Drew Blickensderfer has refused to let Layne Riggs lose sight of the bigger picture after a heartbreaking P19 finish at the Kansas Speedway. He was left beating himself up after crashing while battling for the win. However, the Front Row Motorsports Competition Director was clear that the team does not want its driver settling for second.
Watch What’s Trending Now!
With Riggs now trailing Kaden Honeycutt by 37 points in the championship battle, Blickensderfer pointed to Joey Logano’s comeback in the ongoing Cup Season, to remind viewers that the title fight is anything but over.
He told Matt Weaver (via X), “Nobody thought Joey Logano was in the Cup championship until about a 3-week stretch, and this team can rattle off wins like no other. We’ve seen that, so we have his back, man.”
Riggs had been running second and putting pressure on Kaden Honeycutt before the late-race incident changed everything. Earlier, he dropped back to P19 due to a slow pit stop. However, he charged through the field and got all the way back to P3 in just five laps. That recovery is exactly what the FRM Competition Director wants people to remember.
“He’s the same kid that had a bad pit stop earlier in the night and goes from 19th to 3rd in 5 laps, right? It’s not because he’s taking it easy and settling; he’s going forward and that’s what we want, right?”
Riggs tried his best to catch the leader on the final few laps of the race, but he overdrove his truck and clipped the outside walls on Turns 3 and 4. His truck suffered a right-front tire failure, and he limped to a 19th-place finish, instead of settling for P2. Leaving 17 points on the table. And Riggs was mad at himself for looking at the bigger picture in terms of championship race.
“I’m disappointed in myself. I let my crew down, for sure. I felt like I should have been a lot smarter, thinking bigger picture and know that I could have easily come out of here second and had a lot better shot. But I just made it a whole lot harder for myself. It’s going to be something I beat myself up on all week long before we go to Charlotte.” Yet, the leadership at FRM felt he took the right call, accepting that this was a learning curve for the young driver.
It seems that the pressure caught up to Riggs when he found himself in an unfamiliar situation. Instead of being the driver controlling the race from the front, he was now the one chasing another championship contender. According to Blickensderfer, that required a change in mindset, and the excitement of finally catching Honeycutt may have contributed to the mistake.
Blickensderfer acknowledged that the team has to learn from the incident, particularly because they had never been in this type of championship battle before, but does that mean a change in Riggs’ approach? Absolutely not.
“Bob (Jenkins) doesn’t want somebody that’s just okay finishing 2nd,” Blickensderfer said. “Now, it’s easy to say right now, man, 2nd would have been a heck of a lot more points, but he wants someone to go try and win, and Layne was trying.”
That is also why Blickensderfer was determined to reassure Riggs after the race. He admitted that the driver was already dwelling on what he could have done differently, but argued that the ability to push harder is a major part of what makes him valuable to Front Row.
Despite the setback, Blickensderfer remains optimistic. With a margin of just 37 points between Riggs and Honeycutt, he believes that one strong race could immediately change the complexion of the standings.
“I think it’s 37 right now. We go win a race and that gets cut in less than half probably pretty quickly. We win some stages, win a race, and it’s game on again,” he said.
There is enough evidence that the No. 34 team has the speed to put together winning streaks, and Blickensderfer pointed to that consistency as the reason there is no need for panic after Kansas.
When it comes to balancing aggression with execution, Kansas may serve as a painful lesson for Layne Riggs. However, Front Row would rather have a driver capable of “grabbing that extra gear”, even if it occasionally comes with mistakes, than one who stops pushing when a championship is on the line.