Kaden Honeycutt walks into Dover Motor Speedway on Friday night as the NASCAR Craftsman Truck Series points leader, and the way he got there is the story.
He won his first career Truck race at Watkins Glen on May 8, in overtime, by 0.902 seconds over Connor Zilisch. He won the ARCA race earlier that same Friday afternoon at the same track. Two wins, two series, one driver, one day — the kind of weekend Sam Mayer pulled off at Bristol in 2020 and nobody else has matched in the six years since. Honeycutt is the second.
He came out of that weekend with a 29-point lead in the Trucks championship over Chandler Smith. Friday night at the Monster Mile, the lead gets its first concrete test.
The race
Trucks Race 9 of 25. ECOSAVE 200 at Dover Motor Speedway. Two hundred laps, two hundred miles, on the one-mile concrete oval. Friday, May 15, 5:00 PM ET. FS1, NASCAR Racing Network, SiriusXM NASCAR Radio.
The Trucks share a Goodyear tire combination this weekend with the O'Reilly Series — Eagle D-6106 left side, D-6148 right side. The left side has been on the trucks at Darlington, Rockingham, and Bristol earlier this year, so the teams have a notebook on it. The right side is new. Goodyear designed it specifically for Dover's concrete surface and the high speeds and heavy loads the Monster Mile asks of the right-side rubber.
"We are bringing a tire setup specifically designed to withstand the track's high speeds and heavy loads, while also helping lay rubber on its concrete surface, particularly given how smooth it is," said Rick Heinrich, Goodyear's NASCAR product manager.
Each team gets five sets of tires for the weekend — three for the race itself, one that transfers from qualifying to the start of the race, and one for practice. Minimum inflation is 18 psi left front, 49 psi right front, 18 psi left rear, 45 psi right rear. The OARS race on Saturday runs the same combination with the same allotments.
The Honeycutt question
Honeycutt enters Dover as the points leader by his own results — not by virtue of someone else's penalty, not by virtue of a DQ, but by virtue of an overtime win at a road course where his team made every call right. The question now is whether his No. 11 TRICON Garage Toyota is fast at the kind of one-mile concrete oval where Trucks racing tends to look very different from a road course.
The honest answer is we'll find out Friday. The right-side tire is brand new for the Trucks at this venue. The left-side, on the other hand, is a familiar piece. Crew chiefs who took notes at Darlington, Rockingham, and Bristol have something to work from.
The thing about Honeycutt is that he keeps doing things that haven't been done in years. The same-day ARCA-and-Trucks sweep at Watkins Glen put him alongside Sam Mayer in a sentence about Bristol 2020 — the only sentence in modern NASCAR history with both of those names in it. Friday's race adds a different test. The weekend of pavement-and-concrete physics he hasn't had to solve yet on his own merit.
The six-in-six
Trucks are now three races into the longest stretch on the 2026 calendar. Texas (May 1, Hocevar in OT) and Watkins Glen (May 8, Honeycutt in OT) are done. Dover is Friday. After Dover the series rolls into Charlotte (May 22), Nashville (May 29), and Michigan to close out the run. Six races in six weekends. The team that comes out of that stretch with the points lead — and the team that doesn't — usually shapes the championship picture into the summer.
Travis Pastrana drives the Kaulig No. 25 RAM the Friday after Dover, at the Charlotte Motor Speedway NC Education Lottery 200. He is not in the field at Dover. The Charlotte race is a separate story. Mention it now because by the time the truck haulers leave Dover on Friday night, attention will already be turning to whatever Kaulig's #25 RAM rotation looks like through that next Friday's intros.
Goodyear elsewhere
For the people who track the Goodyear tire program globally — and there are a few of you reading this — Goodyear's racing tires are also in action this weekend at the Route 66 NHRA Nationals in Illinois and the Nürburgring 24 Hours in Germany. The Dover Trucks race is one of three Goodyear-program weekends competing for crew-chief and engineer attention.
The Trucks get the Friday lights. The OARS gets Saturday afternoon. The Cup runs Sunday. The Monster Mile sees three different field types in three different days, all on Goodyear rubber, with a championship race-week storyline in each one.
For Honeycutt, the storyline is whether the Watkins Glen win was a road-course performance or a championship-form announcement.
We'll find out at Lap 200.