LAS VEGAS — For the first time in four years, Kyle Jergensen is an overall champion of the BFGoodrich Tires Mint 400, completing four laps of this year’s grueling course in a rapid 6:47:23.597.
After taking the lead from two-time defending race winner Adam Householder on the final lap, Jergensen and the No. 222 The Beast/Camburg/Magnaflow team put their Unlimited Truck SPEC entry on top of the box, giving their class an upset overall win while competing against other teams with twice the horsepower.
“Our gameplan was to let them make mistakes, and they all made mistakes,” said Jergensen. “We made no mistakes—no flats, no nothing, the truck was perfect, the team was perfect. That’s what won us the Mint today, no mistakes. We actually had a surprising amount of dust behind Arciero for a couple laps. Arciero is fast enough that we can’t pass him. We have half the horsepower and half the top speed, so we’d do what we could in the tight stuff.”
Brett Sourapas, Tracy Graf, and Householder were the first three trucks off the line after qualifying up front on Friday, and they held the top three overall spots through the first lap. As the field hit the first timing loop on Lap 2, Graf and Householder were scored ahead of Sourapas, although the trio were still separated by under a minute.
Householder would take the overall lead through the second loop as Arciero and Jergensen jumped past the 4WD trucks for second and third, even though Sourapas and Graf would still hold physical second and third at halfway.
But Jergensen would pick up the charge on the third lap to become the biggest challenger to Householder’s winning streak. He’d slice three minutes off the gap to get it down to 46 seconds at the first pit on Lap 3, and shave it further to just eight seconds at the second loop. After a slightly longer pit stop for Jergensen at the end of the lap, the 2022 overall winner would trail the 2024 and 2025 winner by just over a minute going into the final circuit.
It wouldn’t take much longer for the door to open for Jergensen, as Householder needed to make a tire change just a few miles into Lap 4. 20 minutes later came the break that changed the race, as Householder’s lower A-arm failed. Joining him on the sidelines on the “heartbreak lap” were SPEC truck standouts Stephen Beal, who has been in contention for the overall podium, Dustin Grabowski, and defending SPEC class winner Conner McMullen.
As Jergensen had already put himself in the lead both physically and on time, he hung on to secure the victory by more than four minutes apiece over Sourapas and Arciero. By the end of the race, the front-runners were managing not only their equipment, but also an unforgiving course that only got rougher as the day went on.
“I feel like every single year we race here we say it was rougher than the previous year, but this was no joke,” said Sourapas, the top finisher in Unlimited Truck 4WD. “Lap 4, you can’t even get on top of anything. When we finished the opening ceremony, my paddle shifter wasn’t working, I could only downshift. My right-hand man Evan (Weller, co-driver) was shifting up for me the entire race, so he had his hands full. We got four well-deserved flats, it was super rocky out there, but all in all we’re happy to be here.”
For Arciero, whose heart has been broken many times by the Mint in recent years, today served as partial redemption. While he didn’t win the race overall, he was the top driver in the Unlimited 2WD class—and he admits that he at least considers winning his class at the Mint a “box half-checked.”
“Today went fairly good,” he said. “I lost third gear, our high gear, so the third and fourth lap, the fastest I could go was like 90, 95 miles an hour. We had no top speed and we were just hoping for attrition at that point. I know the Mint has it, and when we saw Adam pulled over on the side of the road, I knew we had it. But I knew we had to catch and pass Kyle since we started side by side, and that was going to be a tall feat.”
Seven-time NASCAR champion Jimmie Johnson made his return to the desert for the first time in more than 30 years, teaming up with Troy Herbst as part of a multi-truck effort for Terrible Herbst Motorsports. While Johnson started near the rear due to a rollover in Friday’s qualifying, he finished the first two laps of the race without major incident before handing the truck over to Troy Herbst, who brought it home sixth in class and 12th overall with a 7:31:34.479.
The Mint 400 was broadcast live on SPEED SPORT 1.
