If you didn’t watch that Texas Xfinity Series race you just missed out on one of the best finishes ever. Sam Mayer came out on top of the situation. By just 0.002 seconds, it ties the second-closest finish in the second-tier NASCAR series. It is the closest Xfinity Series finish ever on a non-superspeedway.
The highs of victory and the lows of defeat. There is no other way to describe the end of that race. Sam Mayer, Ryan Sieg, door to door. RSS Racing against JR Motorsports. David versus Goliath, except this time, Goliath raised his hands in victory.
Mayer has figured out how to close these races. For his fifth checkered flag in his Xfinity Series career, he made it dramatic. The young driver couldn’t believe it after he got out of the car.
“That’s absolutely unreal. This Carolina Carports Chevrolet was certainly as fast as Xfinity Internet,” Mayer said on the fronstretch. “But this team, the amount of adversity we had to fight this entire year so far, and to come to a mile and a half that I want to say I’m good at, but it took a lot. It took every ounce of me to do that today, but so proud of my team. Mardy on top of the box. Kevin on top of the roof. He might have won that race because he told me, bottom of three and four was better, so props to him.”
NASCAR has the big teams and the small teams. It is always exciting to watch one of the little guys lead laps late and really challenge for a win. While Sieg was able to take down the other fast JR Motorsports drivers, he couldn’t beat all four of them.
Sam Mayer got a run late as he started to run the bottom lane of the track and was able to take the lead away. Then Sieg crossed him over to get door to door and put the 1 car up into the wall. It wasn’t enough, though.
This is the closest finish of the NASCAR season. It beats out the three-wide Atlanta finish in the Cup Series by one-thousandth of a second.
Justin Allgaier sweeps, Sam Mayer cleans up
Combined, Justin Allgaier and Sam Mayer swept the stages and won the race. That’s a really good day for JR Motorsports. While Allgaier had a disappointing P3 finish after leading the most laps, he is going to get a win.
It doesn’t help that this is the second race this season where Allgaier has squandered a late lead. At Phoenix, he had a comfortable lead and was cruising to the finish when he lost control of his car and went into the wall.
This week things fell apart after a pair of late restarts. Getting too caught up fighting off other cars, Allgaier found himself falling back and having a hard time catching up to the leaders again. While he bounced back to take P3, it was a letdown after the day he had overall.
Allgaier swept the stages and Sam Mayer made sure to tidy it all up at the end and clinch the win for JR Motorsports. A finish like that, you can’t really complain as a NASCAR fan. Texas Motor Speedway might be salvageable after all.
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