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Hornaday Jr. picks up first win of the season at ORP

Fri 23rd, July 2010

Clermont, IN (Sports Network) - Ron Hornaday Jr. snapped a 22-race winless streak in the Camping World Truck Series with an impressive performance in Friday's AAA Insurance 200 at O'Reilly Raceway Park at Indianapolis.

Hornaday Jr., the four-time and defending series champion, took the lead from pole sitter Timothy Peters after 62 laps and dominated from there. Peters reclaimed the top position during the fifth and final caution when he opted to stay on track, while most of the leaders, including Hornaday, pitted for the last time.

Shortly after the final restart, Hornaday and Kyle Busch chased down Peters. Hornaday then made his winning pass with 48 laps remaining. He finished two seconds ahead of Busch for his 46th career truck victory, but his first since August 1, 2009 at Nashville.

"It was just a great day," said Hornaday, who led 129 of 200 laps. "Hopefully, it keeps everybody a little bit quiet, but it took [crew chief] Ernie [Cope] to come here and settle everyone down, because the guys were getting a little anxious. We know we've got a winning team, but we just had to prove it to them."

One year ago at ORP, Hornaday made series history by becoming the first driver to win four races in a row. Hornaday extended his record to five consecutive victories the following week at Nashville.

At the end of the 2009 season, Hornaday's then crew chief Rick Ren left his Kevin Harvick Inc. team and moved over to Kyle Busch's new Truck Series team to serve as director of competition.

Hornaday also won a truck event at ORP in 1997 and 2007. He will compete in Saturday's 200-lap Nationwide Series race for Kevin Harvick Inc.

Busch's second-place run was his best finish at this short 0.686-mile oval.

"We made it through the evening pretty well," Busch said. "I thought we had a shot to win there and battle with Hornaday a little bit. I felt like if maybe I could have stayed in front of him the results would have been a little different, but we knew going into practice, he was a little bit better than we were. Unfortunately, we just didn't have enough for him tonight."

Matt Crafton finished third, while Johnny Sauter and James Buescher rounded out the top-five.

Rookie Austin Dillon took the sixth spot, followed by Todd Bodine, the current points leader, Brad Sweet and David Starr.

Peters, who led 71 laps, faded in the late-stages and wound up finishing 10th.

Bodine now holds a 177-point advantage over Aric Almirola, who crashed halfway through the race and ended up with a 31st-place finish. Almirola got collected in an accident involving Mario Gosselin and Narain Karthikeyan.

"We're struggling, and we're racing for 20th," Almirola said. "We were trying to work on our truck and get it better with a hundred laps to go, and [Karthikeyan] kept running into me every corner. This place is as wide as they come for short tracks."

With the win, Hornaday moved up to fourth in the standings, trailing Bodine by 212 points.

Johanna Long made an impressive debut in the series with a 17th-place run. Long, who drove the No.15 Toyota for Billy Ballew Motorsports, became the youngest female to compete in a truck race at age 18.