The smallest budget team in the NASCAR Truck Series just won their way into the championship race at Phoenix Raceway and now have an entire month to prepare for it.
CR7 is a legitimate underdog operation comprised of a really good driver, an exceptional crew chief, an experienced team manager and owners who have just recently committed to go all-in. Grant Enfinger survived a tumultuous first round but still faced an 11-point deficit to start a round that features Talladega, Homestead and Martinsville.
Enfinger went out and scored 19 points across the first two stages and now he no longer even had to win not that he viewed it that way.
“We decided to be aggressive all day,” Enfinger said. “Now that wasn’t like, ‘hey, I’m going to try to make a 20 percent move work’ but if it’s a 70 or 80 percent chance of working, we’re taking it all day long.
“That mentality didn’t change at the end either. I wasn’t going to push anyone into the wall and wreck all of us in the process. I wasn’t going to aggressively side draft or block but we were going to do everything we could.
“But yeah, we had good stage points and that maybe changed the game for us but we maintained the same mindset all day. I felt like we needed to win one of these three races and I didn’t want to lose sight of that.”
It was a fair question because he was leading at the end where Enfinger might have needed to choose between accepting a good points day or being crashed. Fortunately for him, the crash unfolded behind him and the carnage throughout the day affected several other championship contenders instead.
Nick Sanchez looked just as capable of challenging a dominant Enfinger for the win but was crashed from the front twice, the second instance damaging his spoiler, with a pit road NASCAR official approving the fix but then calling him down pit road before the penultimate restart.
“I’m so frustrated because the officials on pit road were okaying the spoiler,” Sanchez said.
“We pushed the spoiler but obviously knew what we were doing and I think honestly they just measure the spoiler and it was at more of an angle than how it should be going through tech.
“Obviously, you never want to go through something like that and I finished 22nd running around by myself at Talladega when, who knows, maybe on that restart, I could have gained 5-10-15 spots. I could have won the race. I never even got the chance and I’m really disappointed in their part.”
Taylor Gray finished second, which sounds nice until realizing that he probably needs a win this round, and really needs it now that Enfinger won and skipped ahead of everyone else on points.
“Heartbreak,” Gray said, upon falling to 13 points below the cutline.
“The 9 (Enfinger) winning definitely didn’t help us at all in terms of pointing our way in,” Gray said. “You’ve got (Christian Eckes) and (Corey Heim) that have been the class of the field all year and then you have (Ty Majeski) that is fast but have moments where they don’t put races together to match the speed they have.
“So to be honest, I need (Majeski) to have a really bad day and I need us to have a really good day so things can fall the right way and we could be super fast so I don’t know. I think we will be good.”
Majeski was frustrated after getting caught up in that wreck for a lot of reasons.
“I hate this kind of racing; it’s not racing,” Majeski said.
He spent all race trying to be somewhat conservative and just make it to the finish and he still had nowhere to go and got totaled when Tyler Ankrum spun off the nose of Daniel Dye to trigger that big crash.
“We were and we weren’t,” Majeski said of being conservative. “We were trying to put ourselves in position to move forward for sure but without being too aggressive and putting ourselves in a bad spot. There is a happy medium here that I just don’t know that I have quite found yet. ..
“We haven’t been able to get track position and keep it all day. We always find ourselves at the fail end of the pack at one point and then we are playing catch up all race. We made a mistake in Stage 1 and cost ourselves points and then at the end of the second stage, we wen third lane, when the 91 one got the 52 loose and then we went from fourth all the way to the back again.
“Those were stage points that we gave up and I hope they aren’t the difference after Martinsville.”
For his part, Ankrum expects he needs to win but he also thought he would always need to and feels confident about these next two races too.
Updated playoff grid; 1/3
Grant Enfinger W
Corey Heim +30
Christian Eckes +29
Ty Majeski +5
—
Rajah Caruth -5
Taylor Gray -13
Nick Sanchez -20
Tyler Ankrum -23
Focus on the finale
But back to Enfinger, this is legitimately a team that just doesn’t have the same resources as Tricon Garage, McAnally Racing and ThorSport. They have no wind tunnel data and less sim time but they do now have a month for Jeff Stankiewicz to focus entirely on the championship race at Phoenix.
They can do this while everyone else is fighting their way to join them in the desert.
“We’re not a championship team yet, but we can be,” Enfinger said.
Stankiewicz is ready to do the work.
“Chevy has been working really hard with us on the sim side and now we’ve got a better understanding of our simulation stuff now that all, all the truck measurements are correct and the same, working on tire models and aero maps, things we work on with McAnally,” Stankiewicz said.
“So once we kind of got all that dialed in, and honestly we had to go run some of these trucks a few times to really understand the aero balance because we don’t get wind tunnel information, so we just had races where our nose weight was off, things we just had to learn by doing it, racing.
“So, we’ve spent all season learning. There’s some things we could have done better. But we have a really good driver and now we can just focus on Phoenix, put all of our eggs in one basket. Grant is hungry and there’s no reason we can’t go there in a month and win.”
Matt Weaver is a Motorsports Insider for Sportsnaut. Follow him on Twitter.