Ben Rhodes looked to be heading to a solid top-five run Friday night in the Vankor 350 at Texas Motor Speedway. Then while following Kyle Busch in the high line, Rhodes and Brett Moffitt collided.
“There at the end I thought we had a good second place finish going,” Rhodes said. “I had the outside rolling behind Busch, and I thought we could clear the two guys in front of me, but Brett Moffitt just cleared himself into my front nose. On the straightaway. I don’t know what was going on there.”
Rhodes, slipped to finish 10th after suffering catastrophic damage to the front of his race truck. It was the third top-10 in five starts this year for the 22-year-old driver, but the finish could have been so much better.
The fact that the disappointing night came at the hands of more contact with Moffitt left Rhodes noticeably peeved.
“Another incident from him,” Rhodes said. “But that’s happened, we’ve got history I guess.”
When pressed on what Rhodes would do to even the score, Rhodes just said he would store the incident in his mind going forward.
“I don’t know. He’s wrecked me twice in the past in the Truck Series. I’ll hold onto that,” Rhodes explained. “I’ve never really wrecked him and now he’s done that as well. I mean he put himself in a lot of bad positions tonight. It is what it is. We just have to know who we are racing with on the race track.”
While Rhodes soldiered on to a decent finish — moving to third in the championship standings in the process — Moffitt stumbled to finish 19th, four laps off the pace.