It’s Heim time in Vegas: Corey Heim battles back from early speeding penalty to pick up second win of season in Ecosave 200
By Kyle Foster, photo courtesy of Eric Thompson (Shamboozled.com)
Twitter/X: @NapaKyle @NapaSportsNews
Las Vegas-Corey Heim is off to a fast start this season. It’s unsurprising as he is likely to win mostly everywhere the NASCAR Craftsman Truck Series goes.
But on Friday night at Las Vegas Motor Speedway, Heim picked up his second win of the season in the first three races in the Ecosave 200.
Heim led a race-high 6 times for 42 laps. But after qualifying 16th, he quickly moved his way up to fourth in the opening stage on the way to getting his 13th career win in the Truck Series.
“It means a lot,” Heim explained of the fast start to the season. “I’ve never started a year out like this. I feel like our earliest one was maybe four to six races into the year, something like that. So with the way our short regular season works and how important it is to get wins and playoff points early and stage points and whatnot, I think it’s very important to start off the year right.”
The 22-year-old Georgian also finished fourth in both stages, which made it a good points night. However, he also had to overcome a speeding penalty on pit road, which made him have to start at the rear.
“I thought I ran my lights decent in my practice run,” Heim said of his speeding penalty. “We always get that little pit road run before we take the green. And I thought I’d kind of mapped it out good, but we had a pretty big stack up on the beginning of pit road. And then, of course, try to get back to my normal speed, I think I just overstepped it in a section. Just kind of misread the timing on that, so that was all me.”
All of this is a long time coming for Heim. He has been so close to winning in Las Vegas but has never gotten the job done. In his two races prior, he’s finished in 4th and 3rd, so a win was in the near future.
The most important thing about this win is it puts Heim just 5 points behind points leader and deafening champion Ty Majeski.
Finishing in second was Grant Enfinger. He was able to get close as the race was starting to end before Heim put some good laps together to win by a margin of .825 seconds. This is also Enfinger’s third top-ten finish to begin the season.
Tanner Gray finished in third. He got his fourth top-10 finish in 8 total races on the 1.5-mile track in Sin City. The difference is this was a great chance to win.
“I mean, it feels good,” Gray said of his nice finish. “It’s frustrating when you know you have a truck that can win, and you don’t close it out. That’s really the first time in the entire time I’ve been in the truck series that I feel like I’ve had a legitimate chance to win a race straight up like that.”
Finishing in fourth was Majeski. He had an eventful day. While the truck was very fast, he was racing with Corey Day, and while side-drafting the two touched and put a donut on the side of his door. This also knocked some of the speed out of the car.
“The 7 body slammed me on the front stretch and put a real big kink right in front of the right side tire and started to stall the arrow to our right rear quarter (panel),” Majeski explained. “We didn’t know if it was if the truck was just free, or if the damage was causing us to be free. So we tightened the truck up, fixed the damage, and then we were just too tight after that.”
That being said, Majeski showed why he is the champion as he was able to rebound and get a top-5 finish.
“I’m sure glad that we got the race back going again,” Majeski continued. “If they would have called the race, we’d have finished 12th with
