JOLIET, Ill. — One week ago, Taylor Gray’s sputtering No. 54 Joe Gibbs Racing Toyota sat helplessly out of fuel at Sonoma Raceway, and teammate Brandon Jones obliged with a push to help him across the finish line. Saturday night at Chicagoland Speedway, there was more contact, but at far higher speeds and with late-race stakes.
Though Gray’s No. 54 bore some of Jones’ neon yellow paint on his logo-scrubbed left-front Goodyear tire, the hard racing in an event that Jones eventually won wasn’t his undoing. A smidge of wheelspin on a late restart and what Gray called a lack of aggression to block NASCAR Cup Series regular Chase Elliott’s charge shuffled him back in the order, and seventh place was the best he could muster.
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Gray still rallied to a solid gain in the still-simmering showdown for the NASCAR O’Reilly Auto Parts Series Chase, moving up one spot in the standings and providing him with slightly better footing in a bubble battle with JGR teammates Brent Crews and William Sawalich. The 21-year-old driver, now in his second full season of O’Reilly competition, now sits 11th on the provisional 12-driver grid, and he improved from a 20-point margin above the elimination line to a plus-52 cushion.
The positives were there, but after leading 55 of the 201 laps — second only to Elliott’s race-best 78 — so was a measure of remorse.
“I mean, the points are great, but I just want to win, man,” Gray said after Saturday’s Cuervo 300. “That’s what I come here to do: to win races, and I want to win races for these guys that work really hard throughout the week and throughout the weekend. Feel like I kind of took one away from us there.”
Gray overcame a deficit from the start, taking the green flag in 25th after qualifying was a washout. He still managed to land in the points at the end of both stages, padding his stature in the standings and regaining some of the ground he lost at Sonoma, where a nearly assured top five evaporated within sight of the finish for a 29th-place result.
Some of the final-stage restarts went his way, and others didn’t, but veteran crew chief Jason Ratcliff was quick to remind him post-race on the No. 54 team radio about the big-picture progress.
“All in all, a great day and he drove a race that deservingly he should have won, but it’s not over till it’s over,” Ratcliff told NASCAR.com. “So I know he’s disappointed, but a lot of good takeaways. Pit crew did a good job, the race car’s good, all the guys did a great job building the car, and he drove an awesome race. So yeah, you leave here with a little bit of a bitter taste in your mouth, but something you can build on, some momentum. Really, the last month and a half has been really solid. We’ve been capable of winning a couple races in the last four. Just gotta keep plugging away. That’s part of it.”
Ratcliff is in his second season atop the pit box for Gray’s O’Reilly Auto Parts Series efforts, and the list of drivers he’s worked with in his long career includes a host of NASCAR Hall of Famers or likely future inductees — Kyle Busch, Joey Logano, Matt Kenseth and Christopher Bell among them. Ratcliff says he’s been impressed with what Gray has shown him so far, noting his on-track poise and off-track diligence.
MORE: O’Reilly Auto Parts Series standings
Gray has converted for a pair of wins in their time together — a redemptive victory at Martinsville Speedway in last season’s penultimate race and a triumph this spring at Kansas Speedway, a 1.5-mile venue with Chicagoland similarities. Ratcliff says he sees more in Gray’s future.
“I mean, he’s obviously got the talent to win,” Ratcliff said. “He’s got a couple wins under his belt now at two different styles of race tracks and a lot more opportunities that just slipped away from him, which happens when you’re … not a rookie, but a sophomore or whatever you want to call it. So he’s doing the right things, he’s preparing right, he’s coming to the race track and learning every week. He’s doing all the same things that all the great drivers I’ve worked with in the past are doing, and is producing on the race track. We were hoping at this point we would have a couple more wins under our belt at this point in the season, so we’ve had a couple hiccups along the way, but all in all, it’s still been very successful here, and we’ve got a lot of races ahead of us, and I think that he’ll win a couple more before the season’s out.”
The races both before and after his Kansas win in April have been a mixed lot. In the last 10 races, Gray has finished outside the top 25 five times — including a pair of consecutive DNFs after crashes sidelined him from contention at Dover Motor Speedway and Charlotte Motor Speedway.
Three top-10 outcomes — including Saturday night’s at Chicagoland — in the last five events have helped offset those issues, though Ratcliff admitted how the Sonoma setback still stings. Just four races remain until the 12-driver Chase field is set, and Ratcliff hopes more days like Saturday will make the difference.
“I mean, we’re our own worst enemy when it comes to the points. We’ve beat ourselves more than we’ve been beat,” Ratcliff said. “Like last week, we gave up 20-some points just not being smart. It just comes down to math, and we just missed it on our fuel deal. So we just have to do a better job of capitalizing when opportunities present themselves and points won’t be a problem. But it was good to have a good finish under our belt today after last week, when we gave some up. So to come out of here, it’d have been great to win it, but we’re doing what we need to do. We’re coming out here and being competitive, we’re getting stage points, we’re running up front, and we keep doing that, it should take care of itself.”