Chandler Smith lined up beside his Front Row Motorsports teammate Layne Riggs for the last restart Friday night at Martinsville Speedway, got a shove from behind into Turn 1 and drove into the lead on the backstretch with 12 laps left. He was never caught, and he won the NASCAR Craftsman Truck Series race on a pass that cost his teammate a win that would have put him in the points lead.
Riggs, in Front Row's No. 34 Ford, led 156 of the 200 laps, won both stages, the segments that pay bonus points before the finish, and finished third. A win would have put him one point ahead of the series leader, according to NASCAR. Instead Kaden Honeycutt, in TRICON Garage's No. 11 Toyota, still leads the Chase, the series' championship playoff, by 20 points over Riggs, down from 43, according to NASCAR's unofficial standings, with one race left.
Smith beat Ben Rhodes of ThorSport Racing by 0.574 seconds for his first win at the half-mile Virginia track, his third this season in the No. 38 Ford and the 10th of his Truck Series career.
Smith said he had a responsibility to Bob Jenkins, who founded Front Row, and to his No. 38 team "to go out there and win the race, but at the same time evaluate the situation and don't do something that's going to hurt the 34 detrimentally." Asked whether he would have gone for the lead sooner if Riggs weren't his teammate, Smith said, "I was trying to go. I couldn't go nowhere."
Riggs said in a team statement that he had wanted the outside lane for that restart and that his team wanted him on the bottom. "I just felt like I was just too loose to fire off on restarts," he said. "Congrats to Chandler on the win. It's been a little while for those guys, but those bonus points really would have been nice, and even more than that I wanted a grandfather clock really, really bad." Martinsville gives its winners a grandfather clock.
Honeycutt ran in the top 10 most of the night without leading a lap. On the lap after the final restart, contact from the 16-year-old pole-sitter, Tristan McKee, entering Turn 1 sent him up the track, and he fell from fifth to 14th, where he finished.
"It's 20 points, but definitely not comfortable," Honeycutt said. "We've got to go win Homestead next week and just focus on winning. That's all we can do."
Riggs, who has seven wins this season to Honeycutt's four, sees the finale the same way Honeycutt does. "I think it's going to be me or the 11 wins at Homestead, winner takes all," he said.
Only Riggs can still catch him: a driver can score no more than 76 points in one race, and everyone else is more than 76 back. Smith is third, 103 back, followed by Ty Majeski of ThorSport, 128 back, and Christian Eckes of McAnally Hilgemann Racing, 140 back.
Majeski finished fourth. McKee finished fifth in a Spire Motorsports Chevrolet after becoming the youngest pole winner in Truck Series history, according to NASCAR.
The season ends at Homestead-Miami Speedway on Friday, Nov. 6, at 7:30 p.m. ET on FS1.