Update: NASCAR has disqualified Zane Smith from his runner-up position. It does not change the dynamic of the final Four but the details can be found at the bottom of the post.
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Before the season started, Carson Hocevar predicted it would take five wins to claim the Truck Series championship and that he felt like his Niece Motorsports team was up to the challenge.
At the time, it was a bold claim because Hocevar had yet to win in the Truck Series, and there he was at Daytona proclaiming himself as capable of getting the job done. In winning at Homestead on Saturday afternoon, he now has four victories, and will race for the ultimate win next month at Homestead.
Do the math — that would be five.
There was also this on Saturday morning.
When Hocevar asked rhetorically on Saturday morning what he needed to to officially advanced into the championship race, a fan offered this solution instead.
Is Hocevar going to call his shot for Phoenix now too?
“No, no, I’m not,” Hocevar said. “If we work really hard and as much as we have, we will have a shot. I could be leading coming to the white, yellow comes out and we make the wrong call, so when you call your shot, you end up looking dumb 99 percent of the time.
“This team is plenty capable of winning the championship. There are also plenty of other teams capable of winning the championship. So, we’re going to focus forward and do what we’ve done to get us here.”
The other teams capable of winning the championship were also decided in dramatic fashion on Saturday. They are Ben Rhodes of Thorsport and Grant Enfinger of GMS Racing to go alongside Hocevar and Corey Heim, who previously locked in with a win at Bristol.
How those final two sports, the ones claimed by Rhodes and Enfinger, was the stuff of dramatic legend.
Rhodes was objectively awful in the first stage of the race, finishing 27th by the first planned break, so crew chief Rich Lushes called him down pit road with 53 laps to go and left him out the rest of the way. It didn’t win them the race but finishing third was enough to get them the final transfer spot by two points over Nick Sanchez.
“Our truck was so bad all day long, we had nothing else to do,” Lushes told NASCAR.com after the race. “Like we had to do something different from everybody else so it was the only call I really had. It worked.”
Lushes and Rhodes won the 2021 Truck Series championship together and it’s because of the unorthodox approach that the driver sometimes doesn’t even believe will produce merit.
“I was so terrible the whole race, I didn’t think it was going to work out,” Rhodes said. “So I mean, that’s just plain and honest. Right? I’m never gonna hide that. But I had faith in the call. Every time we’re down, Rich does a really good job of making some some call off-strategy nobody else is doing. And he pulls it out and we end up winning something. Right now, it’s advancing. I’m just proud of him for the call, you know? But yeah, at the time, I was just shaking my head and I said, ‘Yes, I’ll give it a try. Here we go again.’
“I mean, we almost won the championship last year on a call like this. So, you know, this is a big deal. That leadership is important — the ability to make calls like that and have the confidence to let yourself be thrown to the wind if that’s what happens. He does that. He doesn’t care what happens. He just wants to win. Ballsy move, for sure. I’m all for it. He’s got faith in me to back it up. But sometimes I say, ‘Man, that’s a little too ballsy for me.’”
Enfinger claimed the other spot, a combination of seven stage points and a fourth-place overall finish, but it was more about what befell Nick Sanchez and Christian Eckes, the latter of which was penalized twice on the day for passing early and then on pit road.
“I haven’t seen it and I knew it was close, I thought I turned right at the start finish line but either way, I sped on pit road,” Eckes said. “It was a common trend of stupidity on my end. I ruined the season for my guys. They work too hard. It is what it is.”
He said entering the day that he needed to be perfect.
“Not even close to perfect and that’s on me,” he said.
Sanchez was not particularly competitive from the drop of the green flag. Then, on lap 35, Sanchez ran into the back of Tanner Gray during a pit road stack up. The damage to the Sanchez car was significant.
“I wasn’t really good all day,” Sanchez said. “I was kind of confused on the balance a little bit. Obviously the 19 (Christian Eckes) didn’t really have a lot of good luck so I feel like I was in that position to make it because he kind of got screwed on a couple of things. But I need to a better job of noticing the balance of the truck and where it was going and fixing that.
“And yeah, me hitting the 15 (Gray) obviously took me out of it at the end. I was racing him and he got in front of me. And I’ve had my marks to go pit road, and here, especially as the pace falls off, you don’t know if they’re running the bottom or they’re going to pit lane. And it’s not an excuse because I hit him. It’s my fault but just gotta learn from it. Second time I’ve done it this year. Did it in a Vegas. You can’t make those mistakes and expect to make the championship race and that’s on me.”
Then there was defending champion Zane Smith, who finished second in a race that he had nothing other recourse but to win, based on everything that went wrong at Bristol and Talladega. He had a shot but just couldn’t get that last little bit.
“I felt like I was going to be fine after the second stage but we didn’t make the right change,” Smith said. “We got way too tight and maybe it was just the heat cycles, or no, we came down pit road so I don’t know.
“We took control of the race and just had no rear grip to defend the track position.”
Then there was Ty Majeski, who didn’t absolutely have to win, but either needed to win or score a ton of points. He finished second in the first stage but was an afterthought the rest of the race. He too was eliminated.
Zane Smith DQ
The Front Row Motorsports team was disqualified for improper window bracing.
Specifically, language in the rule book that says ‘windshield braces must be used. Windshield braces and installation must conform to the (above) drawing.
The team released the following statement:
“We are disappointed in the disqualification from today’s NASCAR Craftsman Truck Series event. We will continue to work and discuss with NASCAR officials back at the NACAR R&D Center in Concord, N.C. before making any further comment.”
Smith is stripped of all stage points earned and will be credited with a last place finish. Because Rhodes owned the tiebreaker over Sanchez, the playoff standings remain the same regardless of this outcome.
Matt Weaver is a Motorsports Insider for Sportsnaut. Follow him on Twitter.