Josh, freaking, Berry, the rookie that came from late models with JRM put on a show this weekend at Martinsville. With the race starting Friday night and ending mid afternoon Sunday due to rain we got to see some great racing.
The early stages of the race saw Noah Gragson, a driver that some can consider a serious contender at Martinsville no matter what, taking the win at the end of stage 1. After a delay that lasted a day moving the race to mid day Sunday, is when Josh Berry started to take form. A big factor in this was that the cars were set up as night racing cars, meaning more grip on the track due to cooler temps. With the sun coming out this changed the track and somehow made Berry very,, very, fast. Once he cracked the top 10 at the end of the second stage he was clearly the fastest car on the track. The big thing for me was not only was he fast on restarts, which was huge considering the amount of cautions we saw, he somehow had a car that ran well in short and long runs.
With 20 to go Berry was roughly a second ahead of his team mate, Noah Gragson, and coming into traffic. This would be the real test to see if Berry had what it took to win. Going through traffic seemingly without any hold up he just kept pulling farther and farther away from Gragson and eventually to his first Xfinity Series win in just 13 starts. This was amazing to see as Berry is a 30 year old rookie who is finally showing his stuff. He has had a decent season so far, and this could be the boost he needed to get more races and improve even more on an already impressive Xfinity resume as a rookie.
The Slow Restart 