It wasn’t the result Ben Rhodes had hoped for, but it wasn’t too bad either.
The 18-year-old Louisvillian finished 21st (out of 40) in the NASCAR Xfinity Series’ Owens Corning Atticat 300 Sunday at the 1.5-mile oval Chicagoland Speedway.
“We had a pretty decent Alpha Energy Solutions Chevy to start the race,” Rhodes said after his second Xfinity start. “Pretty much the entire race was about me learning. A 21st-place finish is not where we should be with the speed that we had, but I definitely put us in the hole by making a couple of mistakes. I’ve got to do a better job of saving the car and staying clamer on the restarts. I got aggressive and made up a lot of spots, but then I got too aggressive on some of them and once I made up the spots I would fall back from overdriving the corner. But, I learned a lot. I learned how to race around these guys, how to use the aero(dynamics) to my advantage, how to use the aero to their disadvantage and just how to drive these cars.”
Erik Jones won the race, which was originally scheduled for Saturday night but was postponed a day by rain.
Rhodes, who qualified 17th driving JR Motorsports’ No. 88 car, had a slow start but an adjustment on the first pit stop helped him move into the top 15. Despite several brushes with the wall and contact with Ross Kenseth on Lap 183, he was 14th before the final restart on Lap 188. However tight handling issues, and an unsuccessful run on the high side of the track in the final 12 laps dropped Rhodes to 21st.
Rhodes’ next race will be the Lakes Region 200 at New Hampshire Motor Speedway.
“It was really fast out there today, but it just comes down to me learning,” he said. “I don’t even think I could write down everything I learned - it was probably 200 different things. I want to thank all of the guys on this No. 88 team for their hard work today and I took forward to getting back in the car at Loudon.”
Photo courtesy Ben Rhodes' Facebook Page