Ryan Newman made a perfect debut in the NASCAR Craftsman Truck Series.
Making his first career start, Newman traded the lead twice with Kevin Harvick Inc. teammate Ron Hornaday in the final eight laps before hanging on to win Saturday’s E-Z-GO 200 at Atlanta Motor Speedway.
It was a doubly satisfying day for KHI as Hornaday, who finished second, made up much of the ground in the series championship battle that he lost last week with points leader Johnny Benson with a 29th-place finish at Martinsville, Va.
“I’m not sure if I should just retire now,” Newman said. “He raced me clean. He left me room; he could have pinched me off twice, but he raced me like a gentleman. Obviously he’s racing for a championship and I’m well aware of that too.”
Newman held off a last-lap challenge from Hornaday, who gained ground on his bid for a fourth series title.
“I don’t know if I can say it, but second stinks,” Hornaday said. “I just missed the corner a little bit, that one corner off of (Turn) 2. If you miss it, you miss three-tenths to a half a second. He ran me down and he got the momentum.”
Hornaday, who started the day trailing Johnny Benson by 65 points in the standings, trimmed the lead to 31 with three races to go. A victory would have given Hornaday an additional 10 points, but he didn’t fault Newman for not giving him the win.
Denny Hamlin finished third and was followed by Todd Bodine, Scott Speed and Erik Darnell.
Benson was seventh and Kyle Busch, T.J. Bell and Brian Scott rounded out the top 10.
“We definitely didn’t have the week that we thought we were going to have. We always run really, really good here. We’ve had some mechanical issues that have taken us out of some great finishes. We just didn’t run good today—that was the bottom line,’’ said Benson.
“I don’t understand. We were good and decent in practice—and we thought we were going to be in the race. We started the race and we struggled with something. We had something that was amiss and we just have to try to find it,” he added.
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