Saturday night's Built Ford Tough 225 NASCAR Craftsman Truck Series race at Kentucky Speedway was a great way to kick off the second half of the season for the truckers.

Not because it was the very best race of the season — it wasn't — but because of what it set up for the stretch run. The truth is, Johnny Benson handily dominated the Kentucky proceedings, leading 94 of 150 laps in his Toyota Certified Used Vehicles Tundra to best his Bill Davis Racing teammate, Michael Annett and the Pilot Travel Centers Toyota.

No, the finish wasn't an edge-of-your-seat thriller like Michigan or Mansfield. But the title race certainly seems as though it will be. Check this out: With 13 of 25 NCTS races in the books for 2008, Benson leads Matt Crafton by just one point and Ron Hornaday Jr. by five points. With Rick Crawford 92 points back in fourth, followed by Mike Skinner (-101) and Todd Bodine (-111), it truly is a six-way fight for the championship. That's pretty remarkable, given that the season is past the midpoint.

And the combatants understand what's at stake. "Our goal is to try and win the championship," said Benson, who scored his second NCTS victory of the year at Kentucky. "Man, everybody that has got up there in the points has definitely had issues. If you would back up the last two seasons — with the amount of issues that we all have had — there's no way that any of us should win the championship based off the last two years. It's been amazing on that aspect. It's great for Craftsman to have a points battle that's just unbelievable. It's a lot of fun to be a part of, I can tell you that."

"This was great," said Crafton, who continued his dream season with a solid third-place finish in the No. 88 Menards Chevrolet Silverado, his seventh top-five finish of the year and third in a row. "We just need to keep doing what we're doing for the rest of the year, getting top fives and wins, and hopefully we'll be the best in the end."

As clichéd as it sounds, with a points race this close, every race - indeed, every position — is critically important. At Kentucky on Saturday night, Hornaday rebounded from a potentially disastrous unscheduled pit stop for a loose tire to finish 10th. Granted, 10th isn't where the defending champion wanted to finish, but it was far better than 27th, which is where he was after his pit stop.

With the difference between 10th and 27th being 52 points, the fact that he and his Camping World No. 33 Chevy team salvaged a decent night out of a wretched one might have huge implications before the year is out.

No one knows that better than Benson, who in the previous race at Memphis had his only DNF of the season when he lost a motor and finished 33rd. "I think we've been good all year," said the new NCTS points leader. "We had our problems at Atlanta, which kind of hurt us there.  We had problems at Martinsville. Of course, last week (Memphis) we had the engine problem. That was probably the huge hurt because that was preventable and the other ones may have not been. Just week in and week out Trip (Bruce, crew chief) gives me something that is capable of winning the race, or at least running in the top-five, for sure. If we can see the front and get there, I'm clearly confident that if we work hard, we'll get there."
 
Now, it's off to O'Reilly Raceway Park at Indianapolis for Friday night's Power Stroke Diesel 200. Don't miss it, because by this time next week, the points standings well could be jumbled again — something that's likely to keep happening all the way to the season-finale at Homestead-Miami Speedway in November. And that ought to be a fight to the finish.

Tom Jensen is the Senior NASCAR Editor for SPEEDtv.com, the former Executive Editor of NASCAR Scene and a contributing Editor for TruckSeries.com.  He is the author of "Cheating: The Bad Things Good NASCAR Nextel Cup Racers Do In Pursuit of SPEED," and has appeared on television and radio shows to discuss NASCAR racing. Jensen is the President of the National Motorsports Press Association.  Jensen is the 1997 National Motorsports Press Association Writer of the Year and has won numerous national and state awards for news reporting, columns and feature writing.