Three-wide clanger in COTA overtime leaves Bowman, Busch, Friesen on empty

AUSTIN, Texas – Saturday's NASCAR Camping World Truck Series race turned when the top three contending trucks bashed door handles on the next-to-last lap at Circuit of The Americas. As fate would have it, two of the three were a pair of Cup Series double-dippers with a bit of history. Alex Bowman, Kyle Busch and Trucks regular Stewart Friesen all came together in Turn 11, the 3.41-mile course's sharp, knife-edge left-hander in the second overtime attempt in Saturday's XPEL 225. Their in-formation jam-up allowed Zane Smith to scoot free to the lead and hang on for a comfy 3.529-second victory. RELATED: Truck race results | Truck schedule Bowman, making his first Camping World Trucks start since 2017, was in third place in the Spire Motorsports No. 7 Chevrolet halfway through the first lap of overtime No. 2. He drove inside the No. 52 Chevy of Friesen, and their battle became three-wide with Busch's No. 51 Toyota on the far outside. Bowman's truck failed to sufficiently turn and all three scraped wide, giving Smith free passage. Busch led a race-high 31 of the 46 laps but finished third. Friesen took ninth, and Bowman placed 25th. Bowman walked over for a brief conversation with Busch on pit road but later said that no clean resolution was reached. "To the point where he's not mad at me? No, but it cost him a race, right? So he's gonna be mad," Bowman said. "But we race each other long enough and talk enough, and know each other well enough that I feel like he absolutely knows that I didn't drive in the corner and try to crash him. So I wasn't even past my normal brake marker. I guess the angle that the 52 put us at, we were never going to make the corner and once you're committed, it's like nothing you can do. Like if I would have stayed straight, I would have made the corner and still crashed the 52 and the 51, because I would have spun the 52 into the 51, once he turned left. I hated it, but it's part of it." The at-odds feelings between Bowman and Busch stemmed from this year's Cup Series race at Las Vegas Motor Speedway, where Busch questioned the integrity of Bowman's victory there and at other venues over the team radio. Bowman made light of the situation after his Vegas triumph by printing up T-shirts that poked good-hearted fun at his supposed habit of "backing into wins." Busch said only "it's just racing" when asked about his talk with Bowman. On the cool-down lap, his Kyle Busch Motorsports team apologized and told him that overtime "just didn't work out." Busch's reply: "Never does lately." "We had a great race all day," Busch said later. "I really appreciate everyone at KBM and their hard work and everyone there who does a good job building such fast trucks. I felt like we deserved that one, but it doesn’t matter if you deserve it or not. It’s just a matter if you get it. You have to be the first one to the checkered flag to win these things and we just weren’t." MORE: Camping World Trucks standings Friesen salvaged his third consecutive top-10 finish, which bumped him up one position to third in the Camping World Truck Series points. He lamented that the opportunity to race for his first win of the season shriveled a lap and a half from the checkered flag. "When the guy goes in there wide open with no chance of making the corner, like he cannonballed me, knocked me into Kyle then we all three of us went flying off the end of the track and then it allowed Zane in the 38 to drive by everybody," Friesen said. "So I mean, the 7 (Bowman) was fast. He was extremely fast. He's probably faster than me and Kyle and could have raced us. could have just loosened me up or just raced us a little bit rather than just throw a Hail Mary in there with a lap and a half to go and kill all our chances at a win."