Kyle Busch mysteriously couldn’t seal the deal for the Stage 1 and 2 wins in Saturday’s NASCAR Camping World Truck Series FR8 Auctions 200 at Atlanta Motor Speedway, but the driver of the No. 51 Toyota Tundra was unbeatable in the final Stage of the race as he cruised to his first win in NCWTS competition in 2021 by a victory margin of more than four seconds over Austin Hill.
This marks the 60th win for Busch in his Truck Series career and he has now won a NCWTS race in each of the last nine seasons.
Busch led a race-high 102 laps in the 130 lap contest. According to Busch, it’s all credit to the talented people on his race team.
“It’s just a great opportunity to race in great stuff with KBM and Cessna Beechcraft,” Busch said. “This Toyota Tundra was awesome. Can’t say enough about my guys. Everybody at Kyle Busch Motorsports, they do such a great job and a lot of hard work.”
Hill made an impressive rally in the final Stage, as he elevated from a third to fourth-place truck to get a solid runner-up finish.
For Hill, he went into the final Stage restart trying to conserve tires. Choosing to do so, ultimately put him in too big of a hole to catch Busch.
“When we had that restart, that last restart we had, I tried to save my tires a little bit,” Hill explained.” I didn’t want to kill them right off the bat, and whenever it was go time, I started matching Kyle’s laptimes…”
Hill continued, “I kind of gave that gap up and then I could never close it. I was matching his laptimes, but I needed to be a little quicker.”
John Hunter Nemechek, who drives for Kyle Busch and snagged the Stage 1 and 2 wins on Saturday, finished third.
Johnny Sauter got his first top-five — and top-10 for that matter — of the year with a fourth-place finish and Sheldon Creed, the defending Series champion, finished fifth.
Zane Smith, Ross Chastain, Matt Crafton, Brett Moffitt and Stewart Friesen rounded out the top-10 finishers.
Moffitt had to overcome starting in the rear after an engine change moments before the race went green. Friesen, who finished 10th also overcame a late-race pit road penalty.
For all of the post race stats, news and information from the FR8 Auctions 200 at Atlanta, visit the Race Information Page:
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