Piquet also made two Nationwide starts last season, winning the Sargento 200 at Road America from the pole. He finished in the top 10 in both of his starts.

No word on who will replace Piquet in the team’s No. 30 Camping World Truck Series Chevy. But, Jeb Burton has signed with the team. And, James Buescher will return to the CWTS to defend his title.

In related news, Justin Allgaier will also return to TSM for 2013, continuing his relationship with the newly renamed team, and his sponsor, Brandt.

Allgaier piloted the No. 31 TSM Chevy to two wins, 12 Top 5s, and 36 Top 10s. He also earned one win with Penske Racing.

It has also been rumored that Danica Patrick will drive 10 races for the team in the Nationwide Series in 2013.

Related Stories

• Patrick Expected To Run For Turner Motorsports In N’Wide
• Buescher Could Move To Nationwide Series In 2013
• Burton Signs With Turner Motorsports

Turner could move Buescher from the Truck series to the Nationwide Series in 2013.

Buescher said:

I know I’ll be in a series full time and be in competitive equipment and in position to win races so I’m not too concerned to know what I’m doing next year. I’m good with either one. It would be cool to try to go for back-to-back championships but if I get the opportunity to go Nationwide racing, it would be cool to compete for more Nationwide wins and see if we can get a Nationwide championship.

Update: Buescher has decided to return to the Camping World Truck Series to defend his title.

Related Stories

• Burton Signs With Turner Motorsports

Behind the dramatic race to the checkers, James Buescher rolled to his first series championship, securing the title with a 13th-place run.

In a championship battle that generated little drama until the closing laps — when rookie Ty Dillon made a last-ditch move — Buescher drove a methodical race en route to the title. After Dillon wrecked with two laps left in regulation distance, Buescher finished six points ahead of series runner-up Timothy Peters, who ran eighth Friday.

Joey Coulter finished third in the season finale, followed by Nelson Piquet Jr. and Miguel Paludo.

Gale claimed the first victory of his career in a green-white-checkered-flag finish that took the race six laps beyond its scheduled distance of 134 laps. As he and Busch exited the final turn, Gale pinched Busch’s No. 18 Toyota against the outside wall, taking the checkered flag by a nose in a shower of sparks.

“I got drove into the fence,” Busch said. “That’s it. You saw it.”

Gale didn’t disagree.

“It’s not my style, but I knew that, if I could pinch him a little bit, I could get the advantage, and pretty much, that’s what I was thinking at that point,” Gale said. “A guy like me, it’s my first opportunity to come down for the checkered flag in a NASCAR race.

“Kyle’s a racer. He’s been in the same position I’ve been in. We’ve all seen hungry racers get an opportunity and take it. That’s what you have to do in this sport. He owes me, but I saw the checkers in the final race. That’s all I can say…

“When it comes down to the final straightaway to win at Homestead in the last race, and your first NASCAR win, I believe anybody would do it.”

Buescher started 17th, 14 spots behind Dillon (who entered the race 12 points behind the leader), but the driver of the No. 31 Chevrolet moved briskly toward the front, working his way up to eighth by the time debris from Bryan Silas’ contact with the outside wall in Turn 4 caused the second caution on Lap 43.

Buescher had dropped to 12th, the last car on the lead lap, when NASCAR called the third caution on Lap 104, again for debris. He held that spot after pit stops under the yellow and gained one spot to 11th before Max Gresham’s spin with 10 laps left brought out caution No. 4.

After a restart on Lap 130, Dillon charged into second place, 11 positions ahead of Buescher, but contact between the trucks of Kyle Larson and Dillon wrecked both as they fought for second and also collected the Dodge of Ryan Blaney.

Buescher pitted for tires after a 10-minute, 40-second stoppage and came home 13th after the two-lap sprint to the finish.

“Everybody on this team has done a fantastic job,” said Buescher, who won four times on the way to the title. “We had a shot at it last year, but we came into this year swinging and did a lot of work over the offseason. It definitely paid off. This is definitely the coolest thing I’ve ever done in racing.”

Despite the wreck that took him out of contention and dropped him to fourth in the standings behind Coulter, Dillon was philosophical when he talked about the final race.

“We just had to go out there and win the race and make something happen,” said Dillon, the series rookie of the year. “I just tried to make something happen there at the end, I got to second, and the points were looking good.

“We just missed that championship by a little bit, but I’m all right with everything that played out. We were going for it. We almost had it. We were trying to hit the home run in the bottom of the ninth and almost did it. But it’s all right. We’ll be back next year, fighting harder than ever.”

