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MARTINSVILLE, Va. — A 10th-place finish doesn’t always get celebrated. But here was Ricky Stenhouse Jr., his car bruised after 500 hard-fought laps at Martinsville Speedway, cheering his remarkable top-10 as if the flashbulbs were popping in Victory Lane.
With some tongue-in-cheek embellishment, Stenhouse stood on his door and raised his fists in jubilation after parking his Roush Fenway Racing No. 17 Ford on pit road after Sunday’s STP 500. His second top-10 finish of the Monster Energy NASCAR Cup Series season was just enough to put his car number on the Martinsville scoring pylon at day’s end, helping him erase plenty of past heartaches on the Southern Virginia short track.
“Never,” Stenhouse said with a smile when asked if he’d ever celebrated 10th place. Given his barren run of luck at the historic .526-mile track, there was reason.
“This is our worst track, by far, on the circuit and has been since I got to (Monster Energy NASCAR Cup Series),” he added. “This is huge momentum. I mean, this is almost like a win for us and how we normally come into this race, so definitely can take some momentum.”
Stenhouse rallied from an early spin after contact with Paul Menard, scraped with race leader Kyle Busch at the end of the race’s second stage to stay on the lead lap, then gradually improved to chip his way into the top 10. It marked just his second lead-lap finish in nine Martinsville starts, six of which had resulted in finishes of 30th or worse.
“Going into today, we had better hopes of a better Martinsville than normal,” Stenhouse said, mentioning his team’s steady gains in practice earlier in the weekend. “Our normal is really bad here. When we got turned by the 27 (Menard), I thought our day was going to go about our normal way that it does, but we fought hard all day, got the car a little bit better.”
A focal point of Stenhouse’s climb was his clash with Busch in the waning portions of the race’s second stage. Stenhouse had clanged fenders with Busch’s No. 18 Joe Gibbs Racing Toyota a few laps earlier when he made a decisive push to get by him in Turns 3 and 4 with the green-checkered flag in sight on Lap 260.
The move kept Stenhouse on the lead lap, costing Busch the lead and the stage win, plus the playoff point that would have accompanied it. Busch unleashed a string of profanities at Stenhouse over the team radio mid-race, then promised post-race that he’d filed the incident away, saving it for an appropriate time for retribution.
Though the two were not racing for position, Stenhouse made no excuses afterward.
“It’s as hard as I can drive,” he said. “I’ve got sponsors, fans and a team to take care of. I had to stay on the lead lap. That was a turning point in the race. If the 18 laps the 3 and we’re stuck a lap down, it could ruin our race. I drove as hard as I could and it paid off for us.”
Stenhouse also explained that the hard-edged racing wasn’t in response to any previous transgressions, but rather a tactical decision to keep the No. 3 Richard Childress Racing Chevrolet of Austin Dillon from inheriting the free pass under the ensuing caution — which would have trapped Stenhouse a lap down.
“Nothing to get him back for,” Stenhouse said. “Our cars were hard to drive, we had a lot of laps on the tires and I saw he was going to try to get on the outside of the 3 and that’s where he was good in (Turns) 3 and 4, so I ran in there with him. I was just going to give him a nudge and make sure that he didn’t get by the 3. I didn’t mean to give up the win for him in that stage, but it was what we had to do.”