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MARTINSVILLE, Va. — The potential for a topsy-turvy day in the NASCAR Camping World Truck Series Chase never quite ripened Saturday afternoon at Martinsville Speedway. But the relative calm still left a bag of mixed fortunes, a dose of hurt feelings and the customary bending of sheet metal.
Only Johnny Sauter enjoyed smooth sailing in the Texas Roadhouse 200 on the way to his second victory of the season and an automatic berth in the Championship 4 finale Nov. 18 at Homestead-Miami Speedway. The remaining five Chase drivers either held serve with top 10s (see Christopher Bell, Timothy Peters and William Byron) or salvaged midpack finishes after experiencing late-race adversity (Matt Crafton and Ben Kennedy).
Kennedy’s chances at joining the top-10 crowd ended in the last of five caution periods in the 200-lap race when contact with Ben Rhodes sent Kennedy’s No. 33 Chevrolet spinning in Turn 2. Kennedy’s truck collected the John Wes Townley entry, but continued with moderate damage.
Kennedy salvaged an 18th-place finish — last among the six Chase drivers — but had cross words for Rhodes in a verbal altercation post-race.
“Hats off to this Jacob Companies team for working hard at trying to make it a better day for us, but the 41 just wrecked us,” Kennedy said, referring to Rhodes’ truck number. “It’s unfortunate to have people out here racing like that. We’re not the first victim of it. Hopefully, he’ll get his share one day and maybe we’ll take care of that.”
Rhodes, a rookie who is not playoff-eligible in the seven-race Chase, was contrite, absorbing the blame for the contact that sparked the Lap 177 tangle.
“I was trying to move Ben Kennedy up a little bit to get past him and ended up getting into him too hard on the second time coming around the corner and spun him out,” Rhodes said. “I apologize for that to him because I know he’s in the Chase and fighting for a championship. It’s something I would never do to him on purpose. Just a shame. These guys have worked on this truck so hard. It’s Martinsville, so it’s going to get torn up, but they deserved a better finish than this.”
Rhodes said he would make an effort to contact Kennedy this week in an effort to smooth out their dispute. “I guess we worked it out on his terms,” he said of their brief post-race talk. “He wanted me to come down and see him. I guess that’s what he was upset about, but I know in (the) recent past, you don’t go see a competitor as soon as they get out of their race truck. That’s always a bad idea.”
Crafton, a two-time series champion, finished one spot ahead of Kennedy in 17th after a brake issue derailed his ThorSport Racing No. 88 Toyota. Crafton said he noticed something amiss under braking just 15 laps into the event, and the issue came to a head when he slowed with his left-rear caliper on fire 51 laps from the finish.
“I definitely felt we had a top-five truck,” Crafton said. “We could run in the top five with losing the brakes. It was 15 laps into a run every run that I started losing the brakes and I would just have to sit there and ride so I had something to be there at the end. I smelled it at one point and kept feeling something going on with the brake pedal and finally it went away.”
Remarkably, the team rallied for a lead-lap finish after making an extended stop for hasty repairs. Crafton lost just one lap while his crew managed a fix, and he regained it as the beneficiary of the Kennedy-Rhodes-Townley shunt.
Still, the same No. 88 truck faced a similar brake issue in the Chase opener at New Hampshire Motor Speedway, a lingering mechanical gremlin that left crew chief Carl “Junior” Joiner flummoxed.
“We changed a lot of stuff between here and Loudon, so I’m a little bit confused on the deal,” Joiner said. “It’s racing, I guess. … We’ll just go to Texas and see if we can win.”
Bell landed a fourth-place finish in just his second Martinsville start, holding off the veteran Peters — a former winner at the .526-mile track — in fifth. And rookie William Byron recovered from a sluggish pit stop for his own salvage job, finishing eighth.
The three-race phase concludes with races on consecutive weekends, at Texas Motor Speedway and Phoenix International Raceway, before the Homestead finale. With Sauter already confirmed for the Championship 4, that leaves five drivers separated by just 14 points competing for the three remaining slots.