NCWTS: Grant Enfinger Leads Opening Great Clips 200 Practice at Atlanta Motor Speedway

It seems that Grant Enfinger has his NASCAR Camping World Truck Series career off to a good start this year.

After winning the pole for the Daytona race, Grant Enfinger would top the chart in the opening practice session at Atlanta Motor Speedway ahead of Saturday’s Great Clips 200. Enfinger topped the charts with a lap of 30.873 seconds.

“I feel good about it so far,” he said. “We have a lot of speed in the truck. We have some speed with all three of our GMS (Racing) Chevys so I’m just happy to be here.”

After starting on the pole at Daytona, Enfinger led a bunch of the opening laps before finishing 20th after getting caught up in the big wreck. Notably, Enfinger was one of the drivers that participated in a “rookie” test at Atlanta Motor Speedway last month, which he says is huge simply for the additional seat time.

“It’s definitely going to help with getting me acclimated to the trucks,” he commented.

Christopher Bell was second quickest during the session, 0.131 seconds off of Enfinger. Bell is hoping to have a good run after tumbling over and over at Daytona International Speedway. As the field went into turn one, Brandon Brown made contact with Christopher Bell, causing him to bounce off of Timothy Peters, before getting into the wall and flipping over.

“Just praying that things would stop pretty quick, and luckily everything did its job,” Bell said as he looked back at the incident. “These guys at KBM build good, safe trucks and it showed last week at Daytona.”

Matt Crafton was third quickest in the session, and feels confident about his chances as he is driving the same chassis that he dominated with at Homestead-Miami Speedway last November. Crafton also won last year’s race at Atlanta Motor Speedway, stating that teammate Cameron Hayley is driving that truck.

“All we did right there is go out there, make one lap, and check our travels,” Crafton said of his session. “We don’t want to go make a lot of laps out there as the track is still green. We messed up on our travels as we were dragging the splitter, so we’ve made some changes and will now focus on race runs from here on out.”

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Daniel Hemric was fourth quickest as he looks to make his second start with Brad Keselowski Racing after finishing eighth at Daytona. Hemric is entering his second year in the series after running the full schedule last year for NTS Motorsports. John Wes Townley rounded out the top-five ahead of rookies William Byron and Cole Custer.

Parker Kligerman was eightg quickest after finishing third at Daytona last weekend. The session didn’t come without issue, though, as Kligerman’s team is fighting a mechanical problem. 

“It sounds like we had a fuel pressure issue on the dyno earlier in the week. So that’s the issue that we have here,” he said. “I just shut it off immediately when it started on the backstretch as we don’t have a back-up motor or truck. We’ll work at diagnosing the problem and going thru the system and if not, change everything and hope that we get it fixed.”

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Cameron Hayley was ninth quickest as he enters his sophomore season of truck series competition with a new crew chief on the pit box, Eddie Troconis. Troconis joins the team after serving as one of the engineers at Kyle Busch Motorsports. Thus far, he says he’s feeling a lot better this year at Atlanta than last year in his rookie season.

“This track has always been difficult,” he added. “It’s the first real track that you hit with a new crew chief as I have Eddie Troconis on the box. But I’m definitely feeling better with my second year here.”

Going into the weekend, Hayley added that he and Troconis “we sat down and explained on a scale as to what a three loose feels or a three tight feels to me.”

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Last year’s series runner-up Tyler Reddick was 10th quickest, followed by Caleb Holman, Daniel Suarez and Daytona race winner Johnny Sauter.

“Just trying to some big stuff right now, working through some packages since we have so much practice time,” Sauter said. “Needless to say, reality has set in with all the mile and a halves that are coming up so going to work on it and try and get some speed out of it.”

Sauter’s GMS teammate Spencer Gallagher followed him on the chart, but didn’t have a clean session as he brought out the red flag about 10 minutes into the session due to leaking fluid.

“I’m starting to develop a theory that these trucks run better with fluid in them,” Gallagher said. “Unfortunately, we had a support for an oil line come loose and the oil line came loose so as you can imagine, it started leaking fluid. But I know that the truck has speed in it so we’ll get out there soon and be fine.”

The drivers of the NASCAR Camping World Truck Series will return to the track at 2:25 pm EST for their second of three practices today.