Zane Smith, Front Row Motorsports Continue COTA Dominance

If you want to win a Craftsman Truck Series race at Circuit of the Americas, you’re going to have to go through Front Row Motorsports.

Zane Smith won his second straight race at the Austin, Texas, racetrack on March 25 and FRM won its third straight COTA race (Todd Gilliland won the inaugural race for the team in 2021). No other Truck Series team has been able to win at COTA, though Kyle Busch looked like he had it in the bag until a poorly timed caution at the end of stage two put him behind Smith, who led the most laps (16) en route to the win.

Busch still managed to finish second. Ty Majeski finished third, followed by Tyler Ankrum and Ross Chastain in fourth and fifth, respectively. Ben Rhodes was on track to finish third until he completely lost his drivetrain in the final corner and coasted up the hill to finish 10th.

Top Storylines of the Race

• Taylor Gray made his season debut and began his rookie campaign in the TRICON Garage No. 17 after missing the first three races of the season due to being under 18. Luckily, March 25 is his birthday, so it was very fitting to make his season debut the very day he becomes eligible to run the bigger tracks.
• An interesting qualifying event saw two odd circumstances occur. Travel issues for Spencer Boyd resulted in him not arriving at the track in time, so Stefan Parsons stepped behind the wheel of Boyd’s No. 12 for qualifying. Boyd started at the rear and failed to finish the event in 32nd. Along with this came a surprising failure to qualify for Spire Motorsports and Alex Bowman after his No. 7 had a tire failure on-track and did not post a time.
• IndyCar Series veteran Ed Jones made his NASCAR debut, driving Young’s Motorsports’ No. 20, but his day was over two turns in as a broken trackbar caused Jones to bring out the first caution of the day on lap 1. He finished 36th, dead last, failing to complete a lap.
• Christian Eckes was able to build off his momentum from winning at Atlanta Motor Speedway by winning stage one, but power steering issues in stage two took him out of contention and left him 30th, eight laps down.
• Chastain and Busch seemed to be the class of the field in stage one and two, but Chastain ran into fuel-pump issues right before the end of stage two and had a long pit stop to address the issue, leaving Busch to runaway with the stage two victory. Chastain managed to rebound nicely, moving up 23 spots from the final restart to finish fifth. While the day…