BRISTOL, Tenn. – The UNOH 200 at Bristol Motor Speedway produced a wide spectrum of emotions of Thursday night, with multiple drivers caught in the roller-coaster ride.
On one hand, Matt Crafton felt the relief of surviving the NASCAR Camping World Truck Series regular-season finale, while Todd Gilliland, Dalton Sargeant and others endured the agony of missing the playoffs.
Crafton entered the night as the eighth and final driver that was provisionally on the postseason grid, needing simply to maintain his points position during the night and hoping that no one below him in points won the race to knock him outside the seeding.
His No. 88 Menards Ford F-150 struggled to find speed for much of the night, but in the end, Crafton did what he needed to do to survive and advance. He gutted out an eighth-place finish while points leader Johnny Sauter won the event, keeping Crafton safe and allowing him to claim the last playoff berth.
Though Crafton’s ThorSport Racing team has struggled this season, the two-time Truck Series champion was relieved and grateful to have a shot to chase a third title this fall.
“I felt like if we would’ve had track position, we could have mixed it up there in the last stage tonight,” said Crafton. “The truck fell off the jack on the first pit stop and we lost a lot of spots. I know it was good, though. We had problems in qualifying, too, and had a tire equalized. It was just a long day.
“I don’t know if anything else could go wrong this year, honestly,” he added. “I was just waiting for that big scoreboard to fall on me at some point, or something crazy like that. We never give up, though. We just have to keep digging and I know we’re going to be a force to be reckoned with here in these next three (races). I know we can win races. We have a great group of guys. We just need to catch a break.”
Crafton ended up 115 points ahead of Myatt Snider, who was the first driver on the outside looking in.
Snider’s night unraveled coming to the green-checkered flag at the end of the second stage. He was racing on the inside of Noah Gragson when Gragson got loose and slid down the track exiting turn four, making contact with Snider’s door and sending him spinning into the inside wall.
The son of NASCAR on NBC pit reporter Marty Snider was able to get to the pits for repairs and continued despite damage to his No. 13 Carolina Nut Company Ford F-150, but Snider later fell out of the race with power steering issues and was scored 29th at the finish, 39 laps down.
Dalton Sargeant ran inside the top five at one point in the race, after staying out during the first stage break to gain track position, but faded to 11th by the time the checkered flag waved. He finished the regular season 10th in the standings, seven markers behind Snider.
