Pit Strategy Nets Taylor Gray Kansas O'Reilly Win Over Creed

Brandon Jones and Sheldon Creed had, without a doubt, the two best cars in the field in Saturday's NASCAR O'Reilly Auto Parts Series Kansas Lottery 300 at Kansas Speedway. However, it was Taylor Gray, the driver of the No. 54 Joe Gibbs Racing Toyota, who claimed the victory.

Gray gained the race lead with a strategic pit call by his crew chief, Jason Ratcliff, which saw Gray hit pit road a few laps earlier than Jones and Creed, which allowed him to build a time advantage on his competitors due to turning faster laps on fresher tires before they pitted.

Jones was done in by an uncontrolled tire penalty on his final pit stop, and Creed simply couldn't run Gray down for the lead in time to pick up the win. Gray would cross the finish line 0.718 seconds ahead of Creed, which allowed him to secure his second career O'Reilly Auto Parts Series win.

After celebrating the win with a spectacular burnout on the frontstretch, Gray gave credit to the win to his crew chief for making a race-winning strategy call.

"Yeah, first of all, thank you to everybody at Joe Gibbs Racing, Toyota Racing, Operation 300. And how about Jason Ratcliff? Man, that pit call was awesome," Gray said in his post-race interview on The CW.

Gray took the lead with 48 laps remaining in the race, and he never looked back as he led the entire final 48 laps uninterrupted. Gray did have a sweat-it-out moment in lapped traffic in the closing laps, as he tried for a couple of laps to get around Brennan Poole.

That allowed Creed to close in, and make the race for the win interesting for a couple of laps, but Gray's car was too good. Gray said, despite not having the dominant car on the evening, that he knew he had a car under him capable of winning the race if they could just get track position.

"I knew we had a car capable of winning," Gray explained. "I thought [Brandon Jones] was a little better than us before the green flag cycle, but you just have to stay locked in, right? And needed to be a little bit freer, Jason made a really great adjustment on the car, really good pit call, got us in clean air."

Creed, who started at the rear of the field due to issues in pre-race inspection, was searching high and low on the track trying to make up the ground on Gray. But in the end, lapped traffic made it too difficult to run the line he needed to make his move.

"Oh, I don't know. I was kind of trying everything," Creed admitted. "I hit the bottom there with, I don't know, a few [laps] to go, and I thought that might have been somewhere where I could get him. And then we just caught lappers, and they were filling the bottom anytime I wanted to go and try to run it."

He may not have won the race, but by being the highest-finishing Dash4Cash competitor, Creed did take home a $100,000 payday for his effort on Saturday night.

Justin Allgaier, the series point leader, kept his firm grasp on the point lead intact with a third-place finish, while Jesse Love, who drew the ire of his teammate, Austin Hill, in a mid-race crash, finished fourth.

18-year-old phenom Brent Crews would round out the top-10 finishers in the race.

Brandon Jones would come back to finish eighth after rallying back from his late-race pit road penalty, but the Joe Gibbs Racing driver was left wondering what might have been on a night, where he led 67 laps and won Stages 1 and 2.

Kansas Lottery 300 Race Results

1. 54-Taylor Gray
2. 00-Sheldon Creed
3. 7-Justin Allgaier
4. 2-Jesse Love
5. 19-Brent Crews
6. 88-William Byron
7. 0-Cole Custer
8. 20-Brandon Jones
9. 41-Sam Mayer
10. 39-Ryan Sieg
11. 26-Dean Thompson
12. 17-Corey Day
13. 27-Jeb Burton
14. 48-Patrick Staropoli
15. 51-Jeremy Clements
16. 8-Sammy Smith
17. 92-Josh Williams
18. 45-Lavar Scott
19. 44-Brennan Poole
20. 18-William Sawalich
21. 32-Rajah Caruth
22. 02-Ryan Ellis
23. 31-Blaine Perkins
24. 42-Nathan Byrd
25. 28-Kyle Sieg
26. 07-Josh Bilicki
27. 55-Joey Gase
28. 24-Harrison Burton
29. 74-Dawson Cram
30. 96-Anthony Alfredo
31. 35-Blake Lothian
32. 87-Austin Green
33. 91-Mason Maggio
34. 21-Austin Hill
35. 5-Luke Baldwin
36. 99-Parker Retzlaff
37. 1-Carson Kvapil

Add us as a preferred source on Google