KANSAS CITY, Kan. — The opening two races of the Craftsman Truck Series postseason have been anything but normal for No. 1 seed Layne Riggs. Yet despite the struggles, Riggs remains 37 points behind championship leader Kaden Honeycutt leaving Kansas Speedway.
While Honeycutt dominated Saturday‘s Race to Stop Suicide 200 by making it a clean sweep of all three stages and leading 111 of 134 circuits, Riggs had multiple woes that plunged him to 19th at the checkered flag.
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Before a four-hour, 47-minute red flag due to intermittent precipitation, his No. 34 Front Row Motorsports crew had a slow stop, leaving all five lug nuts on the left-front wheel loose, dropping Riggs deep in the running order. Once the race resumed, he drove from 16th position to ninth place in the opening lap of the restart. Six laps later, he rocketed to the runner-up position, glued to the back bumper of Honeycutt.
That‘s where Riggs remained for much of the final third of the race. In one last attempt to track down Honeycutt, he clipped the outside wall while running against the boards through Turns 3 and 4, cutting the right-front tire with two laps remaining. The No. 34 Ford limped to the finish, losing 17 positions — and 17 points.
“I tried too hard,” Riggs said of running against the wall, inching closer to the No. 11 Toyota. “I got up there like I had been doing at the very top, and when I got into [Honeycutt’s] wake, it was a little too much. These trucks are so sensitive that when you barely touch the right-rear, it sucks the right-front around.
“I’m disappointed in myself. I let my crew down, for sure. I felt like I should have been a lot smarter, thinking bigger picture and know that I could have easily come out of here second and had a lot better shot. But I just made it a whole lot harder for myself. It’s going to be something I beat myself up on all week long before we go to Charlotte.”
The motto within the four walls of Front Row Motorsports is to hunt trophies. Drew Blickensderfer, competition director at Front Row, consoled Riggs for a couple of minutes while the six-time 2026 winner sat in his hot rod before unbuckling. Blickensderfer wanted his driver to put Kansas in the rearview immediately.
“Bob Jenkins (team owner) wants winners here — we don’t want to just ride around,” Blickensderfer told NASCAR.com on pit road. “You’ve got to judge that, but now is not the time to beat yourself up over it. Now is the time to try to look forward and go win races. Go win the next three or four. This team and that driver is capable of doing it.”
After entering The Chase presented by Mobil 1 opener at Bristol Motor Speedway with a 25-point cushion over Honeycutt, Riggs has lost 62 markers in the opening two events to the No. 11 truck. The No. 34 bunch had another pit-road mishap in Thunder Valley, causing Riggs to lose multiple laps and take the checkered flag in 32nd position after owning the first two stages.
While Riggs acknowledged his concern about the pit-road mistakes, he took full ownership of the Kansas defeat.
“I should have been thinking about the next five races, but I was thinking about putting it on one,” Riggs stated. “But we’re not out of this. Five races is a lot; can flip the script pretty fast. We just have to stay on our toes; we have to be better on pit road than we did today. We have some good tracks coming up for us.
“Definitely going to need to digest this one before I can move on. I need to think about it, process it, put it in the past and then we can focus on the next one.”
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Given Riggs’ clear advantage in wins, stage victories and laps led in 2026, he believes the deficit to Honeycutt is more than manageable. For Honeycutt, the mission is simpler: continue doing what he‘s done through the first two races and put Tricon Garage in position to win consecutive Truck Series championships.
“I just focus on winning the race,” Honeycutt said in his winner’s post-race press conference. “I think if you try to do anything other than that, you are pulling yourself out of the gate. That’s all this team focuses on — that’s our mentality. We just focus on winning, and winning takes care of points and everything that comes in handy.”