Grant Enfinger has never been much good on road courses, and he is the first to admit it. "I think this is only my second top 10 at a road course," he said Saturday, a sentence made a little absurd by the fact that he had just won one.
That is the LiUNA 150 at Lime Rock Park more or less in full, and it is a better story than the Truck Series usually hands us. The two drivers who have run this championship all summer, Layne Riggs and Kaden Honeycutt, led the first 62 laps between them the way they lead most things lately, and then the race remembered it was at a road course and came apart.
Here is the part that matters. Three laps to go. Enfinger, in the No. 9 CR7 Motorsports Chevrolet, lines up on the front row next to Gio Ruggiero and the No. 17 TRICON Garage Toyota for a restart. There is a win on the other side of it, his first in more than a season and the first road-course win of his career. The bump-and-run is right there. It is always right there, and plenty of drivers would have used it.
Enfinger beat him clean instead. Off the launch.
"A lot went into that decision, but I didn't want to go in there and purposefully take him out of the way for the win," he said afterward. "I feel like we beat him on the launch. And I think we had a better car."
That is the kind of thing nobody bothers to say anymore. The move-him-and-say-sorry win is the house special in this sport. Enfinger looked at the easy version, decided he'd rather earn it, and earned it anyway. If you want a reason to like the guy, that one is free. He gave the credit to his Chevrolet and, without a trace of irony, to the Lord: "the seas parted and the good Lord blessed us today and we were able to come home for a win."
He wasn't taking any bows about the speed, either. He pointed at the two trucks he figured he couldn't have beaten in a straight fight. "I don't think we had anything for the 11 or the 34 straight up," he said, the 11 being Honeycutt and the 34 being Riggs. He was probably right, which is the other half of the story.
For most of the afternoon this was Riggs and Honeycutt's race and nobody else's. Riggs put the No. 34 Front Row Motorsports Ford on the pole and led the first 34 laps. He won Stage 1. Honeycutt, in the No. 11 TRICON Garage Toyota, won Stage 2. The two of them combined to lead the opening 62 laps of a 100-lap race, which is the polite way of saying everybody else was running for third.
Then Lime Rock did what Lime Rock does. Four cautions and an 18-minute red flag stacked up in the final 40 laps, pit strategy scrambled the order, and the two title contenders slid back into traffic. Fighting their way toward the front, they ran into each other. I have watched points leaders lose races every way there is. Taking each other out, with nobody to blame but the two of them, is the one that stings. Riggs, who led a race-high 48 laps, finished 23rd, first car a lap down. Honeycutt fell to 24th with 28 laps to go and then did the most Honeycutt thing available, which was to drive all the way back to third as if nothing had happened.
Behind Enfinger, the finishing order was pure Lime Rock. Landen Lewis, in the No. 45 Niece Motorsports Chevrolet and chasing his first career win, ran Enfinger down to the stripe and lost by .483 seconds, which is going to sting for a while. Honeycutt salvaged third. Parker Kligerman, the broadcaster who happens to own a piece of Lime Rock Park, finished fourth in the No. 77 Spire Motorsports Chevrolet, on a racetrack that is partly his, which ought to at least come with a discount. Christian Eckes ran fifth in the No. 91 McAnally Hilgemann Chevrolet. Colin Braun, the IMSA sports car regular moonlighting in the No. 25 RAM, drove into the top 10, because road-course week always pulls a few ringers out of the garage and the ringers can, in fact, drive.
The scary moment of the day belonged to Thomas Annunziata. He won Friday's ARCA Menards Series race at Lime Rock and was running second on Saturday when a fire broke out on his No. 1 TRICON Garage Toyota on Lap 79. He got out of the truck and needed help from the safety crew; his team said he was awake and alert. He was taken to a hospital for evaluation and, Tricon Garage said, was cleared and released that night. He had been the story of the weekend right up until his own truck ended it for him, which is about the cruelest trick racing keeps in the deck.
For all the wreckage, the championship barely moved. Riggs and Honeycutt both clinched their spots in the Chase, and Riggs still leads, 44 points up on Honeycutt with four races left in the regular season. He earned that lead the hard way over the last two months, and one wrecked road course did not take it back.
What moved was the cut line below them, which is where Enfinger comes back in. The win jumped him to ninth in the standings, 25 points clear of Tyler Ankrum for the last Chase spot, with Stewart Friesen and Jake Garcia tied and lurking 17 behind that. A driver who spent the spring as a name you skimmed past in the box score now has a trophy and a playoff cushion, both of them earned on the one kind of track he had no business winning on.
The Trucks go to North Wilkesboro next Saturday for the Faith Fest 250, where Chandler Smith is the defending winner and the racing will look nothing like this. Grant Enfinger will not lose a minute of sleep over that. He has a road-course win, a Chase spot, and, for the first time in more than a season, his own name in the results that matter.
Took him a while. He earned it clean.