Matt Crafton Wins Crash Fest At Kansas Speedway

Matt Crafton stormed to the victory for the Camping World Truck Series tonight, holding off Joey Coulter in the late stages of the race.  This is Crafton’s first win of the 2013 season and fourth top 10 finish.

“It’s huge,” Crafton said. “Yesterday we were 18th average on the second practice and we were a 20th place truck at best — to be honest.  They changed so much on this truck — you always hear people say it, but they changed four springs, sway bar, sway bar arms — I mean tons of stuff.  There’s a bunch more stuff that they changed that would probably lose everybody, but they made a whole sale change and what that comes down to is teamwork and believing in each other and then going out there and doing it.”

It was Crafton’s first win since 2011 at Iowa.  Crafton took the lead with 42 laps to go with a three-wide pass and held off the charge of Joey Coulter to take the win.

“The show was so awesome — it was a great race,” Crafton continued. “My spotter told me where Joey (Coulter) was a little bit and he had a very, very fast truck.  I think track position was everything and it was whoever got out front.  We contemplated and contemplated on that last restart because we had talked about it earlier on the red flag — where would you start if you were leading this race at the end?  They said the outside early and then the yellow comes out and we’re leading and I said, ‘Where do you guys want to start?’  They said, ‘That’s up to you.’  (Carl) Joiner (crew chief) thinks inside and I went outside.  Then he could blame me after that.  The bottom — you could get sucked around so easy and I wanted to be on the outside to be able to control it.”

Joey Coulter would hold on for second for his first top five of the season.

“It was wide open out there, doing whatever I could do,” Coulter said. “I could pull him off a corner, it all equaled out. Great day for the 18 tundra. Everybody did an awesome job on pit road. We got caught a lap down but we’re able to get back and Harold – he pulled off some great pit strategy.”

Rookie Ryan Blaney passed Brendan Gaughan in the final trip down the backstretch while points leader Johnny Sauter finished fifth.

Defending champion and pole sitter James Buescher would lead the most laps – 55 – on the way to finishing sixth. It marks his first top 10 of the season. Darrell Wallace Jr. would finish seventh, followed by Ty Dillon, Ron Hornaday Jr. and Timothy Peters.

The race was a crashed filled event with 11 cautions, that saw only 17 cars out of 36 starters finish the race. The most frightening of those incidents came on lap 121, involving Todd Bodine, Brennan Newberry and Bryan Silas and resulted in a 12 minute red flag to clear the track of debris that covered nearly one whole end of the track.

Sauter continues to lead the standings, 12 points ahead of Matt Crafton.