John Hunter Nemechek and the No. 4 Mobil 1 team roll into Charlotte (N.C.) Motor Speedway for the North Carolina Education Lottery 200. Nemechek is coming off a 12th-place finish at Circuit of the Americas in Austin, Texas. Nemechek currently sits at the top of the NASCAR Camping World Truck Series points standings leading Ben Rhodes by 33 points. The second-generation driver also leads the series in stage wins (seven), laps led (338), fastest laps run (170), average finish (4.0), average running position (5.38), driver rating (117.6), top-five finishes (five), and is tied for the series lead with two wins.
In NASCAR Camping World Truck Series competition at Charlotte, Nemechek has four starts at the 1.5-mile facility. His best career finish at Charlotte was sixth in 2020. Across his four starts, he has completed 99.6 % (534/536) of the laps, has an average start of 20.3, and an average finish of 12.3. Nemechek finished inside the top 20 in both of his NASCAR Cup Series at Charlotte last season including a 13th-place finish in the second race. He finished 12th in his lone Xfinity Series start at his home state track in 2019.
The Triple Truck Challenge presented by Womply in the Camping World Truck Series concludes this weekend. This year’s program consisted of the events at Darlington (S.C.) Raceway, Circuit of the Americas in Austin, Texas, and concludes at Charlotte (N.C.) Motor Speedway. An extra $50,000 is on the line Friday night. Sheldon Creed and Todd Gilliland captured the $50,000 bonus at Darlington (S.C.) Raceway and Circuit of the Americas.
Nemechek is an eight-time winner in Camping World Truck Series action, winning at least one race each season from 2015 to 2018 for his family-owned team, NEMCO Motorsports, and returning to victory lane this year with KBM. Across 110 career starts in NASCAR’s third division, the second-generation driver has compiled two poles, 947 laps led, 33 top-five and 57 top-10 finishes resulting in an average finish of 12.8. The North Carolina native qualified for the Camping World Truck Series playoffs in each of his two full-time seasons, finishing eighth in the championship standings in both 2016 and 2017. He was voted the series most popular driver in 2015.
Eric Phillips returns to KBM to lead the No. 4 team this season. Phillips led the No. 18 team at KBM in its debut season in 2010 and helped build the organization into one of the premier teams in all of NASCAR before departing at the end of the 2014 season. Under his guidance, the No. 18 team won eight races in its inaugural campaign and became the first team in Truck Series history to capture an owner’s championship in its first season of competition. In 2014, the Illinois native led the No. 51 team to an owner’s championship and his team’s 10 wins spearheaded KBM to a single-season Truck Series record of 14 wins. His 39 career Truck Series victories make him the winningest crew chief in Truck Series history, with 29 of those coming while at KBM. At Charlotte, Phillips has collected three wins with Kyle Busch (2010, 2011, 2014), four top fives, eight top 10s, and an average finish of 7.4.
John Hunter Nemechek, Driver Q&A:
How special is it to race in front of a hometown crowd at Charlotte?
“It’s definitely a big ordeal to race in front of friends, families, all the employees here at KBM, and all of our partners that are around this area as well. Being a hometown driver and myself being from Charlotte, North Carolina, it is definitely a place that you want to win and make everybody proud. It’s a special race and racetrack. It’s Memorial Day weekend as well, so thank you to all the men and women who sacrificed your lives. I’m just proud to be an American.”
The past couple of races haven’t been what you or your team have wanted, but your worst finish was 12th. What does it say about the resiliency of your team?
“When things don’t go right and you can still finish 12th and that being your worst finish, I guess is pretty good situation I feel like. I feel like there are some other guys that have worse days than we do. To run like we have and be consistent, we knew there were weekends where we were going to be off. You can’t win every single race, but we definitely wish that we could. We have to continue to put fast trucks on the racetrack and be there at the end when it counts. It says a lot about this team. We have a never give up attitude. We want to continue to push and strive for more and continue to kind of be perfect every single weekend. Hopefully, we can continue that here at Charlotte. We’ve been good at 1.5-mile tracks this year. Hopefully, we can bring back another W.”
How excited are you to get back to racing on a 1.5-mile track?
“It’s very exciting to get back to a mile-and-a-half. I feel like our 1.5-mile and short track programs have been really good. I feel like our whole program in general has been good. We kind of missed it on one of the road courses and the dirt stuff. I feel like we can kind of throw those away now and focus on the future. We have some really good racetracks coming up as well. Some more mile-and-a-halves, short tracks and another dirt and road course race that I really enjoy, but first things first, I have to go take care of business at Charlotte.”
