There are a lot of ways to win a NASCAR Craftsman Truck Series race. You can dominate every lap like a robot with tire pressure sensors for nerves, or you can do what Chandler Smith did at Bristol: survive bedlam, stack-ups, and chaos incarnate to beat the odds—and Corey Heim—on a late restart and win with seven laps to go. And just for good measure, he picked up a $50,000 bonus from the Triple Truck Challenge. Not bad for a Friday night.
In true Bristol fashion, the race had the elegance of a bar fight in a phone booth. Picture two bulls in a china shop, if the china shop was also on a steep banked half-mile with 36 other bulls.
The decisive moment came on Lap 237, when Smith pounced like a caffeinated cat on Heim during a restart. But it wasn’t just a clean pass—it was a perfectly legal ambush. Bayley Currey, trying to defy Newtonian physics behind them, caused a stack-up that sent the field into a mild panic and allowed Smith to edge Heim to the timing loop before the yellow lights lit up the coliseum again.
“I’m more excited for this team than I am for myself,” Smith said, still glowing with post-win disbelief. “We hired my crew chief three weeks before Daytona. Take that in for a second.” Take it in, indeed. This was a team stitched together with hope, duct tape, and divine intervention, and somehow they found themselves drinking victory lane root beer on a Friday night in Tennessee.
“The Good Lord works in mysterious ways,” Smith added, and if mysterious ways involve threading the needle through a restart catastrophe to steal a win, then yes—divine chaos paid off. As for the $50,000 bonus? “I forgot about that. That puts the topping on the cake.” Forgettable money—must be nice.
Behind him, Kyle Larson did what Kyle Larson does: erase a pit-road penalty with the relentlessness of a man who doesn’t believe in traffic laws. He clawed his way back to second, passing Heim in the closing laps while Heim had to settle for third. Somewhere in that Toyota hauler, a very expensive headset was thrown gently but angrily into a padded wall.
Tyler Ankrum and Ben Rhodes rounded out the top five, with a cast of young chargers like Layne Riggs, Jake Garcia, Kaden Honeycutt, Rajah Caruth, and Gio Ruggiero making up the rest of the top ten. All of them fast. All of them probably wondering how they didn’t end up on the podium.
And speaking of confusion, let’s talk about Bayley Currey. He led 14 laps. He won Stage 2. He then became the unwitting domino in the late-race incident that shuffled the entire deck. He eventually finished 23rd and 13 laps down, which in Bristol terms is like parking your truck in Knoxville and trying to finish the race by telepathy.
Meanwhile, Ty Majeski’s night ended in a hail of misfortune on Lap 53 after some contact with yes, that Frankie Muniz, who was doing a guest stint that ended up as dramatic as his TV career. Majeski, Brandon Jones, and Stewart Friesen all got tangled up in a sequence that could’ve been soundtracked by Yakety Sax.
Majeski’s finish? Another week outside the top 10. That’s three in a row. The kind of streak that makes crew chiefs reach for Tums and team owners reach for backup plans.
Now, the series shifts to Rockingham next week—for the first time in twelve years. That’s right. The last time the Trucks raced there, people still used iPods and called things “epic” unironically. And if Bristol was the prelude to Rockingham, then buckle up, because we’re going from thunder valley to tire-eating tarmac.
Until then, Chandler Smith’s Ford F-150 isn’t just a winner—it’s a miracle on wheels. Built in a rush, patched together with faith, and now $50,000 richer. God bless America. And God bless restarts.
RACE RESULTS
Greg is the author of "The Nuts and Bolts of NASCAR: The Definitive Viewers' Guide to Big-Time Stock Car Auto Racing" and has been published in major publications across the country including the Los Angeles Times, the Cleveland Plain Dealer and the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. He was also a contributor to Chicken Soup for the NASCAR Soul, published in 2010, and the Christmas edition in 2016. He wrote as the NASCAR, Formula 1, Auto Reviews and National Veterans Affairs Examiner for Examiner.com and has appeared on Fox News. He holds a BS degree in communications, a Masters degree in psychology and is currently a PhD candidate majoring in psychology. He is currently the weekend Motorsports Editor for Autoweek.