Majeski Dominates Phoenix For First Truck Series Title

Ty Majeski takes a championship victory lap Friday night at Phoenix Raceway. (HHP/Jim Fluharty photo)

AVONDALE, Ariz. – Ty Majeski didn’t win the most races throughout the NASCAR Craftsman Truck Series season, but he won at the most critical moments en route to his long-awaited first championship.

Majeski, who won back-to-back races at the end of the regular season just to make the playoffs, took a dominant No. 98 Road Ranger Ford F-150 to victory lane Friday night at Phoenix Raceway and bested title rivals Corey Heim, Christian Eckes, and Grant Enfinger to take home the Truck Series title.

The 30-year-old qualified on the pole and led 132 of 150 laps for his sixth career Truck Series win and third of the season. It marked the most dominant Truck Series championship night performance of the playoff era.

Despite three restarts in the final stage that could have easily rattled Majeski’s composure, the Seymour, Wis., native stayed perfect each time in the outside groove and opened up a 3.945-second margin over the final 27 lap green flag run.

With no real competition from behind, Majeski cruised comfortably through slower traffic in the final laps before taking the most important checkered flag of his career to date.

“God, I can’t believe it,” said Majeski, who started as an engineer in the ThorSport Racing shop prior to taking the wheel as a driver. “I can’t say thank you to (team owners) Duke and Rhonda Thorson enough for everything they’ve done for my career. There were a lot of times when a moment like this looked like a far-fetched dream, and they gave me my third opportunity (in NASCAR) after two opportunities that failed.

“You just have to find a way in this sport to set yourself apart from everybody else, and I did that by working in the shop back in 2021. It started as three or four races and I didn’t know what it was going to turn into … but damn, now we’re champions. This is so special and we’re going to celebrate for a while.”

The only blemish on Majeski’s championship night resume was that Heim passed him on lap 39 and went on to win the first 45-lap stage. It was one of only two times all night Majeski was passed under green.

Majeski later won stage two and was in front for all but one lap in the final stage, when it mattered most.

The night’s biggest incident came on the lap-99 restart that kicked off stage three, when Connor Mosack slapped the outside wall in turn two while running sixth and came across the track on the backstretch.

Mosack’s troubles led to a spin in the middle of the field by Tyler Ankrum, which started a chain reaction that ended with nine trucks sustaining some kind of damage and four of them being eliminated.

A six-minute-and-nine-second red flag stoppage followed for track cleanup, during which NASCAR officials assessed a restart violation to Heim for changing lanes before the start-finish line and dropped him to the tail of the lead lap as a result.

It didn’t matter, though. Heim used restarts on laps 108 and 118 to roar from outside the top 15 all the way back to second; he just didn’t have the speed he needed down the stretch to challenge Majeski.

That left the season’s winningest driver – with six victories – one spot short of the championship he’d been hoping for since seeing it all go wrong a year ago at Phoenix in his Championship 4 debut.

Eckes crossed third ahead of non-playoff driver Nick Sanchez and Enfinger, though all three of those drivers were more than six-and-a-half seconds adrift of the race winner.

A late pit stop with 37 laps left, under the penultimate yellow flag of the race, gave Eckes and Enfinger a chance to bolt on 19-lap fresher tires in an effort to go on offense in the final laps. The play didn’t pan out, however, as Majeski’s raw speed was simply too much to overcome.

Taylor Gray, Kaden Honeycutt, Mosack, outgoing series champion Ben Rhodes, and Layne Riggs closed the top 10, but the night belonged to a short-track dreamer who became the third Wisconsinite to earn the Truck Series crown – joining veterans Travis Kvapil (2003) and Johnny Sauter (2016).

“I don’t think it’s sunk in yet, and I don’t think it will for a little while, to be honest,” admitted Majeski on the championship stage. “It means a lot to have won this against the guys we did. Any of the four playoff drivers who made it here would have made this a tough task; this isn’t meant to be easy … but the 11 (Heim), the 19 (Eckes), and the 9 (Enfinger) were all so good throughout the year just as we were.

“We matched them at the times it counted, even when there were other times we were stuck behind them, because we never quit at the shop,” he added. “I love (crew chief) Joe Shear (Jr.) to death too. A couple of short track guys coming out here and doing what we did tonight … that’s awesome.”

He then issued a warning – or perhaps a promise – to the rest of the Truck Series field.

“We have a lot of unfinished business,” Majeski affirmed. “Our tenure has just begun.”

Majeski will be honored for his NASCAR Craftsman Truck Series championship on Friday, Nov. 22 during the NASCAR Awards at the Grand Ballroom inside the NASCAR Hall of Fame and Charlotte Convention Center.