Who can stop the No. 20 team in the NASCAR Xfinity Series?
John Hunter Nemechek gained his second win of the season at a hot Tennessee Lottery 250 at Nashville Superspeedway as he pulled away from teammate Chandler Smith in the final 51-lap run to the finish, beating his teammate by .366 seconds, down from almost a 1.5-second lead before he approached lapped traffic in the final laps.
Jesse Love finished the race third, followed by Austin Hill and Noah Gragson in fourth and fifth.
Riley Herbst, AJ Allmendinger, Justin Allgaier, Cole Custer and Sam Mayer rounded out the top 10.
Nemechek battled back from a errant adjustment that slid him behind two of the fastest drivers of the day in Custer and Allmendinger.
The NASCAR Cup Series regular completed back-to-back wins for the No. 20 Joe Gibbs Racing team. His Toyota Cup counterpart Christopher Bell won with the team last week at New Hampshire Motor Speedway. The team has won five times this season, the most in the 2024 Xfinity season.
The Mooresville, N.C., native collected his 11th win of his Xfinity career, leading a race-high 76 laps.
“I thought we gave the race away there at the start of stage three,” Nemechek said. “I asked for an adjustment when I probably shouldn’t have… We’ve been close to winning a lot this year in this thing, and I have limited starts. So, being able to capitalize on that is huge.”
Smith recovered from being involved in the only incident of the day, which was triggered by Allgaier getting into Smith’s JGR teammate Ty Gibbs.
Love had the drive of the day. He had to start at the rear of the field after he suffered a hole in his radiator prior to qualifying. He also had a slow pit stop during the stage three break that relegated him outside the top 20.
Love fought his way back to finish third despite having trouble with his cool suit in what was a hot day that saw track temperatures as high as 130 degrees Fahrenheit.
Gragson, in his second Xfinity start of the season with Rette Jones Racing, scored the team’s first top five in its second series start. Gragson was part of the group of drivers who suffered a cool suit issue.
Herbst also experienced a cool suit failure early in the race. By the end of stage two and before pit road opened, he had enough and needed assistance draining the suit to eliminate the heat coming from the scorching water in the suit. Once his cool suit problem was resolved, he was able to recover and battle back to finish sixth for Stewart-Haas Racing.
“On the grid, it made a weird noise,” Herbst said. “It clunked a little bit, but I thought, ‘What were we going to do? We’re rolling off.’ So, we kept going, and I just felt it getting hotter and hotter and hotter. So, I made the executive decision to unplug it. That’s risky because you can’t plug it back in. So, that was a 100% decision. Stage two was the hardest. That’s when I got a little spotty vision, but cold water in the car and ice got us through.”
Prior to the only caution for incident Custer and Allmendinger consistently ran in the top three and were running 1-2 before the caution in what was shaping to be a one vs. one fight for the win, however Allmendinger experienced a slow stop, and Custer fell behind on the last restart.
“Last set of tires was probably our worst run,” Allmendinger said. “So, [it] just compounded the issue, but [the] Celsius Chevrolet was really good all day. So, hopefully we learned some stuff and can build off of that.”
“I felt like I overdrove it into turn one a little bit for sure,” Custer said. “But at the same time, I felt like I drove in that deep on other restarts, and it didn’t get that tight… It seemed like we just got really tight that run and kind of sustained that the whole run and tried to do a lot of different things to try to make up speed but just couldn’t make up the speed… We’ll keep digging, figuring it out, and we’ll get one.”
Gibbs led the field to green from the pole, and after racing Custer side-by-side for the first few opening laps, the No. 19 pulled away to lead every lap of the caution-free stage.
Custer slid to fourth by the end of the stage behind Allmendinger and Brandon Jones. Allgaier crossed the line fifth in stage one.
Custer, in the first pit box, was able to get ahead of Gibbs on pit road as he fell three spots. Gibbs was initially able advance back to second on the stage two restart, but Nemechek charged through the field to become a contender as he passed for second and applied pressure on Custer for the lead, completing the first green-flag pass for the lead on lap 71.
Gibbs fell back to fourth and was told during stage two that one of his tires was going down in the stage one green-flag run, affecting his handling in stage two.
Nemechek pulled away quickly from Custer and had a big-enough gap from Allmendinger by the time the No. 16 passed the No. 00 to win stage stage two.
Xfinity Nashville Results
The Xfinity Series will return next week at the Chicago street course on Saturday, July 6 at 3:30 p.m. ET, with coverage provided by NBC.
Wyatt Watson has followed NASCAR closely since 2007. He joined Frontstretchas a journalist in February 2023 after serving in the United States Navy for five years as an Electronic Technician Navigation working on submarines. Wyatt writes breaking NASCAR news and contributes to columns such as Friday Faceoff and 2-Headed Monster. Wyatt also contributes to Frontstretch's social media and serves as an at-track reporter, collecting exclusive content for Frontstretch.
Wyatt Watson can be found on Twitter @WyattGametime
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