Premium Motorsports’ second-consecutive withdrawal of Cole Whitt and the #98 team meant the remaining 40 drivers would all make the field. His warm-up lap of 92.997mph left him 39th on the grid, and the backup car penalty would drop him behind Michael Annett, who didn’t complete a timed lap in the #46 Pilot / Flying J Chevrolet. After managing just 25th in last Friday’s opening practice, he spun in nearly the same spot during qualifying and crashed once more, sending the team to a backup car. This past spring, contact from Regan Smith in Turn 2 sent him spinning into the outside wall, handing him a 32nd-place run. With the exception of a 15th-place finish in the fall of 2014, he had finished no better than 25th, and had yet to come home on the lead lap.
Martinsville, however, has not been one of Stenhouse’s best tracks.
Then, last week at Talladega, he finished 5th, his second-consecutive Top Five in a restrictor-plate race. After going down two laps in the early stages, Stenhouse pulled a stunning rally in the closing stages, and tied his career-best finish with a 2nd to Kevin Harvick.
And at Bristol, he ran a paint scheme reminiscent of Clauson’s XFINITY Series car from 2008. At the Kokomo Speedway, he drove Clauson’s midget as the honorary pace car, then ‘parked it” in victory lane. As a close friend of Bryan Clauson, who passed away in a USAC event in August, Stenhouse participated in a number of tributes. His best of these finishes was easily his most emotional. The finish, which came in Stenhouse, Jr.’s 145th series start, was his second of the season and first since Kentucky this past July, 15 races ago.īetween Kentucky and Martinsville, Stenhouse had inched his way from 21st to 19th in the standings, buoyed by three Top Tens and two Top Fives. picked up the 2nd last-place finish of his NASCAR Sprint Cup Series career in Sunday’s Goody’s Fast Relief 500 at the Martinsville Speedway when his #17 Louisville / Fastenal Ford was involved in a single-car crash after 21 of 500 laps.
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