The key for Matt Crafton going into the weekend was survival. All the driver of the No. 88 Menards Toyota Tundra wanted to was get through the weekend in one piece and keep the points lead.
“That’s all its about,” he said coming into the weekend. “Definitely you want to be fast, but at the same time, you want to keep all four tires on the black stuff. If you stay on the road and you’re there at the end, you’ll contend for the win or a top five without a doubt.”
Crafton did just that as he escaped the wrecks on the last lap to finish 10th, now holding a 47 points lead over James Buescher.
One of the problems that the ThorSport Racing team dealt with was a lack of speed during the race due to tuning back the motor for fuel-mileage reasons.
“I’m glad it’s over, to tell you the truth,” crew chief Carl Joiner said on CTMP’s pit road after the race. “We didn’t have a lot of speed in our truck because we gave up a little bit of power in our motor to get better fuel mileage and it wasn’t a fuel-mileage race for us, after all. I don’t believe I’ll ever do that again because our Triad motors have plenty of horsepower every week, and we need to use it.”
Even with that said, Crafton was proud of not only himself but his team for how the weekend went.
“I enjoyed this racetrack and felt like the more laps we ran, the better we were getting,” Crafton said. “What my ThorSport guys did to improve this truck is what we’ve been doing all season. We’ve just got to get a little better, yet.”
“We worked our tails off, I can tell you that — as bad-to-the-bone as our guys always are,” Joiner added. “We rebuilt virtually our whole Menards Toyota Tundra, from the suspension up. We’ve just got to start getting better through the whole weekend. We had good speed at Michigan and Bristol but we’re going to hit our stride right here because we’re coming to some tough racetracks, but they’re good for us.”
With the road course out of the way, you have to think that the ThorSport Racing team is confident heading into the second half of the season after their first half. Crafton has yet to finish outside of the top 10 this year with a win earlier this year at Kansas.
Going into this weekend, the confidence is even higher as Crafton has finished no worse than ninth in sixth starts at Iowa Speedway, including a win in 2011. He finished sixth there in the spring.
