Bristol, Tenn. (Mar. 16, 2013) – Roush Fenway Racing’s Trevor Bayne used a 12th-place finish in Saturday’s 300-lap Nationwide Series race at Bristol Motor Speedway to climb one more spot to seventh in the NASCAR Nationwide Series point standings.
Bayne’s No. 6 Ecoboost Ford Mustang led early in the race, but the car’s handling tightened throughout the event, with the team settling for the 12th-place finish.
“They’re going to go back and check the car and see if there was one little thing that was off or what it was because it just didn’t feel like our race car,” said Bayne. “So we’ve got to go work on that.”
An early decision to take just two tires during the second caution of the day helped the No.6 team get to the front. The six-second pit stop pushed the Ford Ecoboost car from eighth place into first. Bayne held the spot for more than a dozen laps before getting hung up in traffic as he lapped slower cars in the field.
From there, he fought throughout the day to maintain his position in the top ten and dropped just a couple spots in the end.
“This is the first one where we’ve actually struggled,” said Bayne. “Even Daytona… we sat on the pole and ran up front, but just had a part break, but here, this was the first one where the car was ‘off’ a little bit and we could never fix it. It’s frustrating, but we’ll go to California and hopefully be fast there.”
Maintaining a respectable spot on the track, and keeping the car in tact at “The World’s Fastest Half-Mile” earned Bayne and the No.6 team another 33 points. His steady progress through the 2013 season helped him climb from eighth in the standings, up to seventh; 39 points behind the leader.
Bayne will roll into Fontana, Calif. next Saturday with Cargill returning as his primary sponsor for the Royal Purple 300. Bayne has five career starts at California Speedway, with a high finish of sixth in 2011.
Next Up:
Royal Purple 300
Auto Club Speedway
Fontana, CA
Saturday, March 23th 2013
