For the third race of the 2022 Camping World SRX Series season, the series returned to Stafford Motor Speedway in Connecticut as it neared the schedule’s halfway point.
Stafford is where the inaugural 2021 season kicked off, and at 2022’s said halfway point, there are now three winners in three races. Saturday (July 2) night’s victor was an unexpected one, at least in terms of how the night unfolded, with Ryan Newman.
Marco Andretti and Tony Stewart traded the lead and dueled for most of the evening with Greg Biffle in tow, but one of the later restarts turned the “Rocketman” loose.
Newman finally made it into the top five after the two-thirds-mark restart on lap 51, having rode around in the back half of the pack all night and unable to make moves on the cars in front of him. He moved to fifth right after the restart, and a daring single-corner pass of both Biffle and Paul Tracy moved Newman into third.
This put Newman in prime position for a front-row seat to the Stewart-Andretti battle, and the caution with 11 to go allowed Newman to get into position for a run at Stewart. He got one after the restart, scooting to his former owner and teammate’s inside and nosing by, and subsequently set his sights on Andretti. Newman passed Andretti with six laps remaining, trading a bit of paint with the No. 98 as they exited turn 4, and pulled away to win his first career SRX race.
It’s a testament to — similar to NASCAR’s Cup Series — how even-keeled the competition has been in 2022, even if starting further back in the pack means drivers don’t have as much of a chance to move forward. Newman made it happen, starting ninth and carving his way through the field late.
That said, Newman, Stewart and Bobby Labonte have both finished in the top five every single race this year. There’s no clear front-runner yet, but they’re — forgive me as I borrow a recent NASCAR-based term — the “Big Three” of SRX in 2022.
Newman’s SRX competition comes in the first year of his career without scheduled NASCAR racing since 1999, having spent 22 years in any capacity in the Cup Series, and he becomes the second straight SRX winner with primarily NASCAR experience. The win helped him retain his mantle as SRX points standings frontman.
Though tempers didn’t flare as much at Stafford as they did at South Boston Speedway, things still got heated, and it was all in front of a sold-out crowd. With SRX in its second season and still finding its…
Click Here to Read the Full Original Article at Frontstretch…