NASCAR Truck Series: Toyota shut out of Championship 4 for the first time
By Asher Fair
For the first time, Toyota drivers have been completely shut out of the NASCAR Truck Series Championship 4, with three Chevrolet drivers and a Ford driver advancing.
Only one driver who advanced to the round of 6 of the three-round, seven-race 2019 NASCAR Truck Series playoffs advanced to the Championship 4 by winning one of the three races in the round of 6.
That driver was Halmar Friesen Racing’s Stewart Friesen, who won the round of 6 finale at ISM Raceway behind the wheel of his #52 Chevrolet to clinch a spot in the Championship 4 for the first time in his career.
As a result, three of the other five round of 6 drivers advanced to the Championship 4 based on the strength of their point totals. Those three drivers ended up being GMS Racing’s Brett Moffitt, Niece Motorsports’ Ross Chastain and ThorSport Racing’s Matt Crafton. They drive the #24 Chevrolet, the #45 Chevrolet and the #88 Ford, respectively.
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The two round of 6 drivers who missed the cut were Hattori Racing Enterprises’ Austin Hill and DGR-Crosley’s Tyler Ankrum, the only two Toyota drivers who qualified for the playoffs.
Because of this, Toyota has been completely shut out of the Championship 4 for the first time in Truck Series history.
Of course, the Championship 4 was only implemented for the Truck Series ahead of the 2016 season. But even still, not since the 2011 season has a Toyota driver failed to finish in the top four in the Truck Series championship standings.
That is set to change this year.
The season for Toyota was a disappointment in large part due to the unfair. Kyle Busch Motorsports had placed at least one driver in the first three Championship 4s, and not since the 2013 season had they not had a driver finish in the top four in the Truck Series championship standings.
Burton and Gilliland didn’t even manage to qualify for the playoffs and led only 65 laps in the regular season, leaving only Hill, who drives the #16 Toyota that Moffitt drove to win last year’s championship, and Ankrum, who didn’t even compete for the entire regular season but was granted a playoff waiver due to his age and ended up qualifying for the playoffs with a victory and a top 20 finish in the regular season standings.
Both Hill and Ankrum did manage to advance from the round of 8 to the round of 6, but that’s where it ended for the manufacturer that had seen so much recent success in NASCAR’s third highest series.
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The conundrum to this whole thing is the fact that Toyota didn’t even struggle in the 2019 NASCAR Truck Series season. They currently lead the series in victories with 11 with just one more race remaining for Chevrolet to potentially tie that mark.
The problem is, six of those 11 wins were earned by part-time drivers, with five going to Kyle Busch and another one going to Greg Biffle, in six starts. One of the other five wins went to Todd Gilliland in the playoffs, but he had already been eliminated from championship contention when he won.