Matt Crafton fought a handling issue throughout the night but caught a lucky break with just a handful of laps left to score a seventh-place finish in the Nashville 200 on Saturday night. Crafton's No. 88 Menards/Ideal Door Chevrolet was fast on short runs, but with just four cautions those short runs were short lived; as the green flag laps ticked off Crafton's issues became more pronounced.
"It just felt like the truck was riding up on the track instead of down in the track like you want it to be," Crafton said. "No matter what we did we couldn't get it fixed. The guys made a lot of changes on the two pit stops but for whatever reason nothing seemed to help. It's almost like something broke or worked loose in the suspension. It was a handful, that's for sure."
The handling difficulties caused Crafton to slowly drift through the back half of the top ten over the final 30 laps. He dropped back to ninth and it looked like that was where he was going to finish - that is until the two drivers racing for seventh directly in front of him came together with just four laps to go.
"I saw Justin Lofton inside of Brian Ickler and it looked like Lofton got loose and slid up into Ickler and left me a huge hole down on the bottom," Crafton said. "They were racing hard for position. They had both passed me just a few laps earlier so I really didn't think I had anything left for them at that point, but they shot up the track. It wasn't our greatest night but at least we had a little good luck there at the end. We'd have much rather have run better than we did, but any time someone wants to give you two positions with a couple of laps to go you take it and don't look back."
Crafton dropped one position in the NASCAR Camping World Truck Series championship standings to sixth, just six points behind second-place finisher Austin Dillon.
Next up Matt Crafton and the No. 88 Menards/SealBest Chevrolet is the Too Tough to Tame 200 at Darlington Raceway on Saturday August 14. The race is scheduled for a 7:30 P.M. Eastern start and will be televised live on SPEED. The race will also be carried live on select affiliates of the MRN Radio network nationwide and on Sirius NASCAR Radio Channel 128 (XM 104).
