By RaceScene Publisher on Tuesday, 22 March 2022
Category: The Checkered Flag

Sheldon Creed returns to NASCAR Trucks at COTA with Young’s

In 2014, Sheldon Creed raced with the Stadium Super Trucks in the X Games at Circuit of the Americas and was a top contender before finishing second. A year later, he won the gold.

In 2021, Creed ran the NASCAR Camping World Truck Series race at COTA and was a favourite to win but settled for a top five. A year later, he hopes truck-sized lightning can strike twice.

Young’s Motorsports has signed Creed to run the Truck Series’ XPEL 225 at the Austin track on Saturday, driving the #20 Chevrolet Silverado RST. It will be his first Truck start of 2022 after spending the last three seasons competing in the series full-time and winning the championship in 2020.

The Truck race is intended to give Creed more track time ahead of the the Xfinity Series‘ Pit Boss 250, scheduled to take place a few hours later. Creed graduated to the Xfinity Series for 2022 with Richard Childress Racing, and is currently eleventh in points with three top tens in five races.

Road courses are perhaps where Creed shines the most as a stock car racer. His extensive off-road background has translated exceptionally well to such tracks, with top-five finishes in all five of his Truck road races and a win on the Daytona Road Course in 2020. At the inaugural COTA Truck race in 2021, he qualified third and led a race-high fourteen laps, but a late slide dropped him to fifth. His Xfinity Series début in 2017 also came as a road course ringer as he ran two races at Mid-Ohio and Road America.

COTA will be Creed’s second time driving for Young’s. In 2017, he drove the #20 in the Eldora Dirt Derby, but retired after a wreck and mechanical trouble and placed twenty-seventh. The start was his second in the Truck Series, and the first three all came at Eldora from 2016 to 2018 as a dirt specialist as he was beginning to move into stock cars.

“Welcome back, buddy!!! It’s been awhile since @sheldoncreed drove the 20 truck @EldoraSpeedway – we had a ton of fun back then, and we’ll do the same @NASCARatCOTA,” tweeted team principal Tyler Young.

The Young’s #20 is split between multiple drivers. Danny Bohn finished eighth in the season opener at Daytona before Matt Mills took over for the next two races. Kaz Grala (#02) and Spencer Boyd (#12) will serve as Creed’s team-mates; Grala, a former RCR Xfinity driver, finished runner-up at COTA last year.

Original link