For Brent Crews, Saturday’s NASCAR Craftsman Truck Series debut at North Wilkesboro Speedway has been quite a long time in the making.
After several years of competing in the ARCA Menards Series, CARS Tour, and TransAm TA2 Series, among several other short track series across the country, both pavement and dirt, the Davidson, North Carolina-native finally got his shot in NASCAR’s National Series.
Crews, who turned 17 years old at the end of March, has already managed to turn heads after the first of his nine scheduled starts behind the wheel of the No. 1 Toyota Tundra TRD Pro for TRICON Garage.
Despite having just a 45-minute practice session to get acclimated to the NASCAR Truck Series, in which Crews posted the seventh-fastest lap, the Toyota Driver Development protégé looked anything but inexperienced in the race.
While his orange and white Toyota Tundra wasn’t exactly dent-free by the time the race’s first stage ended, the Truck Series debutant had kept it inside the top-15, after starting 10th.
Strategy by crew chief Jacob Hampton moved Crews into the top-10 to start the second stage, but a chaotic restart, where Layne Riggs and Corey Heim made contact, allowed the brave 17-year-old to shoot the gap four-wide and move into second.
That’s a position that the youngster managed to hold for quite a while, too, defending against 14-time NASCAR Craftsman Truck Series winner and TRICON Garage teammate Corey Heim for quite a while.
While that was the high point of the race for Crews, the JBL-sponsored driver managed to hang around the top-10 for the rest of the afternoon, until an incident with five laps to go.
Ben Rhodes, trying to make a pass for a top-10 position, misjudged his entry speed entering Turn 1 and spun Crews around, causing damage to the No. 1 Toyota Tundra and trapping the team a lap down.
The incident sent the race into NASCAR Overtime, and left Crews to have an upsetting 22nd-place result in his NASCAR Truck Series debut, despite an incredible run.
“It was good,” Crews said. “I got practice, no qualifying. I felt like we had a really good truck. Ran in the top seven or eight all day. I felt like we were on-track for a fifth or sixth-place finish, and ultimately kind of got used up there going into [Turns] one and two by [Ben Rhodes].”
While the finish isn’t exactly what Crews was hoping for, being outside the top-20 after spending time inside the top-five, the fresh face in the NASCAR Truck Series will have many opportunities to compete for solid results, and maybe even wins, down the road.
Crews will be returning to the NASCAR Craftsman Truck Series competition in June for the inaugural event at Lime Rock Park.
