Wood Brothers Racing
After an up-and down day in Sunday’s Straight Talk Wireless 500 at Phoenix Raceway, Josh Berry and the No. 21 eero team were swept up in a multi-car crash on Lap 254 of 312, resulting in a 32nd place finish.
Berry started the race from 10th and spent much of the opening 60-lap Stage running inside the top 15 before finishing Stage 1 in 15th place.
In Stage 2, Berry again ran just outside the top 15 through the early laps, but the eero Ford Mustang Dark Horse sustained damage to the front splitter in an incident on Lap 104 that dropped him to 26th in the running order. Following a restart, Berry mounted a strong charge back toward the front, climbing into the top 15 and ultimately finishing the Stage in 14th.
In the process of recovering from the earlier setback, however, the No. 21 team had used most of its allotted tires. When the caution flag waved for a crash involving Ryan Preece, the team elected to stay on track while many others pitted. The strategy briefly paid off as Berry inherited the race lead and paced the field for 13 laps.
But with older tires compared to the cars behind him, Berry soon slipped outside the top 20 once the race returned to green. Then, shortly after a restart following the seventh caution of the race, Berry was collected in a seven-car incident that brought his day to an early end.
“Wrong place, wrong time,” Berry said after being checked and released from the track’s care center. “Obviously I saw the smoke there for a second and could tell something was happening. I checked up and someone got into me.
“Either way I was wrecking.”
Berry said the crash capped off a frustrating afternoon for the team.
“It was a tough day, a really tough day,” he said. “We didn’t have the car like we wanted. We had some bright spots there and got some track position and looked alright. Ultimately we were down a set of tires and honestly we were just trying to finish it out and take what we could today. We just got caught up in the issues.”
Next weekend, Berry and the Wood Brothers Racing team head to Las Vegas Motor Speedway, where they return as the defending winners of the Pennzoil 400.
