DARLINGTON, S.C. – Defending NASCAR Camping World Truck Series champion Sheldon Creed outlasted both the field and The Track Too Tough To Tame on Friday night for his first win of the season.
Wheeling a Jason Leffler-inspired throwback paint scheme aboard his No. 2 GMS Racing Chevrolet Silverado, Creed used a pair of perfect restarts in the closing laps of the LiftKits4Less.com 200 to capture the win.
Creed used the bottom lane to power past Ben Rhodes on the penultimate green flag with eight laps left, then fended Creed off on a two-lap dash to the checkered flag for his sixth career Truck Series win.
It marked a return to form for the Alpine, Calif., native after an up-and-down start to his title defense.
“This feels great,” said Creed in victory lane. “We didn’t have the best truck tonight, that’s for sure, as far as firing off. I was really tight to start [the runs], and then I was wrecking loose there and just doing everything I could to hang on. I had to be really aggressive on restarts. I’m sure I didn’t make many friends tonight, but that’s what it takes to win in this series.”
As an added bonus, Creed banked an extra $50,000 for winning Friday’s race thanks to it serving as the first leg of the three-race Triple Truck Challenge mini-series.
Creed won two of the three Triple Truck Challenge events in 2020.
“We’ve just been staying focused. We’ve been struggling this year, but we’ve just kept chipping away at things and gotten better trucks the last couple of weeks,” Creed tipped. “All I ask for are trucks I can race with, and tonight it all came together and paid off for us in a big way.”
In all, 20 lead changes among 12 different drivers punctuated the night, but a track-record 12 cautions for 66 laps whittled the field and eliminated a host of contenders who ran up front for much of the race.
The night appeared to be heading for Kyle Busch Motorsports’ sixth-straight Truck Series victory as a team, with John Hunter Nemechek leading five times for a race-high 65 laps and all three KBM trucks running inside the top four coming to a restart with 31 laps remaining.
However, older tires and ill-timed pushes from behind created contact that sent KBM rookie Corey Heim up into the side of Nemechek’s truck, creating a five-wide scrum for the lead that ended in chaos.
A 16-truck pileup – the largest non-superspeedway crash in Truck Series history – broke out in turn one, ending the chances for victory for the likes of David Gilliland, Spencer Davis, Bayley Currey, Heim and more.
It led to a 12 minute, 23 second red flag for cleanup and was followed by a subsequent crash on the next restart when Parker Kligerman lost a right-front tire in turn two and collected Stewart Friesen – who had survived the first major wreck – in a grinding shunt that ended the night for both Kligerman and Friesen.
That incident set up the restart where Creed was able to pounce, as he chose the inside while Rhodes elected the preferred outside lane as the leader, with teenager Carson Hocevar pushing Creed and Rhodes’ ThorSport Racing teammate Johnny Sauter lined up behind him in the top groove.
When the green flag waved on lap 140, Creed dug deep on the entry to turn one and cleared Rhodes with a spirited dive into turns three and four on the back end of the 1.366-mile, egg-shaped oval.
From there, Creed controlled the top spot just before the 11th yellow flag of the evening waved for a spinning Danny Bohn, setting up one final sprint to the checkers.
The roles were reversed for that final restart, with Rhodes on the inside and Creed on the top groove coming to the restart with two laps left, and when the green returned Creed put the power down to escape with the lead despite Rhodes’ best shot at returning the favor with a bottom-side pass on Creed.
Creed led at the white flag and then had his victory cemented when Hailie Deegan crashed on the frontstretch, forcing a caution flag that froze the running order and ended the battle for the win.
Though Rhodes was disappointed with a runner-up finish, he was grinning afterward from what he called “a really fun time.”
“I had a blast,” Rhodes said. “Man, this place is such a fun race track. If I just take the positives away from it, we had an awesome truck and we ran some really, really fast laps. If we had clean air, I think we could have drove away from a lot of people. Our intermediate notebook is really getting built up strong now, so I’ve got a lot of positives to take away from this.
“It was just being kind of in a disadvantaged lane at the end. He didn’t do anything [wrong] on the previous restart. Sheldon just got a good help from behind and got a good run,” Rhodes added. “Maybe I could have pinched him in [turns] three and four now, knowing how he ran me, but I try to race everybody as clean as I can.”
Carson Hocevar notched a career-best third-place finish, rallying back from a penalty for illegal body modifications just before the big accident with 30 to go to challenge for the win late in the going.
Matt Crafton, Grant Enfinger and Johnny Sauter closed the top six, giving ThorSport Racing four trucks among the top six at the finish, followed by Timmy Hill and Nemechek, who rallied for eighth.
Ninth and 10th were Austin Wayne Self and Jordan Anderson, respectively.
To view complete race results, click here.
The NASCAR Camping World Truck Series season continues May 21 at Circuit of the Americas in Austin, Texas, the series’ second road course race of the year and the inaugural event at that facility.