PHOENIX – 2022 NASCAR Camping World Truck Series champion Zane Smith ended the 2021 Truck Series season unemployed. A runner-up finish in the title chase came too little, too late after just three top-five finishes all year; a potential NASCAR Cup Series ride with Chip Ganassi Racing fell through once the team was sold.
That left Smith hitting the phones, looking for work. He kept calling.
And calling.
And calling.
Turns out the one place that actually cared about Smith wasn’t even on his list.
“Front Row [Motorsports] was not one of the places that I called,” Smith explained. “I didn’t even think there was an opportunity. I had a ride pretty much set up, and I was excited about it, but it was literally about 30 minutes later after, yeah, after these 120 phone calls probably in the past couple days. I had gotten a call from Front Row Motorsports that they wanted me to run their truck.”
Front Row General Manager Jerry Freeze had originally been eyeing Smith to drive their Cup car. But he also felt Todd Gilliland, who helped establish the No. 38 Truck, was deserving of the promotion instead. So both sides came together and talked about Smith staying in the Truck Series.
What Freeze didn’t know was how quickly Smith would fit in.
“The one thing I didn’t know when I had that initial conversation,” Freeze explained, “Was the chemistry that Zane already had with these guys. He’s friends with them outside of racing, grew up racing against our race engineer. So they were all buddies. And when Zane walked in the door, it was like these guys had been working together for years.
“It was a perfect fit all the way around.”
How quickly Smith made everyone remember the talent that made him a rising star of the sport in 2020. He was just 21 years old then; at 23, he won three times and collected 18 top-10 finishes in 22 races. The comeback peaked with a career-defining performance at Phoenix Raceway, sweeping the first two stages before executing a stunning charge from 11th during the final laps.
Smith got himself stuck in traffic after a late caution for Hailie Deegan’s crash caused a number of different strategies on pit road. Championship rivals Ben Rhodes and Chandler Smith went for two tires while Smith took four. A slower stop by the FRM pit crew, an issue for the team all night long, dropped Smith back in traffic with less than 15 laps left to make up the difference.
But no one on FRM batted an eye. The strategy…
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