It seems no matter what they do, Win-Tron Racing and Sunoco rookie of the year candidate Mason Mingus can’t catch a break.
The team steered to Texas Motor Speedway this past weekend looking for their second top-10 finish of the year in the WinStar World Casino & Resort 400, the first traditional “stand alone” race of the season.
Despite never seeing the 1.5-mile oval before Thursday afternoon’s practice session, Mingus did well. Solid practice numbers and a respectable 20th place in knockout qualifying effort had the Mooresville, North Carolina-based race team heading in the right direction.
From the drop of the green flag on Friday night, Mingus was making most of his fresh tires early and quickly began charging towards the top-15, but unavoidable contact with the wall after being shoved up out of the grove just 41 laps into the 400 kilometer event transformed a promising night into a frustrating one.
While Mingus was able to recover from the incident, the No. 35 Call 811 Before You Dig Toyota Tundra suffered heavy right-side and bumper damage, which affected the handling tremendously. The Brentwood, Tennessee native was able to solider on to a disappointing 19th place finish.
“I thought we were finally going to shake the bad luck at Texas,” said Mingus. “I was extremely happy with my No. 35 Call 811 Before You Dig Toyota Tundra that Win-Tron Racing brought me. I haven’t figured out the group qualifying just yet and unfortunately I put us in a bad spot in round 2 after placing 13th in the first round.
“Our starting position did not represent the truck we had. We fired off in the race really strong and I had started to make up some of the spots we lost in qualifying, until we got wrecked by the No. 8 truck. It has been frustrating to start the year. We have gotten wrecked too many times. I would expect for some of the rookies to make mistakes and it would be more understandable if we were getting caught up in their messes, but week after week, there are veterans causing more wrecks than those of us that are brand new to trucking race.”
Mingus added, “I feel bad for everyone at Win-Tron Racing, they have been putting in so many hours getting all these wrecked trucks put back together. We definitely deserve better outcomes, but we will keep working at it and bringing good trucks to the track. We’ll try again at Gateway.”
Win-Tron Racing co-truck owner Nate Thiesse sympathized with his rookie driver.
“Mason had a really fast truck at Texas, just at the wrong place at the wrong time,” offered Thiesse. “Even though Mason had never seen Texas Motor Speedway before Thursday, he was adapting to the track quickly and moving forward through the field and just found himself a victim again. We’ll keep digging and head to Gateway next week and see if we can’t finally shake this monkey off our back.”
Exiting Texas, Mingus sits 16th in the championship standings, 45 markers from 10th place held by Joey Coulter. Mingus unofficially sits second in the Sunoco rookie of the year standings, behind current leader Ben Kennedy.
Win-Tron Racing PR
