Bristol Top 10 Helps Honeycutt Build Truck Momentum
Kaden Honeycutt (45) battles Corey Day (7) and Jake Garcia at Bristol Motor Speedway. (Wyatt Tinsley/Race Face Digital photo)
BRISTOL, Tenn. – Kaden Honeycutt will bring momentum to Rockingham Speedway after a top-10 finish Friday night at Bristol Motor Speedway in the NASCAR Craftsman Truck Series.
Honeycutt stayed inside the top 10 for most of the evening, though he started 22nd due to inclement weather that caused practice and qualifying to be canceled.
The first stage of the Weather Guard Truck Race was a quiet but clean one for Honeycutt, where he rallied up to a 12th-place finish before playing his strategy correctly to flip forward, ultimately scoring eight points in stage two by finishing third in that 65-lap segment.
Once a longer run broke out during the final stage, Honeycutt was among the fastest trucks on track for a majority of the race’s final third. He averaged a running position right where he finished – eighth – but got as high as third at one point as he and Niece Motorsports teammate Bayley Currey vied for a win.
“Everyone at Niece Motorsports did a fantastic job on this DQS Solutions & Staffing/Masked Owl Technologies No. 45 Chevrolet tonight. We just needed some short-run speed; that's all we lacked,” Honeycutt explained. “Our long-run speed was awesome, and I thought we were a top-two truck right there at the end. I wished the late caution never came out because I struggled on the restarts.”
The penultimate caution with 24 laps left was called for brief raindrops and set up a sprint run to the checkered flag. On the final restart, Honeycutt started on the third row behind Currey but fell back after Currey lost a driveline right in front of him on the 14-to-go restart.
“I hated that our teammates on the No. 44 had those driveshaft issues. That pushed us back a couple of rows, but there's nothing they could have done,” noted Honeycutt. “Still a solid night for us in P8, and we'll keep on trucking with this momentum to Rockingham next week.”
Kaden Honeycutt (Wyatt Tinsley/Race Face Digital photo)
Honeycutt sits 11th in points, just five points below the playoff cut line through six races, behind ThorSport Racing driver Jake Garcia entering next weekend’s Black’s Tire 200 at the one-mile Rockingham oval, which returns to the Truck Series schedule for the first time since 2013.
The Willow Park, Texas, native was a part of the open test session the series had at The Rock back in January and believes that experience will benefit him in his return to the facility.
“Yeah, so we tested in January, and we made so much progress at the Rock,” Honeycutt said. “I’m pretty excited about going back, and we are going to take one of our old good cars with us there. Chassis 54 has been really good for us, and we are going to probably just show up on how we ended the test and go to practice … see what we need from there.
“Hopefully, we get to practice and we’ll get to see what comes about, but I think we’ll have a good shot in that one as well.”
Tune into the Black’s Tire 200 at Rockingham Speedway on Friday, April 18 at 5 PM ET on FS1, the Motor Racing Network, and SiriusXM NASCAR Radio, channel 90.
