NASCAR’s third tier national series continues to deliver the best racing of the three and now they can add history making to its reputation. The NASCAR Camping World Truck Series moved into Nashville Superspeedway on Saturday with series veteran and three time champ, Ron Hornaday, Jr., poised to set a new record for the most consecutive wins. He had already become the first driver in the Truck Series to win four in a row with wins in Milwaukee, Memphis, Kentucky, and Indianapolis.
Before the race began Hornaday and the team tried to downplay the feat and deflect some of the media attention by claiming Nashville is “. . . just another race”, and “. . . we’re going to go out there and do the same things we always do.” But there was no denying that everyone on the team knew what was at stake.
The last time anyone in NASCAR had won more than four in a row was way back in 1971, and it was done twice that year in what was then called the Grand National Series (Today’s Sprint Cup). Bobby Allison was the first to do it. His streak began at Charlotte in May of that year and continued with wins at Dover, Michigan, Riverside, and Houston, until he was beaten by Richard Petty at Greenville-Pickens Speedway.
And then Richard Petty was the next driver to win five in a row beginning with a win in July at Albany-Saratoga Speedway in Malta, NY. He followed that up with wins at Islip, Trenton, Nashville, and Atlanta. Ironically, Bobby Allison was the driver who broke Petty’s five win streak when he won the next race at Bowman-Gray Stadium in Winston-Salem, NC.
Hornaday was raised in the desert town of Palmdale, California and started his career at the side of his father who raced in the old NASCAR West Coast Series. He became a popular star in the street stock division at Saugus Speedway, near Los Angeles, and eventually moved up to the NASCAR Southwest Tour series where he won a championship in 1992, the same year he made his Winston West debut.
Driving in both the Winston West and Southwest Tour events during the Winter Heat series of races at TucsonRacewayPark in Arizona got him noticed by the late Dale Earnhardt. The story goes that when Earnhardt called, Hornaday thought it was his team playing a joke on him and he hung up! But Earnhardt called back and convinced him that he was, indeed, who he said he was. Hornaday signed to drive Earnhardt’s truck in the inaugural year of the Craftsman Truck Series and he won six races that year and finished third in the points. The following year he was the Series champion, a feat he repeated in 1998, and again in 2007.
Since 2004, Hornaday has been driving for NASCAR Sprint Cup star, and long time friend Kevin Harvick. In that time Hornday has recorded 19 wins, including his current string of five in a row.
There’s no reason to believe Hornaday and the team can’t win their sixth. They have the dominant truck in the series right now as witnessed by their 216 point lead in the championship standings over second place Matt Crafton. The only hitch in the plan for six, however, is the fact that the next race is in two weeks at Bristol Motor Speedway. Winning there requires luck as much anything else. It’s an easy matter at Bristol to be running well and get caught up in somebody else’s bad luck and have an early end to your night.
If he can defy the odds and bring home that sixth consecutive victory, it will place Ron Hornaday, Jr. on a page all by himself in the NASCAR record book.
