After taking a splash of fuel with seven laps to go, Johnny Sauter would beat his ThorSport teammate Matt Crafton back to the line to score the victory in the Careers for Veterans 200 at Michigan International Speedway. It marks Sauter’s first victory of the season and his 10th victory of his career. It also marked the first race that Sauter had Jeff Hensley on the pit box.
“I’m so proud of everybody on this team,” Sauter said. “That last stop – I knew I had to get on pit road right and make no mistakes. So proud of Jeff Hensley for coming over here.”
Heading into the final 10 races of the season, Sauter now leads the point standings by nine points ahead of Crafton.
“We’re just now past halfway so this is great,” Sauter commented. “This is what we needed, this is the momentum that we needed. We’ve had a solid consistent year, but we really had the speed again.”
Crafton’s second place finish marks his eighth top-10 of the 2014 season as he tries to win back-to-back championships.
“Today, I don’t think we had the best truck but I felt we had a top-three, top-five truck today,” Crafton said. “All in all, good day for ThorSport Racing in working hard. We had an incident in practice and these guys kept trashing through practice to solve the tire rub and get the truck right.”
Ron Hornaday kept his positive momentum going with a third place finish, followed by Tayler Malsam and Kyle Busch. Busch ran up front early, though fell back in traffic after running out of fuel as he got onto pit road at lap 52.
“I was better at pushing than he was at pulling. I think if we would’ve had 10 more laps, we would’ve caught the leaders,” Malsam said. “It was a lot of fun running Michigan this week so hopefully get to run some more races.”
German Quiroga finished sixth, followed by Timothy Peters, Jeb Burton, Joey Coulter and Joe Nemechek. Darrell Wallace Jr. finished 11th after leading a race-high 48 laps after running out of fuel as he came on to pit road with 25 laps to go.
Brad Keselowski Racing teammates Joey Logano and Ryan Blaney ran into problems as both their front nose pieces began to fall apart, requiring lengthy stays on pit road for repairs and poor finishes. Blaney, who came in as the points leader, now sits 16 points behind Sauter after finishing 21st.
“We had a quick Ford and we led the first part of the race,” Blaney commented. “We had a pretty big vibration and had to come down into the pits with the nose cone loose. We then had to come back down as we didn’t get it fixed. It’s a shame as we had a pretty fast truck. We have to figure out what happened.”
There’d only be one caution during the 100 lap race, coming at lap eight when Travis Kvapil’s motor went up in smoke after he contended for the win early.
“No warning. It definitely broke, and it was pretty major under there as there were holes in the oil pan,” he said. “Just thankful for the opportunity. I had a good truck. The drafting was definitely going to play a factor out there and we were able to make some good moves there. Just disappointed, but glad to be back behind the wheel of a fast truck and have the opportunity.”
The next race for the Camping World Truck Series is on Wednesday night at Bristol Motor Speedway.
