Layne Riggs has won twice the number of races than any of his Chase competitors but now must rally in order to win the 2026 truck championship. Riggs, with six wins this season, sits second in the standings at 37 points behind Kaden Honeycutt. Honeycutt earned his third win of the year a couple of weeks ago at Kansas Speedway.
The other Chase drivers have combined for three wins all year and while Chandler Smith (71 points behind) and Gio Ruggiero (minus-72) are within 75 points of the lead, it appears to be a race between Riggs and Honeycutt — unless another driver can rattle off at least a couple of wins in the final five races. The Honeycutt-Riggs battle pits Tricon Garage and its No. 11 team — the team that won the title last year with Corey Heim — against a Front Row Motorsports team of Riggs that has had the swagger for much of the season.
In each of the three NASCAR national series, the regular-season champion no longer leads the points. In Cup, Denny Hamlin trails Kyle Larson by 40 points; in O'Reilly, Justin Allgaier dropped to fourth and is 30 points behind Sheldon Creed. As the trucks go green Friday to open a Charlotte triple-header weekend on the 1.5-mile oval, Honeycutt will take the same approach that earned him the points lead.
"I just focus on winning the race. I think if you try to do anything other than that, you’re just pulling yourself out of the gate," Honeycutt said in his news conference after the Kansas win. "That’s all this team focuses on.
"That’s our mentality. We just focus on winning. And winning takes care of points." Riggs tried to make a move for the win at Kansas, only to hit the wall and finish 19th.
If he had finished second in that race, he would have been only 20 points behind Honeycutt. "I felt like I should have been a lot smarter and thinking bigger picture and knowing that I could have just easily come out second and had a lot better shot," Riggs told me and other reporters after Kansas. "I just made it a whole lot harder for myself." Riggs won at Charlotte in May, so he enters the race Friday believing he can at least cut into Honeycutt’s lead.
"We can’t change anything in the past," said Riggs, who has opened The Chase with finishes of 32nd and 19th. "We’ve just got to look forward to the future." And the future holds races at Charlotte, Phoenix, Talladega, Martinsville and Homestead. "We’re not out of this," Riggs said.
"Five races is a lot. We can flip the script pretty fast. … We’ve got some good tracks coming up for us. …
I’m going to keep grinding."
