While the second race of the 2022 season ended with a familiar face in Victory Lane, several drivers not so accustomed to running up front made their presence felt throughout the day. Drivers who missed the playoffs in 2021 but led the race and made a serious push for the win at Fontana included Daniel Suarez, Erik Jones, Tyler Reddick and Chase Briscoe.
“It was good,” said Jones, who led 18 laps en route to a third-place finish. “It feels good to be interviewed after the race, too. It’s awesome, but it’s frustrating, too. You’re that close, and you have a car that you feel like can do it. My car definitely had it today. It was a matter of getting up front and taking advantage of clean air, and we did that a couple of times. I just haven’t raced up front a lot in the last year-and-a-half. There are some things I need to be better at. Hopefully, I have a lot of time to work on that. We want to keep running up front, and if we keep doing that, we’re going to win some races.”
Finishing just behind Jones, in fourth, was Suarez, who grabbed the lead with three laps to go but couldn’t hang on. “We're going to win a few races very soon here,” Suarez said. “I just can't thank everyone enough on my team. We had a fast car, but we went through a lot of adversity. We had a few issues. We hit the wall once. We had an issue with a diffuser. I can tell you that I'm going to work very, very hard to go to Victory Lane very, very soon.”
Said Reddick, who led a race-high 90 laps: “We will keep this momentum going to Las Vegas.”