The two fastest trucks at Lime Rock Park on Saturday did not win the race. Grant Enfinger, who was not driving either of them, did.
That is not a shot at Enfinger, who will tell you the same thing before you can. "I don't think we had anything for the 11 or the 34 straight up," he said after the LiUNA 150, the 11 being Kaden Honeycutt and the 34 being points leader Layne Riggs. He was right. The 11 and the 34 then spent the closing laps proving him right in the least useful way available to them, which is to say they drove into each other, and Enfinger was the driver left out front when it was over.
He will take it. So would you. It was his first win in more than a season and the first road-course win of his career, and that second part is what makes this one worth writing down. Enfinger has been racing trucks for years and winning his share, but road courses have always been the puzzle he could not solve. "I think this is only my second top 10 at a road course," he said, a sentence made slightly ridiculous by the fact that he had just won on one.
Here is how he did it, and it is the best part. Three laps to go, Enfinger lined up on the front row in the No. 9 CR7 Motorsports Chevrolet next to Gio Ruggiero and the No. 17 TRICON Garage Toyota for a restart. A win was sitting right there. So was the bump-and-run, which is always sitting right there, and which plenty of drivers would have used without a second thought.
Enfinger passed him clean instead, off the launch.
"A lot went into that decision, but I didn't want to go in there and purposefully take him out of the way for the win," he said. "I feel like we beat him on the launch. And I think we had a better car."
Nobody says that anymore. The move-him-and-apologize-later win is the standard issue in this sport, and here was a guy who had every reason to grab a rare victory any way it came, looking at the easy version and deciding he would rather earn it. He gave the rest of the credit to his Chevrolet and, with no irony at all, to the Lord: "the seas parted and the good Lord blessed us today and we were able to come home for a win."
For most of the afternoon it was not close to being his race. Riggs put the No. 34 Front Row Motorsports Ford on the pole, led the first 34 laps and won Stage 1. Honeycutt, in the No. 11 TRICON Garage Toyota, won Stage 2. The two drivers who have run one-two in this championship all summer combined to lead the first 62 laps of a 100-lap race, and everyone else was quietly racing for third.
Then the road course did what road courses do to a tidy race. Four cautions and an 18-minute red flag piled up over the final 40 laps, pit strategy turned the order upside down, and Riggs and Honeycutt slid back into traffic. Fighting their way forward, they ran into each other. I have watched championship leaders lose a race a hundred ways. Watching the top two take each other out, with nobody to blame but themselves, is the one that stings. Riggs led a race-high 48 laps and finished 23rd, the first car a lap down. Honeycutt fell to 24th with 28 laps left and then, because he is Honeycutt, drove all the way back to third as though the whole thing had been part of the plan.
The finish behind Enfinger had a Lime Rock flavor to it. Landen Lewis, chasing his first career win in the No. 45 Niece Motorsports Chevrolet, ran Enfinger down and lost by .483 seconds, which is going to gnaw at him for a while. Honeycutt salvaged third. Parker Kligerman, the broadcaster who happens to own a piece of Lime Rock Park, finished fourth in the No. 77 Spire Motorsports Chevrolet, on a track that is partly his, which ought to be worth a discount. Christian Eckes was fifth in the No. 91 McAnally Hilgemann Chevrolet, and Colin Braun, an IMSA sports car regular moonlighting in the No. 25 RAM, drove into the top 10, because road-course week always coaxes a few ringers out of the garage and the ringers can drive.
The hard moment of the day belonged to Thomas Annunziata. He won Friday's ARCA Menards Series race at Lime Rock and was running second on Saturday when a fire broke out on his No. 1 TRICON Garage Toyota on Lap 79. He got out of the truck and needed help from the safety crew, and his team said he was awake and alert. He was taken to a hospital for evaluation and, TRICON Garage said, cleared and released that night. He was the story of the weekend right up until his own truck ended it for him.
None of the chaos moved the championship much. Riggs and Honeycutt both clinched their spots in the Chase, and Riggs still leads by 44 points over Honeycutt with four races left in the regular season. He built that lead the hard way over the last two months, and one wrecked road course did not undo it.
What moved was the cutoff below them. Enfinger's win jumped him to ninth in the standings, 25 points clear of Tyler Ankrum for the final Chase spot, with Stewart Friesen and Jake Garcia tied and lurking 17 further back. A driver who spent the spring as a name you scrolled past in the results now has a trophy and a playoff cushion, both earned on the one kind of track he had no business winning on.
The Trucks run North Wilkesboro next Saturday in the Faith Fest 250, where Chandler Smith is the defending winner and the racing will look nothing like this. Enfinger will not lose any sleep over that. He has a road-course win, a Chase spot, and, for the first time in more than a season, his name in the part of the results that counts.
He was not the fastest truck at Lime Rock. He was the one that won it.