It took 14 extra laps, two overtimes, and a small-batch bourbon barrel of chaos, but in the end, a Canadian crossed the line first at Michigan International Speedway Saturday — just a stone’s throw from the Canadian border. Somewhere in all the overtime madness, Stewart Friesen emerged from the fog of bent fenders and shredded tempers to snap a 72-race winless streak in the NASCAR Craftsman Truck Series.
Yes, Stewart Friesen — the Canadian who sounds like he should be coaching a junior hockey team in Moose Jaw — won a NASCAR race on American soil. And not just any win. This was a street fight with wheels. The kind of race where if you still vaguely resembled a truck at the end, you were doing better than most.
Friesen hadn’t won since Texas in 2022. That’s 72 races of “almost” and “not quite”, “we’ll get ’em next time” and “maybe I should just quit” — until Saturday at Michigan, where it finally all clicked after an overtime slugfest that would’ve made a demolition derby look civilized.
“I don’t even know what to say,” Friesen said afterward. “Thank you to… all these bad ass race fans. I know there’s a lot of Canadians. There’s a lot of Americans. Everybody’s having a good time together and that’s what it’s all about, baby.”
Friesen broke it down in the way only a dirt-track veteran-turned-overtime hero can.
“Yeah, (my truck) certainly wasn’t good to start,” he admitted. “Fought (being) free, then got on the tight side of it. Luckily, got enough cautions to keep working on it. We were swinging the pendulum back-n-forth on it, and then we just nailed it there for those last couple laps.”
Strategy also played a role in the madness: “Thought Corey (LaJoie) might take the front row there with Grant (Enfinger) and then I’d line up behind Ben (Rhodes) and just push the heck out of the top. Then (when the choosing occurred and he was able to move to the front row), I was like ‘I’ll take it,’ and try to get the best launch I could and we got a killer launch. Got in clean air and had enough speed to keep this No. 52… up front.”
Before Friesen could celebrate, he had to survive a red flag, a wreck-fest, and a pair of overtime restarts that turned the final laps into a fireworks show of sheet metal and questionable decisions. Oh, and the race was red flagged for nearly 20 minutes on Lap 88 after Nathan Byrd and Morgen Baird “converted Turn 3 into a scrapyard clearance aisle.
And the restarts? Like watching a bar fight on wheels. Corey Heim had dominated most of the day, winning the first two stages, but got eaten alive in the chaos and finished a dismal 18th after getting caught in a late pile-up.
Grant Enfinger finished second after somehow dodging the worst of it — though even he wasn’t quite sure how.
“I don’t know,” Enfinger said. “We weren’t as good as we thought we were in practice. But man, Jeff (crew chief Jeff Hensley) kept slinging stuff at it. He got gutsy with both of those calls… felt like we executed that first — or second to last — restart pretty well. Just a little bittersweet, but overall great execution by our guys.”
Behind Friesen and Enfinger were surprise pole winner Luke Fenhaus, Ben Rhodes, and Corey LaJoie stepping out from behind the Amazon Prime desk, rounding out the top five. Veterans like Matt Crafton and Chandler Smith clawed their way into the top ten alongside young guns like Andrés Pérez de Lara and Layne Riggs.
Rajah Caruth, fresh off a win in Nashville, had a day to forget. After an early-race tire issue and a heroic effort to get back on the lead lap, his race ended with a crunch into the Turn 2 wall on Lap 77.
Next up: Pocono Raceway on June 20. Let’s just hope that one ends in regulation. Or, given the edge of your seat mayhem we witnessed Saturday, maybe not.
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.