Kyle Busch fended after challenge after challenge in the final laps, but still ended up victorious in the Truck Series at Atlanta Motor Speedway for the second year in a row by just .017 in a tight finish over Stewart Friesen.
Busch, driving the No. 7 Truck for Spire Motorsports, led a race-high 80 of 135 laps en route to victory, but had to deal with the pack throughout at the superspeedway-style track as drivers caught up to him. Stewart Friesen was the last of those as he and Busch swapped positions for the final five laps, and it was Friesen with the lead at the start of the final lap.
Busch jumped to the bottom line, but didn’t have the momentum to clear Friesen despite taking the shorter route through the first set of corners. That left the two side-by-side down the backstretch with help from behind. Friesen had been pushed slightly ahead by the time they exited the fourth corner and had a run down the fronstretch, but Busch was still alongside and sidedrafted to pull ahead for the win.
It was so much at the end that even Busch himself couldn’t keep of it all.
“I don’t remember,” he laughed when asked about the moves he made at the end of the race. “Just trying to make sure I stayed as far forward as I possibly could, you know, and when those guys would kind of cycle to me and get to the next one in front of me and the next one in front of me… I just kept trying to make sure that I battled back and got back to the front so I could try to control it as best I could.
“But that inside was good, you know, they were rolling forward, so it made for a heck of a race,” he acknowledged. “So proud that we had a heck of a race there to the finish and it wasn’t single file, so. There was some mixing it up for those fans out here to see a cool show.”
It’s a big win for a driver who missed out in victory lane in the Cup Series all last year for the first time in 19 years. Still, despite this being the track he missed out on the win by 0.013 seconds in Cup last year, he doesn’t expect much to translate to this Sunday.
“These things are a lot different than the cars are, but probably more similar than the Xfinity cars. But all in all just going out here, just getting laps, and speedway racing is speedway racing,” Busch said, referring to the superspeedway style tracks. “There’s a lot of luck involved, but there’s some skill. And today I feel like there was definitely some skill.”
Stewart Friesen ended up on the disappointed side of that finish, in an ironically similar position to Busch himself in the Cup Series at Atlanta last year.
“We had a shot.” Friesen said. “This is my favorite truck, and we will keep digging with it. We had a shot.”
Looking back on it, Friesen said there were a few things he would do differently, especially sticking more closely to the truck behind pushing him to get as much help from the draft as possible rather than getting spread out.
“I got too far off my help there coming down the back on the last lap,” he explained. “I knew when we kind of surged ahead, and I got [Busch] pinned down there in turn three – that might have been the kiss of death because I didn’t have too much help pushing behind me at that point.”
Still, it’s good momentum, he added, for the team especially compared to last year where they finished 23rd with a damaged truck.
Tyler Ankrum, Bayley Currey, and Chandler Smith rounded out the top five, and Kaden Honeycutt, Ben Rhodes, Ty Majeski, Jake Garcia, and Grant Enfinger all earned top-ten finishes.
For a moment, it looked like Daniel Hemric would make a miraculous comeback. He was collected by Rajah Caruth, whose truck snapped loose and spun by itself, collecting Hemric and others and drawing out a red flag halfway through the race. Hemric’s McAnally-Hilgemann Racing team worked diligently to repair the truck over multiple trips down pit road and he remained in contention.
So much so, in fact, that Hemric managed to get the lead for a lap in the final ten laps despite missing a front-left fender after pulling the bottom lane up to the front. However, that was short-lived as Busch dove around him exactly one lap later and took Hemric back to line, and he was quickly despatched back to 16th where he finished the race.
The Craftsman Truck Series returns at Las Vegas Motor Speedway on Saturday, March 15th.
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