Was there anything else he could have done? Nemechek said it was doubtful there was.
“We just needed a little bit better of a restart,” he lamented afterwards. “Johnny drove it into turn one really hard and I don’t know what more I could have done. It stinks to know that we were that close. I can’t thank all of my guys enough, we definitely can hang our head held high and have nothing to be ashamed of.”
“Our truck wasn’t that great on the top … we had to be on the bottom to make headway on restarts. That’s where our truck turned all night. But once Johnny got into clean air, there was really nothing I could do. It’s so hard to pass here. I had a great restart, but it wasn’t enough.”
A dejected Nemechek climbed from his truck with visible disappointment, knowing that his quest for a championship came up one race — and one position — short of success.
“This will probably be the most disappointing second place finish of my career,” he admitted. “We were so close, and yet so far.”
“It pretty much sums up our whole year, to be honest with you. It’s been up-and-down, it’s been rocky all the way from the first race of the season. We’ve had fast trucks every week, but we haven’t had the finishes that we needed or we should have. We’ve had a bunch of mechanical failures. We’ve gambled and it didn’t work out. There’s a lot of things that we could have done differently, but we’ll come back stronger.”
And so a title that started with two wins in the heat of the summer came to a close Friday night just short of a third.
While they didn’t check every box they set out to at the beginning of the year, Nemechek did say that Friday night’s race accomplished virtually every goal they’d set for it.
It just came down to circumstances that, one more time, didn’t quite work out.
“We came in here with one goal and that was to win the race and we put ourselves in position to do so. That’s all you can ask for,” Nemechek reflected. “Hopefully we can go to Homestead and win.”
“I have to say thank you to all of my guys; the fabulous five or seven that work on these trucks every weekend. … I’m looking forward to Homestead and what the future brings.”
About the Writer
Jacob Seelman is the Managing Editor of Race Chaser Online and creator of the Motorsports Madness radio show, airing at 7 p.m. Eastern every Monday on the Performance Motorsports Network, as well as a periodic contributor to SPEED SPORT Magazine.
Seelman grew up in the sport, watching his grandparents co-own the RaDiUs Motorsports NASCAR Cup Series team in the 1990s.
The 23-year-old is currently studying Broadcast Journalism at Winthrop University in Rock Hill, S.C., and is also serving as the full-time tour announcer for the Must See Racing Sprint Car Series.
Email Jacob at: [email protected]
Follow on Twitter: @Speed77Radio or @JacobSeelman77
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