KANSAS CITY, Kan. –– Layne Riggs entered the NASCAR Craftsman Truck Series Chase No. 1 in points. Then he had a horrible end to his race at Bristol Motor Speedway, finishing the lowest of The Chase drivers in 32nd.
Riggs began his day at Kansas Speedway on Saturday, Sept. 26, with a promising first two stages in third and second, respectively.
Shortly afterward, though, his Front Row Motorsports pit crew had an issue, as he left before the team had all the lug nuts on his left-front tire secured. Riggs had to back up, costing him valuable time.
“Pretty concerned,” Riggs told media post-race about the mishap. “The last three out of the four races, we’ve had an issue on pit road, something catastrophic on pit road. Just, we definitely need to get it together. Know all our P’s and Q’s and know that we have all the confidence in the world to come out and maintain or gain spots. Overall, I think that we got some work to do. Right now, we were hot earlier. Got to get back hot and we will.”
Then Mother Nature settled in, to the tune of nearly five hours under red-flag conditions.
When the race resumed, Riggs showcased the speed in his No. 34 Ford, driving back to battle for the lead. In fact, he led lap 122, one of his three laps led at the 1.5-mile racetrack.
Yet with two laps left in the race, as Riggs chased ultimate victor Kaden Honeycutt, he got into the wall. The combination of his slowed momentum and sustained damage to his truck left him with a 19th-place result.
“Got in the wall, just tried too hard,” Riggs said. “Feel like I had a pretty good run on him there. Was getting a little bit better, kind of hitting my groove there at the end of the race. Finally got the balance where I needed it to be from all day. Obviously, we’re only on two tires. We were at a pretty big disadvantage there. The track was just so fast there for the last few laps that I just tried too hard. I went up there like I’d been doing, very top, and kind of when I got in his wake with a little bit too much. These trucks are so sensitive; when you barely touch the right rear, it sucks the right front around.
“I’m disappointed in myself. I let my crew down for sure. I felt like I should have been a lot smarter and thinking bigger picture knowing I could’ve come out of here second and had a better shot, but I just made it a whole lot harder on myself. Like I said, this is going to be something I beat myself up on all week long before we got to Charlotte. I think we have two weeks; I’d rather have one and go redeem myself. I do a lot of work, a lot of thinking; I’ve got a lot of great people in my corner keeping me smart. Feel like I let those guys down tonight.”
While Riggs left displeased with himself, FRM competition director Drew Blickensderfer doesn’t want Riggs to change his mentality of trophy hunting.
“Oh, he was very motivating,” Riggs added. “He’d been in these situations a lot and he knows I’m pretty upset and hard on myself on what just happened and he just said, ‘I don’t pay you to run second. I pay you to go win races. Everybody at Front Row Motorsports, all we want to do is go win and had a decent shot there and I took it. Wrong place, wrong time. Like I said, we’ve just got to regroup here. So we can’t change anything in the past; just got to move forward.”
Riggs understandably wanted to add to his six victories this season and 11 overall, he cost himself the top spot in the point standings. The elimination-style playoffs, which was the format to determine the championship the last several years, rewarded the “win and you’re in” mentality. The seven-race Truck Chase balances winning with running well. Perhaps that’s something that Riggs will be cognizant of going forward.
“I should’ve been thinking points; I was thinking trophy,” Riggs noted. “I crossed the line second here the last two years. And I felt like I was finally in a position that I had a shot to win a race here at Kansas. I just made a really big mistake. And I think that I should’ve been thinking about the next five races instead of just putting it all in one. But we’re not out of this. Five races is a lot. We can flip the script pretty fast. Just got to stay on our toes; we got to do better on pit road. We didn’t today. We really tried. We have some good tracks coming up for us; I’m excited about that. Overall, I’m definitely going to have to digest this one a little better before I can even move on – think about it, process it, put it in the past, and focus on the next one.”
Between Honeycutt’s 75-point day and Riggs’ 35-point day, the 40-point swing has Riggs 37 points in the rears of Honeycutt. In his third full-time Truck Series season though, Riggs isn’t worried.
“We had two rough races back-to-back,” he noted. “And I feel like, as you’ve seen the shakeup in the upper two series, how fast the points move around, how fast the points moved tonight, that same thing can happen again next weekend. So, you know, we’re not out of this thing at all. But I’m going to keep grinding and keep fighting.”
Next up for the Truck Series is Charlotte Motor Speedway. For what it’s worth, the last time the series visited there over Memorial Day weekend, Riggs won.
Mark Kristl joined Frontstretch at the beginning of the 2019 NASCAR season. He is the site's ARCA Menards Series editor. Kristl is also an Eagle Scout and a proud University of Dayton alum.
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