Austin Dillon scored his seventh career NASCAR Camping World Truck Series victory, winning Saturday’s UNOH 175 at New Hampshire Motor Speedway.
Erik Jones finished seventh and saw his points lead on Matt Crafton shrink to seven points with six races left. Crafton finished second with Johnny Sauter third.
MORE: Race results
MORE: Points standings
“I thought it would have been a smaller lead than that after that run,” said Jones, who left immediately for Kentucky to compete in Saturday night’s Xfinity race there. “It’s nice to salvage a decent day out of it. Definitely not what we wanted. We struggled all day.”
Crafton said “we had about the third-best truck here and came out second.”
Crafton was worried when he and Dillon didn’t pit with 14 laps left but many others behind did.
“I’m like, uh-oh, this might be bad,” Crafton said.
It worked out and he scored his 10th top-five finish of the season.
HOW AUSTIN DILLON WON: Simply, he had the strongest ride all weekend. He was fastest in practice, won the pole and scored the victory to finish the weekend. He also led 80 of the 175 laps.
WHO HAD A GOOD DAY: Johnny Sauter tied his season-best finish with a third-place result. … Timothy Peters finished fourth, marking the first time this season he’s scored back-to-back top-five finishes. … John Nemechek followed his first career series win last weekend at Chicagoland Speedway by finishing fifth Saturday. … Dalton Sargeant was ninth in his second career series start.
WHO HAD A BAD DAY: Tyler Reddick, who entered the race 10 points out of the series lead, spun twice and was never a factor. He finished 15th and is 19 points behind series leader Erik Jones in the season standings. … Cole Custer, who scored his first career series win at this track last year, saw his race end after contact with the wall and placed 24th. … Kyle Busch had a tire rub that forced him to pit during the last caution. He finished 11th.
NOTABLE: Kyle Busch had finished no worse than second in his three previous series races before Saturday’s 11th-place finish. … Akinori Ogata, who is from Japan, finished 18th in his series debut.
QUOTE OF THE DAY: “When you have a truck like that you don’t want to give it away in any shape or form,” Austin Dillon said.
NEXT: The series races Oct. 3 at Las Vegas Motor Speedway.
