Parker Kligerman admitted he hadn’t heard the MRN Radio call of his victory in last weekend’s NASCAR Camping World Truck Series race until Tuesday morning. Upon listening to it during his introduction for an appearance on SiriusXM NASCAR Radio, he said it gave him chills.
The NBC Sports reporter and part-time Truck Series competitor was still savoring the spoils of his victory in Saturday’s race at Mid-Ohio Sports Car Course, where he held off series points leader Zane Smith in a spirited contest during the final laps. Kligerman won by a scant 0.119 seconds, notching his third Truck Series win and his first in nearly five years.
RELATED: Kligerman wins Mid-Ohio | Truck Series standings
Kligerman estimated he had 650 text messages of congratulations that took him approximately five hours to sort through, but he also said the victory had special meaning for the small Henderson Motorsports team that fields his No. 75 Chevrolet. The organization is based in Abington, Virginia — a small mountain town in the southwestern part of the state — and Kligerman said the community had rallied around the group’s Mid-Ohio triumph.
“Whenever I’m there at the shop in Abington, it’s like we’re the high school football team,” Kligerman told SiriusXM, adding the team noticed storefronts and businesses had made signs heralding the victory. “We get people coming from all over Virginia, they come by the shop, they’re so supportive. We’ll do a signing at (local sponsor) Food Country USA, and so many people will come out there from the local area and just be like, we love that this local team is out there racing at the national level and having the success that we do, they’re so supportive of it.”
Kligerman has started in just eight of the 15 races so far on the Camping World Trucks schedule but performed admirably with top-five results in five of those eight appearances. The 31-year-old driver’s return to Victory Lane prompted questions about how many races remain for the rest of this year (Kansas Speedway and Bristol Motor Speedway are current targets), but also the team’s hopes for a full-time campaign in 2023.
“We’ve been trying,” Kligerman said with a laugh. “There hasn’t been a year over the last eight years, I haven’t felt like that I was in a conversation for something full-time. And whether that’s here in the 75 and trying to find ways that we could go full-time, which we’ve tried every year I’d say for at least the last three or four years, and in terms of other opportunities that have come along that have been so close. I’ve told people I’ve had to go and have conversations with my family and my TV duties and say, like, ‘Hey, this is really real, this is happening,’ so on and so forth. Of course, it’s all true, but it’s been very close. I’ve been trying. I would love the opportunity to be full-time. I’d love to be full-time with the Hendersons in the 75 group and go race for a championship. I absolutely think that would be an awesome time, I think something that we could really go and surprise a lot of people in doing. But you know, most of all, I also just I’d love the shot to be full-time right now and race more often.”
Bobby Santos III doesn’t make many NASCAR Whelen Modified Tour starts these days, but when the Tour travels to New Hampshire Motor Speedway, you can bet he’ll be on the entry list.
