ROCKINGHAM, N.C. — Kaden Honeycutt couldn’t have chosen a more difficult act to follow.
The 22-year-old driver from Willow Park, Texas, has succeeded Corey Heim in the No. 11 TRICON Garage Toyota that carried Corey Heim to a NASCAR Craftsman Truck Series-record 12 victories last season, as well as the series championship.
Honeycutt is off to a good start, if not a spectacular one. He has scored three top 10s in four races, two top fives and earned his first career pole position at Darlington Raceway in the most recent Truck Series race.
Honeycutt led a race-high 59 laps before finishing fourth at the Lady in Black in a race that a part-time TRICON teammate stole in overtime with a strategic late pit stop for tires. That teammate? Corey Heim in the No. 5 Toyota.
Driving the No. 1 TRICON truck this week, Heim once again will be an obstacle standing in the way of Honeycutt’s first victory in Friday’s Black’s Tire 200 at Rockingham Speedway.
“I feel like we’ve been really good across the board this year,” Honeycutt said. “My performance hasn’t been really good and consistent every week. I feel like at Atlanta (21st-place finish), I really put us behind and made a really bad mistake there that was pretty uncharacteristic on my part—just doing too much trying to win the race too early…
“I feel like we were really on top of our game at Darlington. I thought we had a race-winning truck on the long haul, for sure. I just needed some stuff to go right at the end… I think we’ll have plenty of chances to win throughout the season.”
Two full-time NASCAR Cup Series drivers also are entered in Friday’s race. Ty Dillon will drive the No. 25 Ram for Kaulig Racing, and Carson Hocevar will moonlight in the No. 77 Spire Motorsports Chevrolet.
Dillon last raced a truck at Rockingham in 2013, finishing 12th in a Richard Childress Racing Chevrolet. Hocevar is racing at “The Rock” for the first time.
“I’m just excited to go do it and run laps around there,” Hocevar said. “It’s a really cool track that I’ve always wanted to race at. It will be fun to have a whole weekend where I just get the opportunity to run the truck and don’t have to worry about juggling it with my responsibilities in the Cup Series.”
Sammy Smith, last year’s O’Reilly Auto Parts Series winner at Rockingham, will do double duty this weekend, driving the No. 7 Spire Silverado on Friday.
Chandler Smith, who qualified second and finished 13th at Rockingham last year, leads the series standings by 33 points over Honeycutt. Layne Riggs, Smith’s teammate at Front Row Motorsports, is third, 41 points in arrears.
