Layne Riggs won the Team EJP 175 at New Hampshire Motor Speedway on Saturday, from the pole, by 0.293 seconds over Chandler Smith. It was his sixth win of the year in the No. 34 Front Row Motorsports Ford, and it ended the NASCAR Craftsman Truck Series regular season with Riggs 99 points ahead of Kaden Honeycutt in second.
Then NASCAR reset the points for the Chase, the ten-driver championship round, and 99 became 25.
What the reset did
NASCAR published two points tables on Saturday: the final standings of the eighteen-race regular season, and the reset standings the ten seeded drivers start from now.
Compare them and the order is identical. Riggs first, Honeycutt second, Smith third, then Christian Eckes, Giovanni Ruggiero, Ty Majeski, Grant Enfinger, Daniel Hemric, Ben Rhodes and Tyler Ankrum. Nobody moved. What changed is the distance between them. In the final regular-season standings Riggs led Ankrum by 410 points. In the reset he leads him by 70, and Honeycutt by 25.
Six of the ten have not won a race this year: Eckes, Ruggiero, Majeski, Hemric, Rhodes and Ankrum. They are in the field on consistency. The other four are Riggs with six wins, Honeycutt and Smith with two each, and Enfinger with one.
The cut line
Stewart Friesen finished fourth on Saturday and missed the Chase by seven points.
He arrived at Loudon 20 points behind Ankrum for the last spot. He led four laps and posted the best finish of any driver below the cut line. Ankrum finished sixteenth. It closed the gap from 20 to seven. Friesen ends the regular season on 408, Ankrum on 415.
Jake Garcia missed by eleven. Brenden Queen, Andres Perez De Lara and Justin Haley are also out. Haley finished ninth in the No. 16 Ram, the best of the five trucks Kaulig Racing entered, and Ram, back in NASCAR this year with Kaulig, ends its first season with none of them in the field.
The race
Riggs led 106 of 189 laps, but not the middle of them. Connor Zilisch took the lead on lap 36 in the No. 71 Chevrolet, led 55 laps across two runs, and was first across the line in both stages. He scored nothing for any of it. The series marks certain drivers ineligible for its points, and Zilisch is one of them. Jake Garcia led 14 laps, Smith 10, Friesen four. Riggs took the lead back on lap 119 and kept it to the finish.
It was not a clean race. Nine cautions took up 56 of the 189 laps, and the infraction sheet ran to nineteen entries, twelve of them for pitting before pit road opened or for having too many crew members in contact with the pit service area.
Front Row Motorsports finished first and second, the No. 34 ahead of the No. 38. The race covered 199.962 miles in two hours, 18 minutes and 59 seconds, at an average speed of 86.325 mph. It was Riggs's eleventh career Truck Series victory and his first since July, when he led 198 of 200 laps at Indianapolis Raceway Park.
The next race is at Bristol Motor Speedway on September 17.
Eighteen races bought Riggs a 25-point head start. They left Friesen seven points short of a start at all.