Garrett Smithley is set to run his first NASCAR Craftsman Truck Series race at Talladega Superspeedway on Saturday, driving the #02 Chevrolet Silverado for Young’s Motorsports.
Smithley will hope his second attempt for Young’s goes better than the first when drove the #20 at Texas in 2022 but failed to qualify. This time, with the #02 sitting twenty-ninth in owner points, he has more insurance to make the race.
His last Truck race was at Charlotte in 2020, where he retired due to a mechanical failure and was classified thirty-sixth with Niece Motorsports. Although his first national series action came in the series in 2015, his Truck experience is relatively scant compared to the Cup and Xfinity Series with just nine total starts. Smithley’s best finish is a fourteenth at the 2015 Michigan race for MB Motorsports.
Much of his 2023 itinerary is at the Xfinity level. He began the season as the full-time driver at B.J. McLeod Motorsports but left after a disastrous start in which rainouts kept him off the grid for the first two races, followed by a one-off at DGM Racing before reuniting with his longtime employer JD Motorsports. Additional struggles relegated him to a limited calendar for the rest of the year.
His best finish so far of the Xfinity season is a sixteenth at Talladega and Daytona. In seven career Xfinity races at Talladega, he has a pair of top tens and a best run of eighth in 2020.
The #02 started 2023 with Kris Wright as the main driver until he was dropped eleven rounds in. The next nine races saw the truck get split between seven different drivers: Josh Bilicki, Chris Hacker, Kayden Honeycutt, Matt Mills, Stefan Parsons, Layne Riggs, and Will Rodgers. Wright remains the only driver with top-twenty finishes in the #02, the best being a twelfth at Texas.
