2017 was the fifth season in the NASCAR Camping World Truck Series for Grant Enfinger. He made all 23 starts in the series driving for the no.98 Thorsport Racing entry.
In the season opener at Daytona International Raceway, Enfinger and the no.98 team started eleventh and finished 16th, one lap down. After putting Daytona behind them, the team had up and down finishes for the rest of the year. But, at Dover the sixth race of the season Enfinger finished third. It was his first top five finish since his win at Talladega Superspeedway in 2016. He continued to have great finishes inside the top five until Kentucky, where on lap 41 Enfinger was involved in a crash that regulated him to a 28th place finish. That was his first DNF since the 2012 race at Rockingham, where on that day, he finished 36th due to a blown transmission.
“They just crashed in front of us there,” Enfinger said. “I think it was everybody just being aggressive on restarts, but you’ve got to be. It’s so hard to pass. It’s just crazy on these restarts. It’s what makes the Camping World Truck Series so exciting, but you’ve got to go for it on those restarts, unfortunately.”
Despite not finishing the Kentucky race and having two finishes outside the top ten at Pocono, and Canada, Enfinger was back in the top five running order at Chicago by finishing fifth. His only other finishes that did not come in the top ten was at Martinsville (12th) and Phoenix (crash, 24th).
At the end of the year, Enfinger and the no.98 Thorsport Racing team finished eighth at the season finale Homestead-Miami Speedway.
“Overall it was an ok night here for us at Homestead,” Enfinger said. “Really, we wanted to have a better run that this, but ended up eighth. We were decent at the beginning of the race, when we had some track position. We gave it up a little bit, about a third of the way through the race, and we just weren’t great enough to overcome that. We finished eighth, but maybe had about a sixth-place truck there at the end. I’m proud of the effort that everyone put in – everyone really dug deep all year. We know the areas we have to work on. There’s no one big area that we’re down on, we just need to step it up in a few places, and we’ll be a contender.”
As the final checkered flag flew at the 1.5 mile track in southern Florida, Enfinger collected nine top five and 15 top ten finishes, with two DNF’s and led 41 laps. This saw him have an average start of 11.0 and an average finish of 9.4.
To follow up to date on Grant Enfinger, you can follow his Twitter page @GrantEnfinger and his Instagram page @GrantEnfinger.
