Sheldon Creed's crew got him off pit road first with 49 laps to go in Saturday night's Fleetio 200. He led the final 53 laps and won the opening race of the NASCAR O'Reilly Auto Parts Series Chase by 2.961 seconds in the No. 00 Haas Factory Team Chevrolet.
Justin Allgaier has won six times this season. Nobody else in the twelve-driver Chase field has won more than twice. He now leads Creed by seven points.
That is what one race did. The Chase is the series' nine-race playoff, and it opens by resetting the standings: Allgaier's 229-point regular-season lead became 25 the moment the field was set, which we wrote about Saturday morning. The same mechanism runs in the Truck Series. One night at Darlington took the remaining 25 down to seven.
Allgaier led 60 of the 147 laps, more than anyone in the field, and won the first stage. With 23 laps left, running fourth, he hit the wall. He brought the car home 17th, ending a run of ten straight top-10 finishes at Darlington.
"Somewhere in the middle of that second stage I started to feel like we weren't as good as we needed to be," Allgaier said, "and the last part of the race there, we just didn't have the car that we needed at the end."
Creed's win was his second in the series. The first came at Atlanta in February, in his 138th start.
"I've wanted this O'Reilly win here and to finally get that is incredible," Creed said. He was runner-up at Darlington in 2022 and won two truck races there in 2021, and Saturday was his seventh top-10 finish in nine starts at the track.
The rest of the top ten. Corey Day was second in the No. 17 Hendrick Motorsports Chevrolet. Brent Crews was third; he is not in the Chase field, but his No. 19 Joe Gibbs Racing Toyota is running for the owner championship, which is scored separately from the drivers'. Sammy Smith was fourth and Austin Hill fifth, putting four Chase drivers in the top five. Anthony Alfredo won the second stage and finished sixth, followed by Taylor Gray, Sam Mayer, South Carolina native Jeremy Clements and Brandon Jones. Clements' ninth was his fourth top-10 finish of the year.
Carson Kvapil started from the pole at 161.636 mph and led 20 laps before finishing 12th. Parker Retzlaff was 21st. Rajah Caruth was 26th, two laps down, after a fuel problem that had already set him back early returned with seven laps to go and forced him to pit.
"We could have easily thrown ourselves out of it," Caruth said. "But we got all the way up to sixth place and was in good position for a good result. But that happens. It's sports."
The race covered 147 laps and 200.8 miles in one hour, 58 minutes and four seconds, with seven cautions for 38 laps and eight lead changes among seven drivers. Creed's average speed was 102.045 mph.
Kvapil is now third in the standings, 19 points behind Allgaier. Hill is fourth at 36 back, Day fifth at 46. Eight races remain, the next being the Nu Way 225 at World Wide Technology Raceway at Gateway on Saturday at 7:30 p.m. ET, on The CW with radio coverage on MRN and SiriusXM NASCAR Radio. Connor Zilisch, who now races full time in the Cup Series, is the defending winner.
On Saturday the difference between finishing first and finishing second was 19 points. Allgaier's lead is seven.