NASCAR on TV this week

Tracking the Trucks: SFP 250

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*In a Nutshell:* Matt Crafton took the checkered flag 0.167 seconds ahead of Joey Coulter to score his third career victory in Saturday afternoon’s SFP 250 from Kansas Speedway. Crafton took the lead with fresher tires for the second and final time on lap 138, and despite numerous challenges from Coulter, he led the final 30 laps to become the 13th different winner in 13 events at the speedway. Rookie Ryan Blaney, Brendan Gaughan and Johnny Sauter rounded out the top 5.

Snitching: It’s the “Self-Policing”

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“If you ain’t cheatin’, you ain’t tryin’.”

It’s a mantra you hear echoed in NASCAR rather often, and some people actually mean it! I mean, after all, a sport built on moonshine and running away from police _has_ to be built on integrity, right?

Alas, teams bending and twisting the rules to find an advantage over their competitors is as old as racing itself, NASCAR or otherwise. Yet somehow every time a team is found to have either been out of bounds in NASCAR’s rulebooks or at least close to it, everyone reacts with, well, shock. They’re called a series of nasty names and noses are slightly turned up at their audacity to even think about trying to make their cars faster. How _dare_ they.

Beyond the Cockpit: Can James Buescher Repeat? He Talks Kansas And Title Expectations

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_Turner Scott Motorsports driver James Buescher is running his fifth full-time season in the Camping World Truck Series. After showing solid improvement throughout the years, last season he finally broke through to victory lane at Kansas Speedway and followed that win up with three more before closing on the season as the 2012 champion. This season hasn’t quite started out the way the driver of the No. 31 team had hoped for, but with top-15 results in all three events so far, Buescher looks to improve upon that performance today._

_Buescher, who led both practice sessions from Kansas, took some time out on Friday afternoon to sit down with Frontstretch.com’s Beth Lunkenheimer to talk about coming back to the site of his first career victory._

Beyond the Cockpit: Matt Crafton On His Start, Short Tracks And Menards

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_Matt Crafton has been competing in the Camping World Truck Series since his debut race in 2000 in a Duke Thorson owned Truck. This past weekend he set the record for consecutive starts in the series with his 297 run, still in a Thorson truck. All but 25 of Crafton’s record setting starts have been in a ThorSport truck. He spent the 2004 season in a Kevin Harvick Truck before returning to his long time owner and friend Duke Thorson._

_Crafton has garnered two wins in the Truck Series during his impressive streak and has also had a myriad of teammates in 13 years of driving for ThorSport. While Crafton stays focused throughout the Truck season, he knows how to have some fun in the off-season. He runs a sand rail around in the desert, not far from his home in the Southwest but also loves running on some of the most historic tracks. He sat down with Mike Neff at Rockingham to discuss a vast assortment of things pertaining to racing and not so much._

Happiness Is … A Packed Weekend In April

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There was a full slate of racing last weekend: Nationwide, Cup, F1, Trucks. It was more than enough of a gamut to give gearheads their fill. The stories have been punched out, so now it’s time to go through some of the highlights that make motorsports so much fun right before the next weekend sneaks up upon us. Without further hubbub…

*Happiness is… night racing.*
Short tracks claim that when Nationwide or Cup run on weekend nights that their attendance dwindles. Got it. But there’s something to be said for racing at night and for encouraging more of it from the national series. To start, and this may seem banal, but the cars just look cooler. For all of the reshaping that has taken place in the past couple years, these two series now feature cars that ‘resemble’ something like everyday cars. Resemble is used loosely. Under the lights the cars shine and all of the work that goes into styling them becomes evident.

In The Face Of Great Tragedy, NASCAR Shines Its Brightest

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There are few things more sobering in life than learning of the tragedies we sometimes face as a nation. This was no less true over the past week when Massachusetts suffered a horrific tragedy with a bombing at the Boston Marathon and shooting at MIT in Cambridge that took a family member of one of NASCAR’s own.

Officer Sean Collier, brother of Hendrick Motorsports machinist Andrew Collier, died tragically in a standoff with the suspected Boston Marathon bombers Tamerlan and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev. It turned a tragic situation into downright heartbreaking knowing that the NASCAR community was so horribly affected. Now, it was personal.