Ricky Stenhouse Jr. Likely To Win 2011 NASCAR Nationwide Series Title, But Won’t Celebrate Yet

The Nationwide Series garage was nearly empty, but the series’ likely new champion lingered along with the twilight.

Sporting a black cowboy hat and boots, Ricky Stenhouse Jr. reflected on a day that virtually wrapped up his first NASCAR championship – albeit by a stroke of misfortune for one of his competitors.

Elliott Sadler was wrecked by Jason Leffler midway through Saturday’s Nationwide race and, combined with Stenhouse’s fifth-place finish, the championship is now firmly in the young driver’s grasp.

Stenhouse leads by 41 points and should easily win the Nationwide title, barring a disaster.

“That’s gonna be cool,” Stenhouse said. “We feel really good about going into Homestead. It’s one of my favorite racetracks...so it’ll be nice going in with this big of a points lead.”

Stenhouse said he wasn’t ready to celebrate, though. He was still mad about not winning the Phoenix race despite leading the most laps.

So how did Stenhouse react to the news when he heard Sadler was involved in the crash? Though he said he felt sorry for Sadler’s luck and didn’t want his championship rival to crash, it was also a relief to know his points lead was padded.

“My spotter said the 2 was in (the wreck) pretty bad, but then I didn’t ask any more questions,” he said. “I was kind of upset about how loose we were on that restart, because we had a really fast race car up until that point.

”So I sat there under that red flag for awhile and was just kind of sitting there, and I was (finally) like, ‘What happened?’ Nobody said anything.

“I was like, ‘Hello?’ And they were like, ‘Sorry, I was watching it.’ They told me what happened, and at that point, I knew. I was like, ‘Whew.’”

Stenhouse Jr. said he was more conservative for the rest of the race. But he won’t be next week at Homestead, even though he only needs to finish 37th or better to clinch the title.

“We’ve still got one more race to go – anything can happen,” he said. “Obviously, you’ve got the start-and-parks that are hopefully going to be able to clinch it after four or five laps. But we’re going to be going hard at the win at Homestead.”