Joey Logano wins Nationwide at Dover; postpones Ryan Truex’s storybook ending

Joey Logano won today’s 5-Hour Energy 200 at Dover International Raceway, but you don’t want to read about that, right?

Ryan Truex is the talk of the sport after coming within just five laps of winning his first-ever NASCAR Nationwide Series race. In the process, he made a pretty strong case that he deserves a full-time ride in one of NASCAR’s top series.

Today’s race was Truex’s fifth of a planned 12-race schedule and third with Joe Gibbs Racing. In three races with the super-team, he’s finished 10^th, 11^th, and second alongside the pole he earned yesterday at Dover.

Truex deserves the opportunity; it’s just a matter of sponsorship and a team making the commitment.

Truex was chasing down a race-dominant Logano with 47 laps to go and likely would have made the pass if not for Logano bringing out the caution by spinning Tim Bainey Jr., while attempting to put him six laps down.
As it was, Truex stayed out and assumed the lead when Logano came down pit road and held the position until lap 195, when he got caught up behind the lapped cars of Jamie Dick and Brad Teague, who were racing side-by-side. Truex had to let off the throttle and Logano zoomed-by on the outside to win his fourth Nationwide Series race of the season.

Truex was bit by the harsh realities of short track racing.

“We were pretty free that last run, and Joey was catching us on new tires,” Truex said. “I don’t think he would have caught me in five laps, but I just caught traffic at the wrong time. For some reason, those guys were racing each other 20 laps down in front of me, and I had nowhere to go, and that was the end of it.”

While it’s easy to blame the lap traffic for deciding the outcome of the race, I don’t think it would have made a difference. With 25 laps to go, Logano had worked his way up to fourth (restarted seventh), roughly three seconds behind Truex. Ten laps later, he passed Brian Scott for second and was just two seconds behind.
At the same time, Truex started working lap-traffic and developed an oversteer, while Logano, finally free of traffic really started to make up ground.
Logano was cutting nearly a half second off every five laps, setting a much quicker pace than Truex and likely would have caught the leader with three or four laps remaining anyway. I suspect that Dick and Teague’s interference really didn’t make a difference.

The championship standings were also shuffled after today’s race, as Ricky Stenhouse Jr. crashed on lap 26 when he lost control of his Ford off the exit of turn 2. Stenhouse drops from the points lead to second, 12 points behind Elliott Sadler. The complete standings can be found here.

All things considered, you can’t ask for a better finish than that. Let’s do it again tomorrow. Race thread will be posted in the morning with the green flag set to drop at approximately Noon EST for the Autism Speaks 500.
Check it out!

Neat facts: Three drivers named “Tim” started today’s race and all three recorded a DNF. Timmy Hill, Tim Bainey Jr. and Tim Andrews were all involved in accidents.

Joe Gibbs Racing swept the podium with each of the top-three finishers coming from the Toyota super-team: Logano, Truex, and Brian Scott.

My race notes can be found by clicking this link.