Erik Darnell came to Kansas on the heels of a disappointing run at Milwaukee last week looking for a good recovery. While the No. 99 Roush Racing Ford F-150 showed promise in practice, the end result was a far cry from the expectations of the driver and team.

Darnell started eighth in Saturday's O'Reilly 250 at Kansas Speedway, making it his second-best NASCAR Craftsman Truck Series start. The No. 14 of Rick Crawford missed a shift on the initial start of the race, stacking up the field behind him. Darnell dropped back to the 13th position as the trucks behind Crawford scattered to avoid making contact with him. He would appear again in the top 10 at lap 20, when he reported to the crew that the No. 99 "started out tight, but it's starting to come around."

The first caution of the event would come at lap 30 when the No. 12 of Joey Miller spun on the backstretch. The No. 99 came to pit road to take four tires, fuel and an air pressure adjustment. Darnell would return to the track in the eighth position for the restart on lap 35. Darnell dropped to the 12th position when, on lap 40, a caution flag would fly again for an incident with the No. 13 truck.

Darnell restarted in the 13th position at lap 45, and would continue to backslide through the field.

"I'm tight all the way through the corner," Darnell reported to his crew.

The No. 99 Ford was running 17th when the No. 40 and 46 trucks got together on lap 78, bringing out the third caution of the race. Darnell brought the No. 99 to pit road for tires, fuel and a wedge adjustment to help his Ford regain some of the lost ground.

The field went back to green with Darnell staying in the 17th position. The adjustments made helped get the No. 99 heading back in the right direction, moving to the 14th position on lap 89. He would move up to the 13th position on lap 108 when the No. 02 truck of Kelly Sutton made hard contact with the inside wall bringing out the red flag. The race was stopped for nearly 10 minutes while safety workers extracted Sutton from her truck.

"I'm loose by myself, but I'm tight when I'm around other trucks," said Darnell.

The No. 99 Roush Racing crew called Darnell to pit road to service their Ford, sending Darnell back on track with tires, fuel and an air pressure adjustment.

Darnell returned to the track unable to continue advancing positions.

"I might have a tire going down," he reported to the crew. "I went into one and it wouldn't turn."

The 99 crew jumped to the wall ready to service their truck, but Darnell stayed on track. He would continue to ride to the finish, unable to diagnose what had happened to his Ford. He would finish the event in the 26th position.

"We had a decent Ford F-150, we were good in practice. We were getting it adjusted to where it needed to be in the race, but we had a problem at the end. We're not really sure what it was, so we'll take it back to the shop and try to figure out what went wrong. It obviously was disappointing to finish the way we did, but we'll come back from this. We've got a really good team and these guys work extremely hard to give me the best truck they can each week. Whatever happened, we'll make sure it does not happen again.

We'll learn from it and go on. We'll head to Kentucky and see what we can do there," said Darnell.