NASCAR Camping World Truck Series

Since that race at Michigan, Bodine has made a few start-and-park appearances in the Sprint Cup Series, while Almirola has been on red alert to jump in and drive four-time defending Sprint Cup champion Jimmie Johnson’s car at a moment’s notice should Johnson’s wife go into labor with the couple’s first child. Both have also gotten in some valuable testing miles in their trucks at out of the way racetracks, hoping to give them an edge for what is to come.

Beginning with this Sunday’s race at Iowa Speedway and running through September 3 at Kentucky Speedway, the Truck Series will race every week for nine straight weeks. The “summer stretch,” as Almirola has taken to calling it, also includes visits to Gateway International Raceway near St. Louis, O’Reilly Raceway Park near Indianapolis, Pocono Raceway, Nashville Superspeedway, Darlington Raceway, Bristol Motor Speedway and Chicagoland Speedway.

Bodine leads the championship standings heading into the summer stretch by 55 points over Almirola, with another Toyota racer, Timothy Peters, third in the standings and 165 points behind Bodine. But all of that can change dramatically over the critical next nine weeks.

“I think it’s really going to come down to the guys who are prepared the most to go through this nine-week stretch with everything ready,” Almirola says. “I feel like we’re really prepared, and I feel like our trucks are in really good shape. We haven’t really torn anything up this year, so we’ve been able to work on making progress.”

Continuing to stay out of trouble and not “tear anything up” is crucial during the upcoming stretch of races. Both Almirola, who is a relative newcomer in Truck Series competition by comparison, and series veteran Bodine, are well aware of that important fact.

“When you’ve got a stretch run, you’ve got to make sure you’re not tearing things up and putting the team behind so they’ve got to work hard in between races,” says Bodine. “If you’re fixing things, you can’t get any better. You’re just continually fixing. If you can get through the stretch without tearing a bunch of equipment up, you can continually get your team better and perform better.”

Bodine has certainly been able to do that through the first nine races of the 25-race season. He failed to finish just once, in Round 3 at Martinsville, and has ridden a wave of consistency to the top of the point standings.

Bodine has top fives in the last six consecutive races and eight out of nine overall. Included in his incredible run to open the year was a victory at Texas Motor Speedway last month. Bodine certainly feels like has momentum, but at the same time, he knows those weeks are now in his rearview mirror.

“I’d say yeah,” Bodine says. “We’ve run really well. We struggled in the first part of the year and we made some changes in the front-end geometry and got the trucks driving better. We’ve been running really well ever since. We got a third, a second, a first and a second.

“It’s been pretty good, but those weeks are behind us. Now we’ve got to just continue improving. We’ve got to keep doing what we do to get these top fives and the wins will come with it.”

Almirola feels like he’s got “Big Mo” on his side as well. After all, he did win the last time out at Michigan, and he also won at Dover in May, which was his first career Truck Series victory.

“We’ve got momentum,” Almirola says. “I know a lot of people say that it doesn’t mean anything, and I’ve heard some people say that it does. I feel like it does. We’ve come off of two wins early in the season, and I really feel like that’s going to help propel us through this stretch and be confident.

“At the same time, we’re having fun. I think it’d be a little bit different of a season for us if all the guys were walking around with their heads hung low because we haven’t been able to get a win or anything yet. I think the morale of the team is good, and I’m looking forward to it.”

Good morale is definitely another good thing to have heading into a stretch of races like this. Of course, one would think it’d be easy to keep morale high when you have big gaps between races like the Truck Series has had prior to now.

However, both drivers actually prefer to race several weeks in a row, as they’re about to do, as opposed to having long breaks.

“It gets everybody in a rhythm,” says Almirola. “You get to doing the same routine week in and week out. The guys get more fluid at working on the trucks. You get a little rusty (with lots of time between races), regardless of what you think. When you take three weeks off and you sit by the pool and hang out, you kind of forget about your truck on the weekends.”

“We prefer to run as much as we can,” adds Bodine. “We’re racers. We want to race. I wish NASCAR would look at the schedule and go three on and one off. That would be the ultimate, to be able to run three weeks, take a breather and catch up, and then run three weeks, take a breather and catch up. But that’s not the way it is, so we’ve got to deal with what we’ve got.”

And what we’ve got are nine races in nine weeks. What is it going to take to still be in contention for the championship when the checkered flag drops at Kentucky?

“We’re going to try to build on the successful ones and the bad ones, they’re going to come,” Almirola says. “We all know that. We’re very aware of that. You can only ride a wave for so long before it hits the shore.

“We want to have good weekends, we want to win races and we’re going to win races. We’ve shown that we’re capable of doing it and we want to continue to do that. But we know that there are going to be weekends that are not so great, and we’ve got to make them OK weekends. Instead of having a bad weekend and finishing 25th or 30th, we’ve got to have a bad weekend and finish 10th.”

Almirola believes this stretch will go a long way toward separating the championship contenders from the also-rans.

“I think at the end of this stretch of races, you’re going to be able to tell who the people are going to be that are going to go for this championship at the end of the year,” says Almirola. “I think right now, you already have an idea of the core group of guys that are in it.

“But I really feel like this stretch here will definitely separate a lot of people at the end of it, and you’ll be able to really have a good idea on the three or four or five guys that are going to go and race for the championship. And I hope that if everything goes the way we want it to, that we’ll be one of those guys.”

Bodine, on the other hand, sees something else as the determining factor on who will still be in contention for the championship come September. The all-important and frequently fickle beast known as luck.

“You never know,” he says. “I think everybody at the top is going to stay there. It’s just a matter of who has bad luck and who doesn’t. That usually determines the outcome of the points. The guy who has the least amount of bad luck usually will win the points, especially when you’ve got good teams at the top, like we do in this series. We’ve got a lot of good race teams in the top 10. The top four kind of separated a little bit from the rest of them, but anything can happen.”