw Johnny coming, I should have moved up, and as we came — the 4 (Bell) was really loose even 20 laps before that. I mean, the 4 was just constantly sideways. Kudos to Chris Bell for holding onto that as long as he did, but then eventually he just lost it. I saw him turning the 17, and all I saw was the under side of his truck, and it was really reminiscent I think it was 2012 where Joey Coulter did a similar thing on the 22 truck.”
While it marks a strong run for Kligerman, it also marks a strong run for the organization as it ties their best career finish from 2011 with Clay Rogers following a season saw them post two top-10s in seven races with David Gilliland.
“There’s three guys that work full-time in the shop, Bobby Gill, Mike Hester the crew chief and Mike our tire guy,” he stated. “Bobby Gill, the famous living legend of USAR Hooters Pro Cup is our car chief, and then our crew chief, and they’re the three that are in the shop and they work very hard, very methodically to put great equipment on the track, and you see it today and I think you saw it last year, though. You saw this team consistently have the ability to maybe get in the top 10 and that was something that was a step ahead for them.
Putting the past couple of years in perspective, going from having a Sprint Cup Series ride to a year on the sidelines, Kligerman stated post-race that he was grateful for the opportunity.
“Last year they had their best year in the NASCAR Camping World Truck Series in terms of getting top 10s, running up front and that sort of thing. So to have this opportunity to come out here to Daytona for a bit of a hiatus and doing more TV stuff was a lot of fun,” he said. “Thanks to obviously Valvoline, Advance Auto Parts and Ricky Benton, the owner of this team. He’s been an ardent supporter of this series, maybe not in a full-time capacity but they continually show up year after year in a part-time capacity and it’s really cool to be part of that lineage and go out there and get them a good finish. This ties their best finish that Clay Rogers did in 2011, which I was in that race, too.”
