After making his début in 2022, Layne Riggs will run his first NASCAR Craftsman Truck Series race of 2023 on Saturday at Atlanta Motor Speedway, driving the #1 Toyota Tundra TRD Pro for TRICON Garage.
The son of NASCAR veteran Scott Riggs, he is a development driver for Toyota who ran three races in a second truck for Halmar Friesen Racing at IRP, Richmond, and Phoenix in 2022. He impressed from the start by finishing seventh in his maiden race; while his two other starts saw finishes outside the top ten, he qualified fourth and second for each.
He won the NASCAR Advance Auto Parts Weekly Series national championship in 2022 with sixteen total victories at Dominion Raceway, Hickory Motor Speedway, South Boston Speedway, and Wake County Speedway. At the age of twenty, Riggs is the youngest driver to claim the title, surpassing Peyton Sellers‘ record set in 2005 by one year; incidentally, Riggs beat Sellers, the reigning champion, by four points for the championship.
TRICON Garage, in their first year as Toyota’s flagship Truck team, fields the #1 for multiple drivers: Jason White finished fifteenth in the season opener at Daytona while Kaz Grala was seventeenth at Las Vegas, while Jesse Love and William Sawalich will get their shots later in the season.. Dean Thompson (#5), Corey Heim (#11), Tanner Gray (#15), and Taylor Gray (#17) race full-time for the team, though Sammy Smith and John Hunter Nemechek piloted the #17 in the first two as Gray is too young for larger tracks. Nemechek was originally scheduled to drive the #1 at Atlanta before Riggs’ arrival.