The Craftsman Truck Series runs its final road course of the season on Saturday, and the driver best positioned to enjoy it is the one already running away with the championship.
Layne Riggs, in the No. 34 Front Row Motorsports Ford, arrives at Lime Rock Park with a 65-point lead over Kaden Honeycutt, the largest championship margin anyone has held all season. He built it the hard way: after sitting 38 points out of the lead, he ripped off a five-race stretch of a third at Dover, wins at Charlotte, Nashville and San Diego, and a fourth at Michigan to swing the standings 103 points in his favor. His fourth win of the year, at the San Diego street course, was a career single-season high, and it came on a last-lap pass that was the first last-lap road-course pass for the win in the series since August 2018. He has won two of the three road courses run this year. Lime Rock is the third.
The track is the oddity. Lime Rock Park is a 1.478-mile, seven-turn road course tucked into the northwest corner of Connecticut, and it does not race on Sundays. A 1959 court ruling still bars Sunday combustion-engine racing there, which is why the Liuna 150 runs Saturday, July 11 at 1 p.m. ET on FS1: 100 laps, 147.8 miles, stages ending at laps 30, 60 and 100. It is the early half of a same-day doubleheader, with the O'Reilly Series racing at Atlanta that night. Practice is at 9:30 a.m. and Kennametal Pole Qualifying at 11.
Riggs is the favorite, but road courses are where the Truck Series schedule invites company. The No. 25 Ram is again a rotating ringer seat, and this weekend it goes to Colin Braun, a 37-year-old sports-car veteran with three IMSA championships, four Rolex 24 at Daytona wins, and a single Truck Series win, at Michigan back in 2009. Two more road specialists fill out the guest entries: Louis Foster, the 2024 Indy NXT champion and a current IndyCar rookie, and Graham Doyle out of IMSA. The last nine Truck road-course races have gone to either Front Row Motorsports or TRICON Garage, but five of the last seven have ended in overtime, and the driver who led the most laps has won nine of the last 11. Precision matters here more than paint-trading.
The defending Lime Rock winner is Corey Heim, who led 99 of the laps a year ago but runs only a partial Truck schedule now and is ineligible for the championship. Among full-time drivers, Daniel Hemric is the one to watch on skill alone: he has the best road-course average finish in the series this year, 4.67, and the only top 10 in all three road-course races.
Behind the runaway at the top, the playoff bubble is a genuine fight. Positions ninth through 14th are separated by 40 points: Tyler Ankrum at 301, then Jake Garcia, Grant Enfinger, Stewart Friesen, Brenden Queen and Justin Haley at 261. There are five races left to sort it out, Lime Rock the first of them, then North Wilkesboro, Indianapolis Raceway Park, Richmond and New Hampshire.
For the locals, the Truck Series hauler parade rolled through Salisbury and Lakeville on Thursday, and the paddock opens to all general-admission ticket holders on Friday afternoon, the first open NASCAR garage of the season. Then, on Saturday, they race, because a ruling handed down when Eisenhower was president says they cannot do it the next day.