Stenhouse Dominating In Sam’s Town 300 Win

Las Vegas, NV – March 10 – Capitalizing on a late race charge, Ricky Stenhouse Jr. drove to a convincing win in the NASCAR Nationwide Series Sam’s Town 300 at the Las Vegas Motor Speedway over defending race winner Mark Martin.

“The car was definitely good out front and when we got the lead out to four or five seconds, I just kind of rode around to save it in case there would be anymore late restarts,” Stenhouse stated. “I found a line I liked to run and the car really came around to it, and I think we just had the car to beat today.”

Stenhouse Jr. and Martin proved to be the class of the field throughout the second half of the event with Martin leading the way for 44 laps before Stenhouse made his way around and into the lead for the final time in lap 146. A late race restart as the result of a caution flag for Jeremy Clements trip through the front stretch grass set up a final duel between the two with Stenhouse getting the jump on the veteran Martin, driving to a 5.904 second margin of victory.

“That was one serious beat down he (Stenhouse Jr.) put on me on that last restart,” Martin stated afterward, “I tried to keep up with him and about wrecked four or five times and that was it.”

Pole-sitter Elliott Sadler led early in the race but experienced problems with the splitter on the car and found himself deep in the field shortly after the halfway mark when the team elected to fix the issue on pit road under caution. Sadler sliced his way forward from there and drove his way to a solid third place finish.

“There was a lot of guts and effort by the team today, “Sadler said, “The splitter was dragging and we decided to fix it and went to the tail of the field but we drove back to the front.” “Anytime you can drive back to the front, you have to be happy with that effort.”

Trevor Bayne worked his way to a fourth place finish after falling back on the final restart and afterwards said he thought he had a car to contend.

“It’s good when you can say a top five finish is disappointing, “Bayne said, “We want to be in Victory Lane every week and there for awhile I thought we had a shot at it.” “We just got too tight at the end, “Bayne continued, “so it’s a decent run.”

Brendan Gaughan also advanced in the closing laps to take the checkered flag in fifth place while rookie Cole Whitt finished sixth after running as high as third in the late laps.

Austin Dillon finished in seventh while Justin Allgaier, Sam Hornish Jr. and Kasey Kahne rounded out the top ten.

The Sam’s Town 300 featured eight lead changes among eight drivers and was slowed by the caution flag seven times for a total of 32 laps.

Dan Margetta

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