(Photo: Sam Draiss | The Podium Finish)
LONG POND, Penn. — Matt DiBenedetto gained ground on the NASCAR Craftsman Truck Series playoff cutline with a 10th-place finish while Stewart Friesen fell further behind after crashing Saturday at Pocono Raceway.
DiBenedetto and Friesen are among a group of four drivers fighting for three playoff spots on points. Entering Saturday’s CRC Brakleen 150, the drivers, which also included Nick Sanchez and Matt Crafton, were separated by a total of five points.
However, DiBenedetto gained ground on the group with a complete race at Pocono. Though he finished 10th, he earned points in both stages and accumulated the most points of any full-time driver in the field.
DiBenedetto said that his Rackley WAR team battled overheating issues on Saturday.
“We were going to have a truck that was capable of top three for sure,” DiBenedetto said. “Once it started overheating, it pulled power the rest of the race and I could really noticeably feel it, so we had to overcome that and deal with that all day and still came home with a top 10 and gained a bunch of points.
“Just keep on really doing what we’ve been doing. We haven’t even been focusing on the guys that we’re racing so much, we’ve been just more focusing on our own race and internalizing it and keeping smart, smooth races.”
(Photo: Sam Draiss | The Podium Finish)
Friesen, who entered the 60-lapper at the Tricky Triangle a point below the cutline, found himself in a position to leapfrog Crafton and onto the playoff grid ahead of the regular-season finale. But with nine laps to go, Friesen got a part of a crash exiting Turn 1 that took out several contenders.
Instead of running 11th, Friesen finished 32nd.
“If nothing else, we’ll have some eyes on us going into Richmond,” Friesen said. “We qualified good there last year, but we lacked some long-run speed, so we worked at the TRD sim this [last] week on some of that. We’ll see what shakes — hopefully, we can maximize stage points and do a good job and be ahead of messes like this.”
Nick Sanchez won the pole and led seven laps, but had a spin that he couldn’t recover from and finished 19th. However, he earned points by finishing in the top three of each of the first two stages. Crafton had a quiet afternoon, recording just one stage point and coming home 14th.
Both drivers gained ground on the cutline because of Friesen’s incident. Sanchez is 21 points ahead and in ninth while Crafton is nine points ahead and in 10th.
None of the four drivers are locked into the playoffs. A win at Richmond Raceway on Saturday would assure that any of the four drivers would secure one of the final three spots.
Saturday’s regular-season finale is set for 7:30 p.m. ET on FS1, MRN and SiriusXM NASCAR Radio.
