WATKINS GLEN, N.Y. — With Stewart Friesen sidelined for the rest of the season due to injury, Halmar Friesen Racing will rely on the efforts of Kaden Honeycutt, newly released from Niece Motorsports, for the remainder of the 2025 NASCAR Craftsman Truck Series season.
The move comes as both Honeycutt and HFR make pushes toward drivers’ and owners’ championships.
But before Honeycutt takes the reins of the No. 52, HFR tapped NASCAR Cup Series driver Christopher Bell to drive the truck in Friesen’s absence at Watkins Glen International.
Bell qualified on the outside pole alongside Corey Heim and seldom left the top five all afternoon. He led 30 laps late in the race and looked like he was on track to score a storybook victory for the team running without its captain.
Then a caution came out. And four more followed that one. Suddenly, fuel was a major issue for several teams, including Bell.
Eventually, Heim took the lead back from Bell, and under one of the many cautions, Bell decided to pit to top off with fuel, hoping others ahead of him would run out.
After a three-overtime nightmare that brought up memories of the 2023 championship race at Phoenix Raceway, Bell battled back to finish fourth for the team.
”I had a ton of fun,” Bell said after the race. “But I’m sure it looked very weird seeing that [No.] 52 truck out there without Stewart in it.
”They’ve got a really good piece — a really strong Toyota Tundra. Hopefully they can build on it and do some good with Kaden these next couple of weeks.”
While the late-race insanity ended up hurting Bell, it did quite the opposite for HFR’s second truck, the No. 62 of Wesley Slimp.
Slimp, making his and the truck’s second start of 2025, had a rough weekend at Lime Rock Park in June. It was shaping up to be the same way this weekend — although Slimp didn’t catch fire like he did at Lime Rock, a 29th-place qualifying effort and two flat tires throughout the race did not give the No. 62 team the confidence Bell had.
However, attrition ramped up at the end of the race, which allowed Slimp to climb all the way to 12th in the final running order.
”The team gave me an awesome truck,” Slimp told Frontstretch. “And even then, it started out good and just got better and better throughout the race. Even with two flats, going two laps down and then running [29th] to 12th. Honestly, I can’t believe it.”
The pair of top 15s is a morale boost for the team after Friesen’s vicious crash in a Super DIRTcar Series race left him with an open-book fracture of the pelvis and a fractured right leg.
”Everyone wishes Stewart could be here,” Slimp said. “But at the same time, we’re all driven forward by the values of success and hard work that he instills in the team. We’re all out here doing it because of that. We wanna run well for him, and I feel like I did that.”
“Happy to give them a good run and get a good finish out of it,” Bell added. “They told me at one time, ‘Checkers or wreckers,’ and I’m like, ‘well, I wanna make sure I get it to the checkered flag’. And we walked out of here with a fourth-place finish after all the chaos. Didn’t tear up the truck too bad, which was nice.”
While Honeycutt (who finished a disappointing 34th in his one-off with Young’s Motorsports) will be taking over the No. 52 going forward, Slimp, normally a sports car driver, has one more scheduled race with HFR at the Charlotte Motor Speedway ROVAL in October.
But a pair of top 15s for a team that doesn’t normally bring two trucks to the track and is racing without its team owner/driver is just what the team needed in its first race since Friesen’s crash.
Anthony Damcott joined Frontstretch in March 2022. Currently, he is an editor and co-authors Fire on Fridays (Fridays); he is also the primary Truck Series reporter/writer and serves as an at-track reporter. He has also assisted with short track content and social media, among other duties he takes/has taken on for the site. In 2025, he became an official member of the National Motorsports Press Association. A proud West Virginia Wesleyan College alum from Akron, Ohio, Anthony is now a grad student. He is a theatre actor and fight coordinator in his free time.
You can keep up with Anthony by following @AnthonyDamcott on X.