Layne Riggs stunned the entire Craftsman Truck Series garage when he took over the final 53 laps of the opening Round of 10 race at The Milwaukee Mile to claim his breakthrough win in NASCAR national series competition by 1.547 seconds.
Yet the driver of the No. 38 Front Row Motorsports Ford wasn’t content with just one triumph. Riggs set his sights on the very next event at Bristol, where he dominated the final stage, led 80 laps and again left title contenders to battle for second.
The 2024 season hasn’t been without its struggles for the Bahama, North Carolina, native, with parts failures and incidents plaguing much of the rookie’s season. Still, Riggs and Co. maintained their confidence and continued learning and working on the chemistry needed to push into Victory Lane.
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“We’ve run good at the majority of races all year,” Riggs said Wednesday in a teleconference with NASCAR.com. “Just had a lot of bad luck, parts failures, getting into incidents with people, and it just hadn’t really been a full circle, completed race yet. And, you know, we finally got to the point we’re in fifth at IRP, was solid fifth at Richmond. I think we should have finished second or third, honestly, and then just come out of the box at Milwaukee, and we were just better than everybody.
“It’s good confidence to do that and just carry that over. We had a whole month to think about it and dwindle on it, and then, you know, come out at Bristol again with a great truck. I told Dylan (Cappello) we had a better truck than I had at Milwaukee. And, you know, just went out there and showed everybody why we were fast and why we won the race.”
Along with a rookie driver in Riggs, the Front Row Motorsports truck team experienced a lot of changes during the offseason, most notably with a change on top of the pit box with lead engineer Dylan Cappello called up to the crew chief role to start the 2024 season opener at Daytona.
Cappello, a short-track racer himself, knew the challenges and growing pains that would be ahead of the team and ultimately used those challenges as motivation to get the No. 38 back to winning form.
“I think just building that confidence,” Cappello said. “You know, to work with Layne, we’ve had a lot of changes here at Front Row as far as the truck side goes, like rebuilding our processes, how we’re putting these trucks together, and just trying to, piece by piece, make stuff better. I feel like every time we’ve put a truck together this year, we’ve made it a little bit better in some aspects.
“So just focusing on the future right now, and trying to close out the season and really just ride this wave that we’ve kind of created the past couple races.”
The wave Cappello mentioned is felt by the four-year Truck Series team and the entire shop of Front Row Motorsports as each team looks to close out the 2024 campaign with strong runs.
“I think it’s been huge for everybody at Front Row,” Cappello told NASCAR.com. “We got back from Milwaukee and everybody was super happy for us and it was like ‘alright, you gotta go out and prove that, that it wasn’t a fluke’ and try and go run good. That was our goal; we wanted to prove that it wasn’t. We didn’t luck in anything. We didn’t just hit on something on accident; you know, I think we proved that at Bristol.”
With Kansas quickly approaching, the 22-year-old Riggs is heading into the weekend with excitement and contentment in playing the “spoiler” for his fellow competitors who are vying for the championship glory, choosing to focus on building more for next year rather than disappointment in not making the playoffs.
“I guess we got hot at the wrong time,” Riggs said while smiling. “Would have been nice if we did this a race or two before. I’d rather be winning races and not be in the playoffs than points racing, running third to fifth every weekend and making my way around. You know, of course, I wish we were. I feel like right now we’d be the championship favorite with, you know, a track like Milwaukee, we won at, which is really similar to Phoenix. I think that we would have been really hard to beat. So it is disappointing in that aspect. I’m just ready to go swinging and keep trying to win all I can and play spoiler. And I really enjoy playing that role. I feel like I can be more offensive on the race track.
“I think that the best way to describe it’s just, you know, offseason shenanigans with contracts and sponsorship and just trying to figure everything out. But I think to describe it best, it’d be really hard to split apart what we got going on right now from any aspect. So, yeah, fully confident we’ll be running the truck next year, and everything will be just like it is right now.”