JOLIET, Ill. – Cole Custer dominated Saturday’s NASCAR Xfinity Series Camping World 300 at Chicagoland Speedway to score his fourth win of the season.
Custer led 151 of 200 laps, along with winning Stage 1, on his way to the victory, 2.9 seconds ahead of Joey Logano. It was Custer’s sixth career win and third at a 1.5-mile track.
“I can’t do anything but thank everyone at Haas Automation and Stewart-Haas Racing because we’re going to take it to ’em in the summer time,” Custer said.
“At these low grip race tracks it is a little bit of everything and that is a testament to our whole team and everyone at the shop that set up the car. When you go to these low grip race tracks and can be good through a whole run it isn’t easy to do.”
Logano led 20 laps from the pole in his first series start of the season.
“We just weren’t quite good enough,” Logano said. “After practice I was able to look at Cole’s times and it was obviously the fastest car and you had to hope we made some good adjustments to keep up. We did and got closer but Cole did a great job running up against the wall like he did that was very impressive. He’s a good and up and coming talent and he proved that today to me at least.”
Christopher Bell finished third, but was disqualified when his No. 20 Toyota was found to be too low in post-race inspection. (Read More)
Michael Annett, Brandon Jones, who rebounded from a pit road speeding penalty on Lap 112, and Austin Cindric rounded out the top five.
“It’s on me,” Jones said. “You can’t speed on pit road if you are going to try to win one of these races. There was two really good guys all day in the race, but I kind of thought we were third-place all race long. All-in-all, this is where we need to be. We had great stages. Great points day – it’s what we need to do to get back into this thing.”
Annett and Noah Gragson caught the race’s sixth and final caution on Lap 173 at the right time as they had yet to pit under green flag conditions. Annett won the race off pit road, but lost the lead quickly to Custer on the restart.
“We tried to stretch it out long as possible and we say good luck and bad luck is 50-50 by the end…how the call goes,” Annett said. “That caution fell at a better time for us got the lead there and track position was important.”
Gragson, Justin Haley, Ross Chastain, Tyler Reddick and Riley Herbst completed the top 10.
It was a tough day for Justin Allgaier, who is a two-time winner at his hometrack. He spun early on Lap 7 and that led to problems later in the race that put him in the garage at Lap 127.
Story Updated at 7:30 p.m. ET
