Fresh off the heels of a debacle of a race down in Daytona, the NASCAR Craftsman Truck Series moves forward to take on Atlanta Motor Speedway for the second straight superspeedway-style race to open up their 2024 season. Who did well? Who had issues? Who suffered some bad luck? Let’s talk about all that and more: this is everything that went down in Saturday’s NASCAR Craftsman Truck Series Race in Atlanta!
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After a first stage that was mostly clean racing, it would be Christian Eckes who would reign supreme. In the video below, you can see the hard racing at the front of the pack with Eckes’ No. 19 NAPA Chevy being aggressively blocked by Ty Majeski. The No. 98 was then pushed aggressively by Eckes but all drivers were able to hold onto their trucks without causing an incident.
While Eckes won the first stage and received a valuable playoff point and 10 points to add to his post-race total, trouble would set in for the No. 19 Chevy after the conclusion of the first stage.
As reported by Bill McAnally Racing on X (formerly Twitter) Eckes’ brakes seemed to have failed.
The issue was so bad that Eckes radioed into his team, telling them that if there was a caution, he’d be in real trouble because he could not slow down. This resulted in him dropping out of the lead pack to avoid calamity.
Following the conclusion of the second stage, Eckes pulled his No. 19 NAPA Chevy behind the wall and officially retired from the race. After this, he and his crew chief were called to the NASCAR Craftsman Truck Series hauler, as reported by Chris Knight. The reasoning why wasn’t clear.
With 10 laps to go in Stage 2, the caution flag flew due to an incident involving Faction46 driver, Thad Moffitt. The incident came at the worst possible time for the team as they had just entered the top 10 and were working their way to the front. The incident occurred with Moffitt driving low and then trying to squeeze into a hole on the backstretch that just wasn’t there. He turned across the front nose of Jake Garcia in the No. 13 Ford which then turned him into the wall. He bounced again off Garcia and then avoided further damage by sliding down the track off onto the apron.
He would continue to race but not without going a couple of laps down due to pitting for repairs.
After a green flag restart to race to the end of Stage 2, Jack Wood found himself in a bit of a hairy situation as well. Coming out of turn 4, he slid up in front of the No. 32 of Bret Holmes but the hole just wasn’t there. The No. 91 of Wood was turned nose-first into the outside SAFER barrier, thus ending his day.
Here’s a view of the incident itself. Just one of those superspeedway racing deals.
Well, this is a familiar sight! After announcing that his Kyle Busch Motorsports company was suing Rev Racing for breach of contract, Kyle “Rowdy” Busch (making his first of 5 starts in the No. 7 for Spire Motorsports) won the first stage.
The early parts of the final stage were littered (no pun intended) with debris cautions, typically stemming from damaged vehicles still running in the race, such as Stewart Friesen’s No. 52. But perhaps the strangest incident in this stretch of debris cautions came from the No. 41 of Bayley Currey who somehow lost his roof during green-flag racing. This is a new one for us here at The Daily Downforce but it did provide us an opportunity to joke about the long-gone NASCAR Convertible Series.
On The High Side on X jokes that Currey just wanted a breath of fresh air.
As the laps wound down, the pack formed a single line at the top of the track. Enfinger was leading when he had a tire go down, prompting Kyle Busch in the Spire No. 7 to jump down low. When he did. Ty Majeski, Corey Heim, and everybody behind them went with him.
With 4 laps to go, the top-4 trucks broke away from fifth-place Daytona winner, Nick Sanchez. The No. 2 of Sanchez never could get a run and Majeski and Heim waited too long to make a move on Busch who had control of this race all the way through to seeing the checkered flag. Kyle Busch kicks off his 2024 series of runs in the Truck Series, just as he did in 2023, with a win, this one coming in Atlanta.
The first checkered flag of this Saturday’s NASCAR double-header is in the books. What do you think of the race today, Daily Downforce readers? Were you pleasantly surprised with how calmly the racers raced? How unsurprised were you by the race winner? Let us know what you think by shouting it out on all our social media platforms. Don’t go anywhere and keep it right here at DailyDownforce.com. We still have one more race today.
Up Next: Xfinity at Atlanta!
