Friday night at Charlotte Motor Speedway, Johnny Sauter prevented deja vu from striking all over again as he scrambled for a sixth-place finish with his No. 98 Nextant Aerospace / Curb Records Toyota Tundra in the NASCAR Camping World Truck Series’ North Carolina Education Lottery 200.
“That’s not the way I race and it’s not the way I want to race,” Sauter said. “It’s just not the way my team races.
“But the situation dictated what we had to do in this race so we worked on our Nextant / Curb Tundra throughout the day to get it raceable — and I’m happy that Dennis and the guys did that and we proved our point near the end of the race.”
At that 13-to-go restart, Crafton, Sauter and Burton lined up behind eventual winner Kyle Busch in second, third and fourth respectively. But when the green flag flew, Sauter got caught in a three-wild melee on the frontstretch and fell back to eighth.
From there, he battled back a couple spots and when Burton was forced into a laps-down truck and crashed on the frontstretch after Busch had taken the white flag, the race was over.
“We started this race with the clear directive that we had to finish this race with this truck without it getting torn-up,” Connor said. “So we ran a careful, premeditated race all night long.
“I think dropping back as Johnny did on that last restart was just a case of doing the right thing — not necessarily what we’d prefer to do.”
The best news is Connor and Sauter’s crew loaded a completely intact Tundra into the hauler that, after some additional analysis, will be good-to-go with Texas, another lightning-fast 1.5-mile venue where Sauter’s had great success, coming up in two races.
“So we’re going to the chassis dyno Monday to try and figure out what was wrong. It might have been a case of us being a little over-cautious, but we did what we needed to do because having a piece we can tune on going forward and not having to re-start from scratch is absolutely critical.”
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