MOORESVILLE, N.C. — Despite entering this weekend’s NASCAR Cup Series round at Sonoma Raceway, 24th in the standings Zane Smith has a lot to gain.
The driver of the No. 38 Front Row Motorsports Ford Mustang remains alive in the In-Season Challenge tournament and could still make the playoffs with a victory.
Smith matches up with Joe Gibbs Racing driver Ty Gibbs, who is 19th in the standings, this weekend at Sonoma. The top finisher of the two advances to the semifinal round of the tournament, which pays $1 million to the winner.
“It’s cool to still be alive in this bracket challenge,” Smith said during a midweek media call. “My last week’s pairing with Chris (Buescher), I knew we were gonna have our work cut out for us just with Chris’ stats, but it’s still racing and things happen and we were able to advance.
“I know going into this week if we did advance it was going to be either Ty or A.J. (Allmendinger), who are both great road racers, so you know they’re gonna have speed in Sonoma, and I think as will I.
“I enjoyed the repave at Sonoma and had a lot of fun there last year, so I’m hoping for another solid day. I hope to advance this week as well, but with that said, I’m focused on beating everyone and hopefully advancing into these playoffs.”
Smith said, however, his team is more focused on trying to win a race than to capture the In-Season Challenge.
“I don’t want to speak for Ty, but I feel like we’re both in the boat as of today — we’re going to Sonoma to try to win the race and advance to the playoffs,” Smith said. “We’re real close together in points and with that we’re focused on having a good day, but our weekends are gonna shake out where different things and different kinds of adversity is going to thrown at us.
“We’re each gonna have our own strategy, so we could run nowhere near each other and never see each other all day, but probably with this bracket challenge and how things work out in this sport, we will be right next to each other all day long. Who knows?
“All I can hope for is to have a shot at it and, hopefully, keep this consistency up that we’ve been having,” Smith said. “I’m sure I’ll get told once or twice about where he’s running or what’s going on with him and what strategy they’re doing and many other things, but, ultimately, we’re trying to advance to the playoffs.”
Smith, who returned to Front Row Motorsports during the offseason, is happy with his team’s performance this season.
“I don’t know how many times I’ve finished 11th this year, but I felt that if I was one spot better, it would be talked about a lot differently of a lot more top 10s, but I’m really proud of the speed we’ve been able to bring,” Smith said. “The capability we’ve had of making our cars better, which is incredibly important, and I’m just having a lot of fun working with this group. For this back half of the year, like I mentioned, I really wanted to just try and stack up these top 10s and hopefully find myself in contention on one of these late-race restarts in the first few rows and try to execute a win.
“At Atlanta, we came close to that, leading some of those closing laps, which was good fuel for my whole team and myself,” he added. “I believe our speed is there to do it, as a team we’ve got to execute the whole day. Sunday races are long and there’s a lot of opportunity to mess up, but with that said, everything just has to go right and we’re getting closer to doing everything right. I think that’s why you’re seeing these more consistent top 15 days and racing inside the top 10, collecting stage points here and there. Those things just go a long way, so hopefully we can keep that going.”
