The first round of the NASCAR Truck Series Playoffs featured its first shock elimination as third-seeded Chandler Smith was eliminated on Saturday afternoon at New Hampshire Motor Speedway.
Smith opened this round with finishes of 30th and 30th due to a crash and electrical control unit issue respectively and not even a second place in Loudon was enough to offset the damage done.
The Front Row Motorsports No. 38 needed nothing short of a win, and despite the best efforts from the driver and crew chief Jon Leonard, they were the first out alongside Jake Garcia of Thorsport Racing after Darlington, Bristol and Loudon.
His best shot might have been on the penultimate restart, where from second, he gave up the front row to line up behind eventual winner Corey Heim.
“My Xfinity Series experience taught me to give up the front row because that’s a two spot difference if you do everything right,” Smith told Motorsport.com. “Which, that restart, I didn’t because Gio (Ruggiero) got in front of me.
Chandler Smith, Front Row Motorsports Ford
Photo by: Meg Oliphant / Getty Images
“Next restart, I executed and got second back and Corey and I were neck-and-neck on lap time. He started stretching and I started trying some things and I would get to even and even picked up pace and just ran out of time.”
As a result, a driver that entered the playoffs third with a 16-point advantage to the cutoff did not advance to race for a championship but the vibes were not all bad.
“I feel like it’s a little bittersweet, to be honest with you,” Smith said. “I had a fast truck that was capable of winning. I started hauling butt there at the end and running down the 11, but it wasn’t in the Lord’s Will today, honestly. I pulled everybody together before the race. We prayed together and I wanted to let them know that I’m proud of them no matter the outcome today.
“We’ve had so much fun this season and the way this deal came about so late, I felt like honestly, don’t get me wrong, we had the expectation of wanting to go win, but we’ve really accomplished a lot more than I think we all envisioned us to do, so it’s bittersweet. It’s bitter because I would obviously like to race for a championship, but it’s sweet because I know that we have trucks capable of winning every time we show up to the racetrack. It just wasn’t meant to be, it’s as simple as that.”
Jake Garcia, ThorSport Racing Ford
Photo by: Meg Oliphant / Getty Images
Garcia entered this race 14 points out but just never had top-10 speed.
“We were just super tight,” Garcia said. “We never got it to turn. We took some really big swings at it and nothing really did much for it, so we’ll have to figure out why that is and what went so wrong this weekend and we’ll move on to the next one. Hopefully, when we come back here or a track like this, we’ll have a little bit better notebook.”
Had Smith found some way to have won, it would have come at the expense of Rajah Caruth or Kaden Honeycutt, who were locked in a points battle to see who would be at risk if that worst case scenario happened.
Both scored stage points and lost track position at various points but Honeycutt and Caruth advanced with finishes of P7 and P10 respectively.
“Yeah, I’m just really glad we executed a full day,” Honeycutt said. “Restarts were great. Lambert (Chris, spotter) did a great job helping me out and keeping me calm and focused on what we were supposed to.
“It was a hectic day and start to our playoffs together, but we have good trucks and we’re in to the next round, and I don’t think any of that is going to change in the next round.”
Caruth left Bristol saying they needed to be better than hoping for bad days from their competition. And to that point, Caruth scored stage points in both stages and even overcame the loss of track position to score that top-10.
“Yeah, definitely some relief,” Caruth said. “I think overall this year myself and we as a as a group haven’t been as fast as I’ve wanted to be, but we’ve had spurts of flashes of greatness, flashes of good speed, and today was I think one of those days with running in the top-10 and playing some strategy to get stage points.
“We achieved a lot of our goals today, especially expecting (Smith) to be really good and knowing we needed to gain points on (Honeycutt). It was a best-case scenario for us today.”
Caruth thanked sponsors Rick Hendrick and HendrickCars ‘just for putting me in the spot and believing in me to go and and race for wins and compete for a championship.”
And so he’s through to the next round.
Playoff Grid
Corey Heim +74
Layne Riggs +27
Daniel Hemric +6
Tyler Ankrum +5
Ty Majeski +5
Grant Enfinger +2
—
Rajah Caruth -2
Kaden Honeycutt -4
Jungle rules
Corey Heim pretty much has a race and a half buffer to the cutline thanks to his nine wins, stage wins and all the playoff points that come with it, which is a big deal in advance of the final three-race round.
– Charlotte Roval
– Talladega
– Martinsville
These are three chaotic tracks where pure speed and performance will very much play a secondary role to execution and luck.
It was best articulated by Tyler Ankrum.
“I have no idea how to evaluate the second round,” Ankrum said. “Those three, between the Roval, Talladega, and Martinsville, they’re all wild cards and anything can happen. You can easily find yourself third or fourth below the cutline after the Roval.
“So, I don’t know. You just have to go execute. Performance might not matter that much.”
That’s how Layne Riggs views it too.
“I think execution will matter a lot more than performance,” Riggs said. “Hopefully we can run well at the Roval and build us a better points buffer but I do think we’re in a good spot right now.
“It’s unfortunate that Chandler was eliminated today but we can work well together with one goal in mind, which will be good. At Martinsville, we just need to have a good day. I’m excited about it and confident about the races coming up and I do think we learned some things today that we can apply to Phoenix as well.”
Honeycutt thinks he’s going to have to be aggressive.
“I think there are two ways to go after the Roval,” Honeycutt said. “You can either go for stage points because you know everyone is going to flip the stage or you flip the stage and try to get the best finish you can.
“At Talladega, I don’t think you can lay back and wait for a crash to happen because you have to drive up there and get stage points because that’s all that’s going to matter come Martinsville, right?”
Caruth says his priority is just minimizing chances to have a bad day.
“It’s a free game this round,” Caruth said. “The Roval is kind of a straight up race but Talladega, anything can happen, and I just think you have to finishes those races. Then, you get to Martinsville and it was jungle rules last year with Christian (Eckes) and Taylor (Gray) and it shows you what guys are willing to do.
“But I think we just have to live to fight another day and be in the fight through three races. So that’s my approach, even if it’s not the best of days, not to take myself out of it and be there come the end of Martinsville.”
