HAMPTON, Ga. — Nick Sanchez made a note to check the damage his No. 48 Big Machine Racing Chevrolet received immediately following Saturday’s NASCAR Xfinity Series race at Atlanta Motor Speedway.
The damage wasn’t marginal by any stretch. Sanchez summed it up after his self-scanning: “Pretty bad.” Throughout Saturday’s 163-lap affair, the 23-year-old rookie was involved in multiple incidents, receiving front-end damage in addition to the usual scrapes suffered from late-race action at the reconfigured 1.54-miler. Bumps, bruises and a frantic last-lap wreck aside, the Miami, Florida native secured a fifth-place finish, his best result to date in the Xfinity Series.
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“You just go with momentum,” Sanchez said after the race. “Obviously, I had tires there, but if you look at the front end of my car, I don’t know how much they helped. Went with momentum, took runs and obviously, I saw the wreck happening there before it happened. Luckily, I caught that and just hung left and ran the apron all the way to the finish.
“Just really proud of my whole team, keeping it rolling, keeping it in the race because there was a time where I thought we were either going to blow up, water was pegged, oil was pegged. You know, we almost got lapped there in the first stage. So, we fought back, we kept it rolling and got enough speed to jump to double the draft and made something happen.”
Starting Saturday’s Xfinity contest in 15th, in addition to finishes of 29th and 11th in Stages 1 and 2, respectively, was only the start for Sanchez, who got loose on Lap 142, leading to Sam Mayer’s No. 41 Haas Factory Team Ford smashing into the outside wall.
A loose No. 48 car was the least of Sanchez’s concerns, who pitted seven times throughout the race. And while the outside line worked wonders for race winner Austin Hill, it was the bottom lane that Sanchez utilized en route to his battle to the front.
“I mean, I had damage, right, but I felt like the bottom for my car was better, you know, just cutting distance and everything was just primo, in my opinion,” Sanchez said.
Sanchez’s fifth-place finish acts as a much-needed rebound for the rookie, who tallied a 35th-place result at Daytona International Speedway in the 2025 Xfinity Series opener last weekend. The finish eclipses Sanchez’s seventh-place result he completed with the team in 2022 at Martinsville Speedway, and for a driver looking to make noise in his first full-time Xfinity Series season, the finish is a positive one pointing in the right direction.
“I guess it’s important, right when, when you have damage like that and you finish fifth, it’s not supposed to happen,” Sanchez explained. “So, it was a struggle. We grinded. So, hopefully, from here on out, it gets a little bit easier. I want to start running up front a lot more, control the races. So, excited to get to COTA (Circuit of The Americas).”
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Sanchez now sits 15th in the driver standings, a 15-spot leap from last week’s positioning. Such is the case following a grind-it-out top five, Sanchez is yearning for more next Saturday at Circuit of The Americas (2:30 p.m. ET, The CW, PRN Radio, SiriusXM NASCAR Radio). In two career starts at COTA in the Craftsman Truck Series, Sanchez has one career top-10 finish (2023).
While the young driver is no longer racing full-time in the Truck Series, Sanchez believes he has what it takes to continue the upward trajectory, bumps and bruises aside. A quick congratulatory phone call from Big Machine Racing owner Scott Borchetta emphasized such themes from Saturday’s exhilarating result.
“Thank you,” Sanchez said to Borchetta. “Hopefully, we’ll keep it cleaner next week.”