It’s not lost on Tyler Ankrum, the fact that he could leave Avondale, Arizona, following Friday’s NASCAR Craftsman Truck Series Championship Race at Phoenix Raceway as a NASCAR National Series champion.
If Ankrum is going to make that happen on Friday, he’ll have to come out on top of a heavyweight fight, which includes Corey Heim, who has been on a record-breaking tear this year, and defending NASCAR Craftsman Truck Series champion Ty Majeski.
With this particular winner-takes-all championship format used by the NASCAR Truck Series in 2025, you’d be silly to count Ankrum out, or even Kaden Honeycutt — the only one of the Championship 4 still looking for their first victory in the Craftsman Truck Series.
Just remaining in contention is a pretty big deal for Ankrum… and while Phoenix Raceway isn’t exactly within a stone’s throw of his hometown of San Bernardino, California, it’s about as close (other than Las Vegas Motor Speedway) as the NASCAR Craftsman Truck Series gets. LiUNA!, a long-time partner of Ankrum’s, also has a strong presence in the Southwest, making it the perfect opportunity to get some of the driver’s biggest supporters to the racetrack for what could be the biggest moment of his career, to date.
Even with all of the potential points of pressure closing in on the driver of the No. 18 Chevrolet Silverado RST as the green flag gets closer to dropping for the final event of the campaign, Ankrum’s demeanor couldn’t be calmer. That’s because the 24-year-old driver doesn’t believe the pressure is on him.
“I think it’s a couple of things; I think in a weird way, it unloads a little bit of pressure on yourself, even though you’re going to have a tall mountain to climb to beat him [Corey Heim],” Ankrum said. “That means all the pressure is back on him, right? You know you have three guys chasing you, and you know you have three guys that are going to try to topple you off your hill, right? It’s essentially a game of ‘King of the Hill.'”
“Not saying we’re going to send each other firewall deep, we all know how that ended in 2023. We’re not going to do that; that would be disrespectful. It wouldn’t be just. But 100% you’re going to come into this knowing it’s going to take perfection, even though we chase perfection every single week, it’s going to be the one closest to it that will end up winning.”
For Ankrum specifically, though, winning Friday’s NASCAR Craftsman Truck Series Championship Race at Phoenix Raceway is going to be a tough task, considering the one-mile oval is one of his worst tracks on the circuit. In seven starts at Phoenix, Ankrum has a pair of top-10 finishes, but none since 2020 with GMS Racing.
“Phoenix is probably the worst race on my schedule,” Ankrum admitted. “It used to be Martinsville, but we’ve greatly turned around Martinsville. Phoenix is one of the hardest tracks for me because you essentially have two medium-speed corners, which is what I struggle with most as a driver.”
“We’ve done a bunch of preparation, we’ve probably got about 15 hours of sim work in the past month and a half, just at Phoenix, that’s how long we’ve been preparing for Phoenix. We’ve got an awesome truck. We put a new body on my truck, my Bristol truck, sent it to the wind tunnel, and it showed really good numbers. So, we’ve done a bunch of preparation from mechanical, aero, as well as the driver’s side to make sure we’re as good as we possibly can be this weekend.”
It’s no doubt going to be an uphill battle to win the NASCAR Craftsman Truck Series title this season against Corey Heim, Kaden Honeycutt, and Ty Majeski. However, the good news? If Ankrum is unsuccessful, he and McAnally-Hilgemann Racing will be running it back for the 2026 NASCAR Craftsman Truck Series campaign.
