Creed Earns Talladega Top 10, But Lacks Momentum Late

TALLADEGA, Ala. – A ninth-place finish in Saturday’s Ag-Pro 300 at Talladega Superspeedway provided a desperately needed bounce-back result for Sheldon Creed and Haas Factory Team.

After crashing out in each of the previous two NASCAR Xfinity Series races – at Bristol (Tenn.) Motor Speedway and Rockingham (N.C.) Speedway, respectively – Creed’s comfort in the superspeedway draft showed through around NASCAR’s biggest and fastest racetrack.

Though it wasn’t necessarily a flashy day, Creed qualified 11th and averaged an eighth-place running position over the 300-mile distance, spending more than 95 percent of the race inside the top 15.

He managed to position himself near teammate Sam Mayer and fellow Ford driver Harrison Burton at times, but the ‘Blue Oval Brigade’ could never get fully organized to best combat the Chevrolet drivers – primarily Jesse Love and eventual winner Austin Hill – that dominated the day.

A late four-car incident on the backstretch led to a six-lap dash to the finish, and though Creed lined up eighth, he struggled to escape being bottled up in the middle of the pack in the final laps.

Creed took the white flag as the second car in the middle lane, but lost all his momentum off the exit of turn two and faded back quickly ahead of Joe Gibbs Racing rookie Taylor Gray and others.

When Connor Zilisch spun off the bumper of Jesse Love and the ensuing caution flag was waved, freezing the field entering turn three, Creed was left ninth and scratching his head a bit after the fact.

“It’s hard to fight through there at the end because there were just so many Chevrolets up there,” Creed explained. “I was trying to take every push I could, but there’s really no safe spot [in the pack] anymore because everyone is racing so hard and it’s a fight to keep yourself in the top 10 and toward the front for the entire race.

“The lanes were constantly changing all race long, so it’s a fun race to watch, but it’s a lot tougher to manage from behind the wheel,” he added. I just wanted to get down (to the bottom) there at the end, but for where I was tried to give the 27 (runner-up finisher Jeb Burton) the best push I could.”

At first, Creed believed he’d have a much better shot at contending for the win with where he found himself approaching the white flag, but the energy in the pack a half lap later didn’t pan out for him.

“The (No.) 54 (Taylor Gray) was doing a great job behind me, because we got the (No.) 27 clear, and I thought I’d have some options coming down the backstretch … but our lane just completely died coming off of (turn) two,” Creed said. “I’m not sure what happened behind us, to be honest, and of course the caution coming out didn’t really help things.

“Depending on how things went coming back around, it might have worked out for a top five, but it’s hard to say because you just don’t know what could have developed in those last few corners.”

Though much of the race consisted of longer green-flag stings, Creed said that a short run to the end was more of a curse than a blessing – only because there hadn’t been a traditional “Big One” that wiped out a large chunk of the field, making it harder to cut through traffic.

“It’s awesome that we didn’t (have a big crash), so hats off to everyone driving the cars and doing a good job with pushes everything. Once the pack got three wide though, it was hard to go anywhere, and I just had to get my lane to flow as best I could. It’s just a really hard battle when it gets like that.”

Creed’s Talladega effort was his fourth straight top 10 at the 2.66-mile oval, dating back to the fall of 2023. Saturday’s race also marked the debut of a new partner for Creed in Ollie’s Bargain Outlet, America’s largest retailer of closeout merchandise and excess inventory.

Ollie’s familiar yellow-and-red colors will adorn Creed’s Ford for three additional races this season at Haas Factory Team in the Xfinity Series.

With one-third of the Xfinity Series season complete, Creed sits 10th in the regular season standings, 23 points ahead of the playoff cut line and just 16 points out of a spot inside the top five in the overall rankings.

He’ll have his next chance to improve on that position when the Xfinity Series heads to Texas Motor Speedway, where Creed has a track-best finish of seventh in four prior starts.

Broadcast coverage of the Andy’s Frozen Custard 300 in the Lone Star State is slated for Saturday, May 3 at 2 p.m. ET, live on The CW, the Performance Racing Network, and SiriusXM NASCAR Radio, channel 90.