Jared Fryar got the call around 5 p.m. that he had inherited win on Wednesday night in CARS Tour competition following the disqualification for an illegal part on the Kevin Harvick Inc. No. 62 Ford driven by Layne Riggs.
Officially, that’s now four wins for the 2018 Late Model Stock champion, and remarkably two of them have come as a result of the flagged winner being disqualified. Also of note is that these two disqualifications are the only time such a decision has been made in the nine year history of the CARS Tour.
The first time came in 2017 when he was beat to the line by Jeff Oakley at Dominion. An overnight dyno test found improprieties in the engine and a yearlong suspension. Fryar took home the check by the end of the week but it still doesn’t feel like a win should.
“It definitely doesn’t feel the same,” Fryar said. “It’s different not being able to celebrate on the frontstretch and with our team but it was the right call, black and white in the rule book, and you’ll always celebrate a win at this level.”
Fryar, who has raced in the CARS Tour across both divisions for much of its history, praised series leadership for generally making the best possible decisions but conceded a degree of nervousness overnight at into the morning.
“CARS Tour has always done a good job of taking care of the teams and trying to do the right thing but you always get nervous,” Fryar said. “Things don’t always play out the way you feel they should. But in this case, I just thought we had a good case.
“It was right there in the rule book, and if they didn’t address it, take care of it, it would be just a bad look. It’s one of the series co-owners’ cars and it would be a bad look for the rest of the series to not make that right.”
And really, for Fryar, it was more about the entire series than just himself and whether or not he was declared the winner.
“They built something really cool here with the CARS Tour,” Fryar said. “They’ve done a good job taking care of the teams and that’s probably something everyone who races with the series was watching closely to see what they would do.”
Fryar was actually closing on Riggs in the closing laps but just ran out of time. He actually had to make the pass on Carson Kvapil for second twice because the first time was negated by an ill-timed caution. It just took him longer on cooler tires to get around the JR Motorsports No. 8 the second time. All of this to say he very well could have won the race outright.
Fryar isn’t racing full-time this year, but is about to turn his attention to a Virginia Triple Crown run, starting with the South Boston 200 this weekend before attempting the Hampton Heat and Martinsville 300 this weekend too.
“We didn’t plan to take this much time off,” Fryar said. “It was two months before Wednesday because of the rainout at Tri-County so we’re excited to get back to some of our best tracks. We’ve kind of just been picking and choosing the bigger money shows and our best tracks so we feel pretty good about these races coming up. Now we’ve got some momentum to carry into the weekend.”
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