TRUCKS: Peters Trounces Bristol Field

Sprint Cup

TRUCKS: Peters Trounces Bristol Field

Timothy Peters was unstoppable at Bristol…

Tom Jensen | Posted August 22, 2012 Charlotte, NC

So much for the “new” Bristol Motor Speedway.

Timothy Peters and his No. 17 Red Horse Racing Toyota Tundra led every lap to win Wednesday night’s UNOH 200, the first NASCAR Camping World Truck Series race on the recently reconfigured Bristol Motor Speedway.

Track owner Bruton Smith had ordered the track’s upper groove to be ground down after poor attendance during the spring round of NASCAR races here. Smith vowed to narrow the track width from three to two lanes and bring back the rough-and-tumble nature of racing at the 0.533-mile, high-banked oval.

But it didn’t work out that way Wednesday night, as Peters was all but untouchable, finishing ahead of his Red Horse Racing teammate Parker Kligerman, Ross Chastain, Joey Coulter and Brendan Gaughan to win. It was quite a birthday present for team owner Tom DeLoach, as his squad drubbed the field.

“We had great speed in the first practice and then we had a flat tire and it just screwed our whole strategy up and we kind of got off a little bit,” said Peters. “(Crew chief) Butch Hylton is so good about getting us all together and using his experience to calm us down.

“And we kind of met in the middle on some of the changes and, boy, was she flawless tonight,” said Peters in what was surely the understatement of the evening.

The victory was the fifth of Peters’ career and it allowed him to stretch his points lead over the driver he previously was tied with, Ty Dillon, who ran out of gas on the last lap. Peters now leads James Buescher by 17 points, with Dillon falling to third, 25 points back.

Runner-up Kligerman, the newest member of the Red Horse squad, was pleased with his second-place run as well.

“Everyone works so well together that it’s made it so easy to step in here,” said Kligerman. “I’m just so proud of these No. 7 guys. This truck left Monday at 10:30 at night. They’ve worked every day since we signed this deal.”

Cale Gale started from the pole, but it was second-qualifier Peters who took the lead on the opening lap. And for all intents and purposes, the race ended then.

Unbelievably, there were no early cautions at the high-banked short track and a lot of two- and even some three-wide racing, despite the tinkering with the groove. The race began with 81 green-flag laps, the longest opening stretch in the Truck Series since Milwaukee in June 2005.

Peters led all the opening green-flag laps and came out of the pits in the lead after the first caution, which waved when Chris Jones hit the wall.

After a second quick caution, Peters sped away ahead of Todd Bodine. NASCAR Sprint Cup regular Brad Keselowski began pressuring Bodine, taking over second place on Lap 112.

With 41 laps to go, Gale tried to pass Bodine on the backstretch, but the two made contact, cutting Bodine’s left-rear tire and sending him hard into the Turn 3 wall to bring out a yellow.

The race restarted with 31 laps to go and initially it looked like Keselowski might go from second into the lead, but he stumbled and Peters took off again.

Chastain got loose in Turn 1 with 14 laps to go, sending Jake Crum into the wall and bringing out another yellow flag.

That set up a restart with seven laps left. Again Keselowski had a bad restart and the field bunched up behind him, sending pole-sitter Gale hard into the wall and allowing Kligerman to take second.

So then it was green-white-checkered, Peters holding off his Red Horse Racing teammate to take the win.

Tom Jensen is the Editor in Chief of SPEED.com, Senior NASCAR Editor at RACER and a contributing Editor for TruckSeries.com. You can follow him online at twitter.com/tomjensen100.

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Tom Jensen

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