Ronnie Bassett Jr. claimed his first ever win in CARS Tour competition on Saturday night in the Throwback race at Hickory Motor Speedway but he didn’t cross the finish line first.
That was Ryan Millington, who spun Connor Hall in Turn 4 coming to the checkered flag, but had his apparent win taken away by race control. This was a decision with precedent, most recently applied to the Pro Late Model division race at Tri-County last summer when Gavan Boschele spun Ashton Higgins in the final corner and has his result disallowed.
As for Hall and Millington, the former was closing in on the latter in the final laps at Hickory and the raced side-by-side for several laps. Hall got to the bottom but couldn’t complete the pass. He slipped and drifted into Millington to take the lead. In return, Millington drove deep into the final corner and sent Hall around.
The precedence stood and race director Danny Willard had to disallow the results here too.
Thus, Bassett went from third in the final corner to winning for the first time since returning to Late Model Stock tour racing after a multiyear stint in which the storied short track family attempted to go NASCAR Xfinity Series racing.
It was an emotional triumph for the Bassetts, who had virtually the entire pit area stop by victory lane to congratulate them, a reflection of just how well regarded the Winston Salem natives are to the discipline.
“Any way you can win these races is awesome,” Bassett said on the FloRacing broadcast in Victory Lane. “It shows we were in contention and had a shot. We didn’t have the best car over a long run but we hung in there and kept fighting.”
It’s been a tall task for Bassett Racing to get back to where they were in Late Models before going NASCAR racing and that’s to say nothing of their shop burning down in 2016 as well. CARS Tour has really proven to be a challenge and they have responded accordingly this season.
“We’ve had a stressful year and a half coming back Late Model racing and we’re gradually getting better,” he said. “It’s not that way you want to do it but anytime you can get one, you take it. I just want to know what happened now.”
There was a fight at the time of his victory lane celebration.
Earlier in the race, Andrew Grady spun into the backstretch wall, following hard racing and contact from Landon Huffman, making his CARS Tour return in a Carroll Speedshop car. Grady was on the outside of Mason Diaz, driving the Stephen Nasse Racing car, and in the stack-up, Huffman got into Grady and Carson Kvapil drove into the back of Huffman.
“In the words of Denny Hamlin, Landon Huffman is a hack,” Grady said on the broadcast after the crash. “It’s no wonder he lost his ride with (Nelson Motorsports). We’re 60 laps into the race, we’re running 10, 12th, whatever the hell it was and he just never turned me loose. Brand new car and now it’s killed but it’s all good. We’ll catch him after the race.”
Indeed, there was a confrontation, and it involved the TORP/Grady bunch, the Huffman/Carroll crew and Chad Bryant Racing trying to break it apart. CARS Tour founder Jack McNelly was also in the middle of it, at one point shouting at Andrew Grady through it all.
JR Motorsports crew chief Bryan Shaffer also confronted Huffman, who told Frontstretch.com, that Grady has crashed more races than he has started, and that he doesn’t care what Grady thinks because he’s got track championships and race wins, where he hasn’t seen Grady win once in 15 years.
Once CARS Tour officials sort out the fight, there will be suspensions stemming from it too, as the series has never tolerated physical confrontations in its decade of existence.
The official results will also need to be sorted out as Hall crossed the line third, even after being spun, but race control had contemplated placing him at the rear of the field as being involved in an incident although there was no caution.
Thus, the results below are unofficial until otherwise corrected:
- Ronnie Bassett Jr.
- Bobby McCarty
- Connor Hall
- Kade Brown
- Brenden Queen
- Treyten Lapcevich
- Mini Tyrrell
- Connor Zilisch
- Josh Berry
- Katie Hettinger
- Landon Huffman
- Jacob Heafner
- Brandon Jones
- Cody Dempster
- Isabella Robusto
- Carson Kvapil
- Michael Fose
- Brent Crews
- Mason Diaz
- Buddy Isles Jr
- Brandon Pierce
- Andrew Grady
- Graham Hollar
- Conner Jones
- Deac McCaskill
