No one in the NASCAR Craftsman Truck Series has won more races this season than Layne Riggs, who has six. And no driver in the championship field has finished worse, on average, in the two playoff races so far: Riggs was 32nd at Bristol and 19th at Kansas.
He returns tonight to Charlotte Motor Speedway, where he won in May. The driver who finished second to him in that race, Kaden Honeycutt, now leads him by 37 points.
The Ecosave 200 starts at 5 p.m. ET on FOX and SiriusXM NASCAR Radio. It is the third race of the Chase, the 10-driver playoff that decides the championship, and after tonight four remain. A single race pays at most 76 points, so Riggs trails by about half of what one good night can earn.
Two races, two bad nights
Riggs, who drives the No. 34 Ford for Front Row Motorsports, went into the Chase as the points leader. At Bristol he led the first 135 laps. Then came a vibration, contact with another truck and a tire rub that sent him to pit road for repairs, and he finished 16 laps down.
Kansas, on Sept. 26, went wrong in a different way. On his stop on lap 61, his crew's jack dropped before his left-front wheel was tightened, and he had to back into his pit stall to have it fixed. He restarted 25th and worked his way back to second. With two laps left, he brushed the outside wall and fell to 19th.
"I just went for it," Riggs said afterward. "Went for it way too hard and went for when I shouldn't have gone for it."
He has finished in the top five in each of his last two Charlotte starts, the May win among them.
The leader
Honeycutt, 23, drives the No. 11 Toyota for TRICON Garage. At Kansas he led 111 of the 134 laps and won both stages, the two early segments of each race that pay bonus points. The win, his third of the season, gained him 40 points on Riggs and gave him the lead. It was the first time he had led the standings since the series left Charlotte in May.
His 15 top-10 finishes this year are the most of any driver in the series. In three career Truck Series starts at Charlotte, he has never finished worse than seventh.
The rest of the field
The gap behind the top two is wider. Chandler Smith, Riggs's teammate at Front Row, is third, 71 points back. Giovanni Ruggiero is 72 back, Christian Eckes 82, Daniel Hemric 87, Ty Majeski 88, Ben Rhodes 98, Grant Enfinger 118 and Tyler Ankrum 127. The full standings are here.
Rhodes finished fourth at Charlotte in May and fifth at Kansas. Majeski started fourth in May and ran in the top five before a mechanical problem dropped him to 33rd, his team, ThorSport Racing, said.
Qualifying is at 2:05 p.m. on FS2, a Fox cable channel. The race is 134 laps on the 1.5-mile oval, 201 miles, with the stages ending on laps 30 and 60. After tonight the Chase goes to Phoenix on Oct. 16, Talladega on Oct. 23 and Martinsville on Oct. 30, and ends at Homestead on Nov. 6.