Creed Eliminated Early In Hard Crash At Phoenix

AVONDALE, Ariz. – Sheldon Creed was running his own race and comfortably inside the top 10 when disaster struck and took him out of Saturday’s GOVX 200 at Phoenix Raceway.

After qualifying second and starting from the front row, Creed converted a fifth-place finish in the opening stage into six bonus points, and restarted sixth in front of Austin Hill on lap 62 following a caution for the stopped car of Anthony Alfredo on pit road.

Creed stayed high through the first half of the restart lap, and was eighth entering turn three when seventh-running Austin Hill misjudged the entrance to the corner and clipped the inside wall, shooting his Chevrolet across the track and into the side of Creed’s Ford.

That sent Creed around in the center of the corner and backward into the outside wall, causing race-ending damage to the No. 00 Pit Boss Grills Mustang.

For a driver who had five straight top-seven finishes at Phoenix’s one-mile desert oval, to have his day end shy of the halfway point – and through no fault of his own – was disappointing.

“The unfortunate part about the whole thing is that it was just a simple mistake out of the (No.) 21 (Hill),” lamented Creed. “(Turn) three is pretty blind when you have a few cars in front of you, and it looked like he hit that inside wall and then just shot up into us. Just in the wrong place at the wrong time.

“I hate it because I felt like we were going to have a strong, top-five day there,” Creed added. “We were steadily making the car better, I feel like … and then ended up with a bunch of things broken on the car after that hit. Not how we wanted to end our first race with Pit Boss (Grills) on board, but we’ll come back from this even stronger.”

After being checked and released from the infield care center, Creed confirmed the crash was “the biggest hit I’ve had in a long time, actually.”

“Stuff happens, sometimes, and there’s nothing that you can do about it because it’s out of your control,” he noted. “The track bar mount got wrapped around the rear end housing and we weren’t going to be able to really fix it.

“It’s done and over at this point, and we’ll live on to fight another day next week.”

Creed leaves Phoenix sixth in the Xfinity Series standings, 23 above the playoff cut line and 28 behind series leader Jesse Love through four of 26 regular season races. Prior to Saturday, he had three finishes of 14th or better to kick off the year, including a third-place run at Daytona (Fla.) Int’l Speedway in February.

The NASCAR Xfinity Series season continues Saturday, March 15 at Las Vegas (Nev.) Motor Speedway. John Hunter Nemechek won last year’s spring race at the 1.5-mile oval.

Broadcast coverage of the LiUNA! 300 is slated for 4:30 p.m. ET, live on The CW, the Performance Racing Network, and SiriusXM NASCAR Radio, channel 90.