Hornish capitalizes on rare opportunity, dominates at Iowa
May 18, 2014
By Rob Gray
NASCAR Wire Service
NEWTON, Iowa — Sam Hornish Jr.’s NASCAR Nationwide Series countdown at Iowa Speedway nearly followed a perfect path.
Mathematically speaking, anyway.
The
part-time Joe Gibbs Racing driver — who finished second, third or fourth
in his previous three races at the 7/8-mile track — dominated Sunday,
leading 167 laps en route
to an all-smiles triumph in the Get to Know Newton 250 presented by
Sherwin-Williams.
“I just couldn’t be happier right now,” the driver of the No. 54 car said.
Nor faster.
Hornish
pulled away from his only stern competition, Coors Light Pole sitter
Ryan Blaney, on a lap 229 restart and celebrated his third career series
victory.
Blaney excelled in long runs, led 80 laps, but settled for second.
“I felt
like if we had maybe 15 more laps I might have been able to get to him,
but it would be tough to get around him,” said Blaney, who won a 2012
NASCAR Camping World Truck
Series race at Iowa. “But like I said, we just needed to have a little
more short-run speed and we might have had something.”
Regan
Smith, who hasn’t finished outside the top 10 all season, took third,
with points leader Chase Elliott and Elliott Sadler finishing fourth and
fifth, respectively.
But none of these three drivers were able to interrupt Hornish’s or Blaney’s hold on the lead, which spanned all but three laps.
“Would
have liked to have one more caution in there, to see if Ryan and Sam
maybe would have gone down and moved each other up the track and we
could have capitalized,” Smith
said. But a good day.”
Elliott
nurses a narrow two-point lead over both Smith and Sadler in the point
standings and survived two slow pit stops to notch his fifth top-five
finish of the season.
“Just a lot of catch up,” Elliott said of his day in general. “Once we got some laps on the tires, we were OK, I thought.”
As for the pit road issues...
“Hopefully we can have those fixed before next week,” the recent high school graduate said.
Hornish noted that past near-misses at Newton helped steer him to Victory Lane this time in a race marked by five cautions.
“It
really hammered into my head exactly what I wanted out of the car and
each time I’ve come back it’s been able to get a little bit closer to
that, a little bit more of that,”
he said. “That’s one of those things that takes a little bit of
experience.”
Hornish,
34, is slated to run five more races for Gibbs this season, with
enhanced opportunities possibly lurking on the horizon.
And he’s OK with that.
The
uncertainty Hornish faced in the offseason, coupled with the abbreviated
schedule, allows him to “pay back” his wife, Crystal, who in February
gave birth to the couple’s
third child, son Sam III.
“She
wanted two kids, I wanted more than that and we’re at three now,”
Hornish said. “So I’ve got to be there to help out. I look at it as,
each time I get in the race care
is a blessing, but on the same hand, each day I get to be at home and
do things with them — I think yesterday, my 3-year-old cut a big hole in
her mom’s shirt, so I was glad I wasn’t at home. But on the same thing,
I know that those are moments that you don’t
get back.”
And, like he said, he couldn’t be happier — as a part-time driver, and closer to full-time dad.
“I’d rather be part-time in this car than full-time in a lot of [others],” Hornish said. “And this is why.”
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