{"id":137763,"date":"2025-09-12T04:35:05","date_gmt":"2025-09-12T04:35:05","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/137763\/"},"modified":"2025-09-12T04:35:05","modified_gmt":"2025-09-12T04:35:05","slug":"is-the-nascar-truck-title-coming-down-to-riggs-versus-heim","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/137763\/","title":{"rendered":"Is the NASCAR Truck title coming down to Riggs versus Heim?"},"content":{"rendered":"

With the exception of Chandler Smith<\/a> and Jake Garcia<\/a>, things have largely followed the script in the NASCAR Truck Series Playoffs as the first two races at Darlington and Bristol have been won by Corey Heim<\/a> and Layne Riggs<\/a> respectively.<\/p>\n

There is a bit of a season-long gap between them, but the Tricon Garage<\/a> No. 11 and the Front Row Motorsports<\/a> No. 34 are the 1a and 1b of the season so far and very much appear destined to comprise half of the final four at Phoenix Raceway in November.<\/p>\n

In fact, Riggs himself very much views it that way after winning the UNOH 200 at Bristol on Thursday.<\/p>\n

\u201cI would think so,\u201d Riggs said of the championship likely coming down to he and Heim at Bristol. \u201cI would think us to, and Chandler right now, that\u2019s my three picks. I don\u2019t really know who the fourth is going to be yet, but \u2026\u201d<\/p>\n

Does it matter?<\/p>\n

\u201cNot really.\u201d<\/p>\n

Now, if Smith is supposed to join his teammate and the Tricon ace in the championship this year, it\u2019s going to take either outright winning or at least scoring nearly the maximum points alongside some bad luck befalling someone else. \u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n

Smith crashed out of the playoff opener at Darlington and suffered another 30th\u2013place at Bristol due to a mysterious parts malfunction of some kind.<\/p>\n

\u201cI don’t know the specifics of it,\u201d Smith said. \u201cAll I know is it sounds like a little sensor, the heavy loads here at Bristol, and I don’t know why it didn’t happen in practice. It\u2019s like this little sensor that is in the engine wiggled its way out under load and that\u2019s what ruined our night.<\/p>\n

\u201cI’m a little frustrated because we’re at this high level of racing and a little tiny tiny little sensor like that can ruin your day. I\u2019m mainly frustrated because I knew we had the fastest truck tonight. It was really, really good.\u201d<\/p>\n

So now, if Smith is going to make Riggs\u2019 premonition a reality, he is at least going to have to challenge for the win if not outright get it done entirely.<\/p>\n

\u201cI\u2019m confident we can,\u201d Smith said. \u201cWe just, like tonight, we could have won tonight. We had the fastest truck tonight but we have to cross our ts and dot our is.\u201d<\/p>\n

Jake Garcia entered two points above the cutline, won the pole, won his first ever stage and then disaster struck into the first corner of the first lap off the restart.<\/p>\n

\u201cYeah, just a bolt on these motors that holds the belt, the crank assembly, sheared off and just broke,\u201d Garcia said. \u201cI mean nothing we can do about it. Our guys did a really good job on the truck and fixing it, even though it\u2019s not something we can control.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s just really, really frustrating to have something completely out of our control happen like that and end our day when I feel like we had the best truck here tonight.\u201d<\/p>\n

What a rollercoaster of emotions that must be to go from being in a position to win your first Truck race and advancing into the second round, to into the infield and now 14 out with just one race left at New Hampshire.<\/p>\n

\u201cDefinitely gut wrenching,\u201d Garcia said. \u201cPassing was hard tonight but I thought we were good enough to pass our way through the field and compete for the stage 2 win as well, especially with how much tire wear there was tonight.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s just frustrating to go from thinking you’re about to sweep the stages to losing power steering going to turn 3 and then your water skyrockets and realize you have bigger issues so \u2026<\/p>\n

\u201cYeah, really frustrating, sucks we can’t run Ford Racing motors. I\u2019d like to run those but we, we can’t and what happened tonight was out of our control.\u201d<\/p>\n

Whatever chance Garcia and Smith might have to advance on points, without winning next week, might come down to the performance of Rajah Caruth<\/a>, who left Bristol 14 points above the cutline but arguably only by default with playoff finishes of 12th and 15th.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe shouldn\u2019t be in a position to be needing others to have bad luck,\u201d Caruth said leaving the track on Thursday night.<\/p>\n

To wit, if Caruth has another race where he isn\u2019t scoring a lot of stage points and finishes outside of the top-10, that does open the door for Smith and especially Garcia to potentially capitalize.<\/p>\n

There is a mathematic pathway there.<\/p>\n

Updated playoff grid\u00a0<\/p>\n

Corey Heim Adv.
Layne Riggs Adv.
Daniel Hemric<\/a> +51
Ty Majeski<\/a> +46
Grant Enfinger<\/a> +29
Tyler Ankrum<\/a> +29
Kaden Honeycutt<\/a> +18
Rajah Caruth +14
—
Jake Garcia -14
Chandler Smith -24<\/p>\n

Business as usual<\/p>\n

Beyond Smith and Garcia, everyone else has maintained the status quo over the first two races at Darlington and Bristol.<\/p>\n

Daniel Hemric said on Thursday that ‘the result was good, but the execution was sloppy, sloppy, sloppy,’ but still leaves 51 points above the cutline — just short of a virtual lock. Kaden Honeycutt entered this race seven below the cutline and left it 18 above, even if he felt apologetic for spinning Tyler Ankrum, who is just 29 up instead of arguably 10 more or more higher.<\/p>\n

\u201cYeah, I’m not really sure like kind of what Chandler’s position is because I am worried about him winning,\u201d Honeycutt said. \u201cI know he had a bad night and I assume he\u2019s below and (Garcia) too but I assume if Chandler wins it might knock us below and we need to make sure that doesn\u2019t happen.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe\u2019ll try to and go do the same deal we\u2019ve done the last two weeks, have a good practice and qualify top 5 and have a good night like we did tonight.\u201d<\/p>\n

Like, even though Grant Enfinger had an awful night where he finished 21st and ran there all night too, he is still in a good spot based on his season long performance and his third place run at Darlington. The only thing stopping him from making another final four are these inexplicable nights where the truck just doesn’t respond to their input.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe came off a good run a couple weeks ago there at Darlington where we ran up front all day and every time I feel like we’re turning a corner, we take a step back for whatever reason,\u201d Enfinger said. \u201cWe\u2019re not going to give up and we\u2019re going to work hard but yeah, it\u2019s one of those kind of frustrating nights and I just don\u2019t know what happened.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe\u2019ll dwell on it for another couple of hours and then start worrying about New Hampshire.\u201d<\/p>\n

Read Also:<\/p>\n

In this article<\/p>\n

Be the first to know and subscribe for real-time news email updates on these topics<\/p>\n

Subscribe to news alerts<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"With the exception of Chandler Smith and Jake Garcia, things have largely followed the script in the NASCAR…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":137764,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[446],"tags":[71995,29779,49,48,20204,28942,2073,74580,20202,634,18242,82,61728],"class_list":["post-137763","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-nascar","tag-bristol-ii","tag-bristol-motor-speedway","tag-ca","tag-canada","tag-chandler-smith","tag-corey-heim","tag-front-row-motorsports","tag-is-the-nascar-truck-title-coming-down-to-riggs-versus-heim","tag-layne-riggs","tag-nascar","tag-nascar-truck","tag-sports","tag-tricon-garage"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/137763","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=137763"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/137763\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/137764"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=137763"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=137763"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=137763"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}