SPARTA, Ky.\u2014Ron Hornaday Jr. scored a milestone 50th NASCAR Camping World Truck Series win Saturday in the Kentucky 225 on a cold night of racing at Kentucky Speedway.<\/p>\n
Hornaday held off the late-race charges of runner-up and polesitter Austin Dillon during the final 10 laps. Dillon, who protected his lead in the series points standings, pulled to within two-tenths of a second of Hornaday but could get no closer.
\n
\nThe air temperature at the start of the race was 48 degrees, and the track temperature was 53 degrees.<\/p>\n
Hornaday led the final 11 of 150 laps on the 1.5-mile speedway after leader Todd Bodine pitted. The key to Hornaday\u2019s win came on his last pit stop for four tires and fuel. Hornaday led four times for 42 laps.<\/p>\n
Hornaday talked more about his 50 wins than his late-race duel with Dillon, a 21-year-old in his second full season in the series.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt will mean a lot when I sit on the front porch in the rocking chair with my grandkids and I can tell them that I won 50 races,\u201d Hornaday said. \u201cAustin is an up-and-coming star, and at age 53, I beat him.\u201d<\/p>\n
Hornaday has three wins at Kentucky Speedway. His first career truck win came at Tucson (Ariz.) Raceway Park on April 8, 1995\u2014the same month Dillon turned 5.<\/p>\n
Dillon tried to catch Hornaday over the final 15 miles but finished 0.438 seconds back.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe gave \u2019em hell at the end, but the old man whipped my tail,\u201d Dillon said. \u201cI gave it everything I had on those last laps.\u201d<\/p>\n
Dillon extended his lead in the standings to three points over third-place finisher James Buescher with five races remaining.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe took on right-side tires on the last two green-flag stops, but it wasn\u2019t good enough to hold off 2 (Hornaday) and 3 (Dillon),\u201d Buescher said. \u201cIt was a good points night.\u201d<\/p>\n
There were a track-record 18 lead changes among 11 drivers.<\/p>\n
Rookie Nelson Piquet Jr. and Brian Ickler in Kyle Busch\u2019s Toyota rounded out the top five.<\/p>\n
Ty Dillon, Austin\u2019s younger brother, finished 18th in his first NASCAR national series race.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt was awesome, a blast,\u201d Ty Dillon said. \u201cWe actually ran out of gas twice. We came here to learn, and I felt like they all knew we were here.\u201d<\/p>\n
Rounding out the top 10 were Ricky Carmichael, Bodine, rookie Cole Whitt, Dakoda Armstrong and David Starr.<\/p>\n
The next race in the series is Oct. 15 at Las Vegas Motor Speedway, also a 1.5-mile track.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
SPARTA, Ky.\u2014Ron Hornaday Jr. scored a milestone 50th NASCAR Camping World Truck Series win Saturday in the Kentucky 225 on a cold night of racing at Kentucky Speedway. Hornaday held off the late-race charges of runner-up and polesitter Austin Dillon during the final 10 laps. Dillon, who protected his lead in the series points standings, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[45],"tags":[15775],"class_list":["post-8175","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-nascar","tag-nascar"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/newenglandracingnews.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8175","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/newenglandracingnews.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/newenglandracingnews.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/newenglandracingnews.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/newenglandracingnews.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=8175"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/newenglandracingnews.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8175\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/newenglandracingnews.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=8175"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/newenglandracingnews.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=8175"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/newenglandracingnews.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=8175"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}