HAMPTON, Ga. – Photo finishes and Atlanta Motor Speedway continue to be a sweet pairing, but the bitter taste of being on the losing side of a thrilling battle to the checkered flag never lightens up.
Saturday afternoon, Stewart Friesen was snakebitten in the Peach State as Kyle Busch outdueled the Craftsman Truck Series mainstay by 0.017 seconds when the two crossed the start/finish line.
Even with Busch on the final lap, Friesen edged slightly ahead of the No. 7 Spire Motorsports Chevrolet coming off Turn 4 and that gave Busch a chance to side draft off Friesen’s No. 52 Toyota and sneak ahead just a couple hundred yards before the finish.
MORE: Race results | Photos from Atlanta
“We had a shot. I’ll have to re-watch and see what 18 things I did wrong,” Friesen said with a chuckle after the race. “I tried to control him the best I could. Got to the top and tried to pack air on him and I just knew when we surged ahead there into three I went ‘ah man … he’s gonna be able to pack back on me and come back,’ and that’s what happened.”
With the cold temperatures this weekend, the grip of the rapidly aging track surface was apparent throughout the 135-lap matinee. Drivers were able to race tightly in a two-wide pack but could also run single-file and slingshot around each other on the bottom by themselves.
In the closing laps of the race, the battles for the lead crescendoed as six different drivers grabbed prime real estate in the final 20 laps. Even Daniel Hemric, with an exposed left-front tire after an earlier multitruck incident, had a quick taste of a potential victory before getting shuffled to the back of the lead pack.
However, Friesen stayed within the top five as the race wound down, and unlike years past, the finish didn’t come down to who was leading a single-file freight train to the end, but a battle of two competitive lanes duking it out for supremacy.
“I think it was just some guys making some smarter decisions and being aggressive when they needed to be and not when they didn’t need to be,” Friesen said of the tightly-contested racing. “We saw the train, but if you had the right guys, you could make some hay on the bottom.”
The last two years have not been nice for Friesen and his family-owned, single-truck team in the series. His last win came at Texas Motor Speedway in the spring of 2022, and since the 2023 campaign, Friesen owned just six top fives entering Saturday’s race.
Running up front and getting a top five on the board early in the season means a lot for Friesen, whose team works in vintage fashion to get to the track weekly.
“It’s just a product of a lot of hard work,” Friesen said. “We’re building our own chassis and bodies and not because we want to, but just because it’s kind of a necessity within the series right now. You can’t just go down the road and pick up a frame or body. It’s really old school the way this series is. It’s hand-fabricated, cheap metal bodies and hand-built chassis, and it’s cool to see our guys take it from the tubing rack to the race track and have good results.”
Earning his first series top five since Charlotte Motor Speedway last season, Friesen said he’s grateful to continue being competitive in the Truck Series. At 41 years old, Friesen knows there are more years behind them than ahead, but the hunger remains as strong as ever to return to Victory Lane.
“It was cool just to be racing up front again,” Friesen said. “Just a big shot in the arm for our race team to be up front where we belong and racing for wins. It takes a village to keep this deal going down the road and I’m proud to have at least a top three out of it.”