LOUDON, N.H. — Bookends.
Perhaps it was appropriate that Ron Hornaday, Jr. became New Hampshire Int’l Speedway’s first repeat winner in the NASCAR Craftsman Truck Series.
Hornaday won the track’s inaugural Truck Series race in 1996, benefiting from a last-lap tangle between Joe Ruttman and Jack Sprague.
That was the only lap Hornaday led — the first time in series history that a winner hadn’t led until the final serial.
This time Hornaday left no doubt in anyone’s mind which driver was going to find his way to victory lane. He led 174 of 200 laps, just nine fewer than the NHIS record set by Sprague in 2001.
“It’s just awesome to get this thing to do what it did today because this is the same truck we finished second with three times and now we finally won with it,” he said. “It’s kind of been our lucky truck and we did it again. Man, 33 wins. That is really unbelievable and that is cool.”

• Hornaday’s KHI partner Clint  Bowyer was knocked out by accident on lap 57. The last time Bowyer sat in the truck, at Dover Int’l Speedway, the Kansan didn’t even finish the race’s first lap.
And Hornaday also won.

• Change is good —– especially if you’re Erik Darnell. Darnell swapped crew chiefs — Matt Puccia for John Quinn  — earlier in the week and on Saturday, his No. 99 Northern Tool+Equipment Ford was closing on Hornaday at the end before settling for second.
The finish was Darnell’s first in the top five since a fifth-place performance in mid-May at Lowe’s Motor Speedway.

• Shane Sieg drove Billy Ballew’s No. 15 Swift Transportation Chevrolet to a 10th-place finish, a moral victory of sorts for a team that’s fielded four different drivers with one previous top 10 in 2007. Bill Lester, whose best finish was eighth at Kentucky Speedway, left the team following the Nashville Superspeedway stop.
Two-time IRL champion and Indianapolis 500 winner Buddy Lazier gets the call for Saturday’s Smith’s Las Vegas 350. Lazier’s debut is concurrent with that of Jacques Villeneuve marking the first time that two Indianapolis 500 champions have started the same race.