Ben Rhodes will look to defend his NASCAR Craftsman Truck Series championship, however, he has a steep hill to climb.
The ThorSport Racing driver begins his quest for glory from the ninth on the playoff grid — one point behind advancement with Wisconsin’s Milwaukee Mile kicking off the postseason on Sunday. Bristol (Tenn.) Motor Speedway and Kansas Speedway are the other races in the first round of the playoffs.
Rhodes is winless with only six top-10 finishes in 16 starts. He’s been playing catch up since the beginning of the season after enduring four finishes of 13th or worse in the first four races.
Without a clear sign of consistency compared to the playoffs’ top three drivers — Corey Heim, Christian Eckes and teammate Ty Majeski — how could this season turn into a third title in the last four years for Rhodes?
“Just the fact that we’ve done it,” Rhodes said. “I think that’s gonna tell us we can do it again, and I don’t mean that rude in any way, it’s just that we have the blueprint. We’ve done it twice and we’ve done it when our back has been against the wall. We’ve done it when we had to get in on tiebreakers, where we had to do crazy strategy and we’d get in on a point.
“We’ve been put through the crucible. We’ve gone through the ringer and somehow we’ve found a way to still make it to the next round. I can thoroughly say that the pressure doesn’t get to us at all. If we make any mistakes, it will be just from sheer incompetence. It won’t be from nervousness or feeling any sort of pressure,” Rhodes continued.
“I can say at the race track now that I feel pretty locked in with all of my guys. I’ve been pretty hard on some people and hard on myself, but I’ve been like that for years. I just try to demand the best that we can out of everybody and, of course, of myself. We ask a lot as far as accountability goes and I think that’s all needed right now, especially with our current situation. I feel good about it, I really do. The first round here, with these three races, are races that our stats don’t show well at, but they don’t show well at the first two simply because we had a mistake last year at Milwaukee. We got involved in a wreck at Bristol and then Kansas I think that got a little bit away from our setup, so we’ll work on that one.
“All in all, it’s a good round for us. If we just do our part, I think we can make it in just fine.”
In both of Rhodes’ championship seasons (2021, 2023), he wasn’t flashy and wasn’t a frequent winner.
He simply rose to the occasion when necessary.
Rhodes finished third in the season finale at Phoenix Raceway in 2021 and fifth last year. Both were enough to secure the championship trophy as he was the first Championship Four driver to cross the start/finish line.
In fact, the 27-year-old has a combined three wins across his two title seasons. To put it in perspective, Heim, the Truck Series’ playoff leader entering Milwaukee, has five wins this season alone.
While Rhodes believes it “hasn’t been a good season for us necessarily,” he’s content with the team’s situation.
“We have to be able to look at that and compartmentalize that and then apply whatever wisdom we know to garnering results and success,” Rhodes said. “The minute we stop trying to look at it and being realistic that’s a problem, so realistically it hasn’t been the best season. Actually, in the past three years or so that we’ve made runs at championships, this has been the worst that we’ve entered into the playoffs and that comes from the bad regular season.
“I started out the first part of the season with Rich Lushes as my crew chief and now I have Doug Randolph, so there was a little bit of a swap up there, but as a whole, I’ve maintained my core group of guys and we’ve just been working on the same stuff. It hasn’t been the best, but I think we’ll be just fine.
“The biggest thing to realize right now going into the playoffs this first round is all about not making mistakes. Then after that you’ve got to have three absolutely perfect races for the next round.”