LOUDON, N.H. — Eighteen races settled the participants. Seven more will decide the champion.
The NASCAR Craftsman Truck Series regular season came to a close in Saturday’s Team EJP 175 at New Hampshire Motor Speedway, locking in the 10-driver field that will race for the championship beginning at Bristol Motor Speedway next month.
For Grant Enfinger, Daniel Hemric, Ben Rhodes and Tyler Ankrum, the “Magic Mile” provided the final points necessary to move on. For Stewart Friesen, Jake Garcia and the rest of the field that’ll now have to wait until 2027 for another shot at title glory, it marked a bitter end to the championship road.
RELATED: Race results | At-track photos
And waiting for all of them at the top of the bracket is the driver who spent most of the regular season setting the pace, and a torrid one at that.
Layne Riggs officially secured the No. 1 seed for the 2026 Chase on Saturday, entering with a 61-point advantage over Kaden Honeycutt and needing just 15 points to guarantee the top position. Riggs earned that nod in short order, clinching after Stage 2 and rounding out the day with a victory for good measure to complete a regular season that established the Front Row Motorsports driver as the benchmark of the Truck Series field.
“I wouldn’t say there’s pressure to perform. I like it,” Riggs said in his winner’s press conference. “We obviously have a points lead still. It’s crazy. We won the race today, and we lost a lot of points after the reset. So, good day for us, but not good for the reset. We’re still 25 up right now, so that’s good going in there. I feel like all year long we’ve been a really strong truck. Obviously, the statistics are there for us and the team. I like the feeling of being the best. It makes everybody else know that you’re the guy to beat. Really look at you hard, try to study you, and it’s a great feeling. It’s the position every race car driver wants to be in.”
The designation is more than ceremonial.
Riggs, as he alluded to, enters the seven-race Chase with a 25-point advantage over second-place Honeycutt and a 70-point buffer between him and Ankrum, the reward for a regular season in which the No. 34 Ford asserted itself as the division‘s most reliable weekly threat. Five victories through the opening 17 races were already the most in the series entering Loudon. A sixth added oomph for emphasis.
Riggs also carried the points lead for much of the summer, with Honeycutt emerging as the most persistent, yet still distant, challenger.
The gap, however, had once been considerably larger.
Honeycutt arrived at Richmond last weekend 100 points behind Riggs before authoring a perfect 76-point afternoon, winning the race after leading 225 of 250 laps. A pair of slow pit stops contributed to a 15th-place finish for Riggs, allowing Honeycutt to trim 39 points from the deficit and keep the No. 1 seed mathematically alive entering the finale.
New Hampshire finally slammed that door.
MORE: Watch NASCAR video highlights
The more volatile drama of the day played out farther down the standings. Only six drivers entered Saturday already assured of a Chase berth, leaving four postseason positions unresolved and 10 drivers mathematically alive.
Enfinger arrived in the strongest shape among those yet to clinch, 65 points above the elimination line, followed by two-time series champion Ben Rhodes at plus-53 and Hemric at plus-35. Ankrum held the 10th and final provisional spot by 20 points over Stewart Friesen, while one point behind Friesen sat Garcia.
From there, the climb became considerably steeper, with Butterbean Queen 47 points beneath the cut, Andrés Pérez 49 back, Tanner Gray minus-59 and Justin Haley 70 points out.
Then the green flag fell, and all those numbers became temporary. Enfinger clinched after Stage 1, while Haley was eliminated; Gray was cut after Stage 2.
It went all the way down to the wire — through a pair of overtimes — with the battle between Ankrum and Friesen not concluding until the checkered flag fell.
Ankrum needed all 175 scheduled laps (plus 14 more) to get the job done. Many of those laps came with malfunctioning brakes.
“I’m not happy, 100%. I mean, I’m freaking mad,” Ankrum joked — mostly — on pit road after the race. “You know, there’s just so many times in my career, I just wish it was a boring day. And honestly, I felt like it was just gonna be a boring day. I think we got to 13th or 14th there at the end of the first stage, but Friesen was within sight. We had that restart in the second stage, and I just went off into Turn 3, and there was no pedal, which is scary here because I don’t want to be the guy to go into the Turn 3 wall and not be able to slow the truck down, but luckily my spotter Eddie D’Hondt gave amazing advice. We worked through the issue. We turned off the left rear brake and we just ran all the rounds to the rear, ran on all the rounds to the front, and that solved half of my problem. Still didn’t have any rear brakes, but yes, I’m like, I’m not happy. I’m happy we made it, but I’m not happy with them. Like, I just wish we would fricking just have a normal day.”
That left Friesen on the wrong side by seven, with Garcia joining him outside the championship field, another four points down from there.
“Yeah, it was what it was,” Friesen said on pit road after the race. “We just didn’t bring enough speed all year, you know? We battled today. … It’s a bummer. We’re definitely a top-10 team. We just had some misfortune. It is what it is. We go back to work and keep building this team up and getting better and better. I promise you that.”
The result carried particular weight after the bubble underwent a dramatic reshuffling just seven days earlier.
Friesen had occupied the final Chase position entering Richmond before a tire issue sent his No. 52 truck hard into the Turn 1 wall and dropped him to last place. Ankrum capitalized with an 11th-place finish, gaining 28 points on Friesen and taking a 20-point advantage into New Hampshire. Garcia complicated the picture further by finishing sixth, drawing to within 21 points of Ankrum and just one behind Friesen entering the finale.
At Loudon, that late-season swing ultimately proved decisive.
With the field finally settled, the emphasis shifts immediately from qualifying for the Chase to surviving it. Bristol opens the seven-race championship run, beginning a postseason in which the regular season has already supplied a clear favorite.
The No. 34 team did more than just accumulate enough points to land atop the grid. Its six wins, sustained points lead and ability to remain the standard even as Honeycutt mounted a late charge — including on Saturday, as he impressively rebounded from a flat tire to finish third — established the type of season that makes anything short of a deep Chase run feel incomplete.
Honeycutt, however, hardly enters quietly.
His Richmond domination provided a forceful reminder that the championship gap is significantly smaller than the regular-season standings once suggested, now even thinner after the points reset, while the previously clinched Chandler Smith, Christian Eckes, Gio Ruggiero and Ty Majeski arrive with varying degrees of race-winning and postseason experience.
Now they know who will join them.
Ten drivers. Seven races. Saturday at New Hampshire was about earning an invitation to that fight.
Beginning at Bristol, simply being on the list will no longer be enough.
