NASCAR Nationwide Series Results At Texas Motor Speedway: Ricky Stenhouse Jr. Wins

Streaking away from Denny Hamlin and pole-sitter Paul Menard after a restart with six laps left, Ricky Stenhouse Jr. won Friday night’s O’Reilly Auto Parts 300 Nationwide Series race at Texas Motor Speedway.

The victory was Stenhouse’s second in six starts this season and the fourth of his career. It was also the fourth straight Nationwide win at Texas for Roush Fenway Racing.

Menard finished second, with Kasey Kahne passing Hamlin for third in the closing laps. Austin Dillon ran fifth, and series points leader Elliott Sadler faded to 12th during the final short run.

The middle third of the event featured scintillating racing that mirrored the action from Fontana, Calif., three weeks earlier. Menard started fifth on a restart on Lap 104 but quickly regained the lead, after Blake Koch’s No. 15 Chevrolet bounced off the inside wall on the backstretch to cause the third caution.

Throughout the ensuing green-flag run, Menard kept Stenhouse at bay, with the margin fluctuating between .2 and 1.5 seconds. On Lap 143, Sadler passed Stenhouse for the second position but couldn’t gain ground on Menard, as the lead-lap cars began a round of green-flag pit stops.

After the pit stops cycled through, Menard held a 2.188-second lead over Stenhouse, who surged past Sadler for the second spot on Lap 151. Menard maintained an advantage of more than two seconds until the caution flag flew for the fourth time on Lap 162, when track lighting failed on the inside of the backstretch for the second time Friday night.

Dillon and David Ragan stayed on the track under the yellow, while the rest of the leap-lap cars came to the pits for tires and fuel. NASCAR red-flagged the race after Lap 169 as track workers replaced the faulty breaker that proved to be the source of the light failure.

After the race restarted on Lap 173, Stenhouse blew past Dillon into the lead on Lap 177, with Menard in pursuit. Stenhouse stretched the margin to more than a second before the engine blew in Kurt Busch’s No. 54 Toyota on Lap 187, necessitating the fifth caution of the evening.

Here are the full NASCAR Nationwide Series results from Texas Motor Speedway: