Layne Riggs had the best truck in Friday’s NASCAR Craftsman Truck Series Allegiance 200 at Nashville Superspeedway, as he led a race-high 99 laps in the 150-lap event. However, in the closing laps, the driver of the No. 34 Front Row Motorsports Ford F-150 was forced to rally back to the front.
Race Results: Allegiance 200 at Nashville
Due to varying pit strategies, which allowed Rajah Caruth to assume the race lead on Lap 105, Riggs found himself in the 10th position going into a restart with 16 laps remaining.
While he had much fresher tires than the drivers ahead of him, Riggs had to endure a few close calls on his path forward, including a sideways Andres Perez De Lara in front of him with 14 laps to go, which led to the driver falling behind Caruth by more than three seconds.
Riggs would regain his composure, and from the fifth position, he was able to crank out lap times much faster than Caruth and Chandler Smith at the front of the field.
With three laps to go, Riggs would scoot past Smith for the runner-up spot, and this put him in the wake of Caruth’s No. 7 Spire Motorsports Chevrolet Silverado for the race lead as the field came to the finish line for two laps to go.
Riggs, who had expressed a desire to take home a Nashville Superspeedway guitar earlier in the day, wouldn’t be denied. Coming to take the white flag, Caruth and Riggs made contact in a heated battle for the win. But going into Turn 1 on the final lap, Riggs was simply too strong. He took the lead, and he wouldn’t look back, as he claimed the win by 0.468 seconds over Caruth.
“Until I passed him and cleared him. That’s how you win a NAS-TRUCK race right there, boys and girls. I hope I put on a show for you guys.”
Riggs said while the finish was dramatic, he had no intentions of falling back from the lead. However, a set of tires prior to the final set that his No. 34 team put onto his truck didn’t react well for him.
“I didn’t want to fall back, but I don’t know what happened with that set of tires. But it was literally undrivable,” Riggs explained. “[My Crew Chief] Dylan [Cappello] made the right adjustments, there. Got me the tires. He got me the motivation. Drove it to the front.”
With the win on Friday night, or Saturday morning technically, paired with a rough night for Kaden Honeycutt, Riggs gained the NASCAR Craftsman Truck Series point lead. With seven races remaining in the regular season, Riggs holds a 37-point lead over Honeycutt.
Caruth, who started the race from the 25th position due to qualifying being washed out on Friday afternoon, knew he had a good truck. It was all about getting the track position. Thanks to a pit strategy gamble, he got it, and then he tried to hold off Riggs.
“Yeah, I mean, I was trying to make this thing as wide as possible, obviously, on the tire disadvantage,” Caruth said. “But that was a great call by [Crew Chief] Brian [Pattie]. I think we were strong, just starting in the back with no qualifying impacted our night. We got the truck really strong, there. Just needed, I don’t know, there’s probably some things I should have done there. Huge congrats to Layne, obviously.”
Chandler Smith would come home with a solid third-place finish, while Ross Chastain, and Tyler Ankrum finished in positions four and five.
Stewart Friesen, Grant Enfinger, Christian Eckes, Gio Ruggiero, and Daniel Dye rounded out the top-10 finishers.
Parker Retzlaff, who drives a Chevrolet full-time in the NASCAR O’Reilly Auto Parts Series, came home in the 11th position, driving the No. 62 Toyota Tundra for Halmar Friesen Racing. Retzlaff piloted the truck in a partnership with LEGACY MOTOR CLUB.
As previously mentioned, Kaden Honeycutt, the series point leader heading into the night, suffered from issues where his truck was losing power intermittently on track. Honeycutt would lose three laps on pit road as his team changed out the battery on his No. 11 Toyota, and he would finish a disappointing 27th.