Johnny Sauter pushed Kligerman to the lead on the white-flag lap, and Kligerman held the top spot when a massive wreck on the backstretch forced NASCAR to throw the yellow before Kligerman reached the finish line.

The victory was Kligerman’s first after five second-place finishes during the past two seasons. It was a vindication of sorts for a driver who was jettisoned from his ride with Brad Keselowski Racing and found a new home with Red Horse Racing.

“When you get so close to something so many times, you can pick two paths,” Kligerman said of his second-place runs. “You can doubt yourself, you can doubt the situation you’re in, you can doubt everything around you. Or you can keep your self-confidence and look at the positive of what you did to get yourself in that position each and every time and say, ‘Hey, if I can do that, it’s just a matter of time.’

“I feel like switching teams — all the things that have happened — this team gave me a ton of confidence. Halfway through the season, it looked like my career was not on the upward slope I’d hoped it would be on. We were fifth in points, we weren’t really achieving a lot, we were getting slower as a team, and I felt like my career was looking at a position where I was not going to be a part of NASCAR much longer.

“There is a vindication ’cause we won. Winning fixes everything, I like to say.”

The truck Kligerman drove now has been to Victory Lane in three superspeedway races.

“This is a magic truck,” said DeLoach, who won for the 10th time in his 300th start as an owner. “This truck that Parker was driving has won Daytona twice. It won Daytona earlier this year with John King, and now it wins Talladega, so it’s a pretty special truck to us.”

Sauter ran second, followed by James Buescher and Ty Dillon. Timothy Peters came home fifth. Dillon maintained a one-point lead over Buescher in the series standings.

Buescher was just as happy to escape Talladega with no change in the championship battle, especially after saving his truck from spinning out of control on the next-to-last lap.

“I’m satisfied with the day,” Buescher said. “You always want to gain, but not losing is good, too. Definitely, with what happened in the tri-oval coming to the white flag, we could have been 25th. The fact that I was able to hang on to it and hang on to a third-place finish makes it a really good day.”

On Lap 46, contact from John Wes Townley’s Toyota turned the Toyota of Ross Chastain into the outside wall, igniting a chain-reaction wreck that also collected the trucks of two-time series champion Todd Bodine and Johnny Chapman (watch).

Fourteen laps later, a melee on the frontstretch damaged the truck of another former champion, Ron Hornaday, and knocked last week’s Las Vegas winner, Nelson Piquet Jr., and Donnie Neuenberger out of the race (watch).

Justin Lofton led the field to a restart on Lap 66, pulling Peters and Kurt Busch with him. Ten laps later Hornaday’s spin, the result of a cut tire, caused the fifth caution, with Lofton still in the lead. During the yellow, Kligerman’s team changed the battery on the No. 7 Toyota after the gauges registered a voltage drop.

Kligerman restarted 21st, but before the field completed two laps, the driver of the No. 7 Tundra had pushed the No. 23 Ford of Jason White from 18th to the lead.

White and Kligerman were running 1-2 when Hornaday spun again in the tri-oval, his right-rear tire shredded.

Taking advantage of Kyle Busch’s brush with the wall in the late going, pole-sitter Ty Dillon won going away in Friday night’s Jeff Foxworthy’s Grit Chips 200 at Atlanta Motor Speedway, the first victory for the NASCAR Camping World Truck Series rookie.

Busch ran second, 3.227 seconds behind the race winner. James Buescher finished third, followed by Parker Kligerman and Aric Almirola. Series leader Timothy Peters came home 13th.

Dillon, 20, grandson of team owner Richard Childress, is third in the standings, nine points behind Peters, as he tries to duplicate the NCWTS championship won by 22-year-old brother Austin Dillon last year.

“I’m just so happy for how hard we’ve worked,” said Ty Dillon. “It’s our rookie year, and we’re battling for the championship. My team doesn’t give up.

“Man, I’m just so happy and so excited. I finally won a NASCAR race. It’s been my whole life, and to finally do it means so much. Man, it’s awesome.”

Busch, Buescher (second in the standings, six points back) and Dillon swapped the lead between them eight times in a 25-lap stretch before Busch began to pull away. After a cycle of green-flag stops that started with Dillon’s trip down pit road on lap 82, Busch held a five-second lead, but a caution for debris on the backstretch on Lap 105 slowed the race and bunched the field.

Lead-lap trucks came to pit road on Lap 106, eliminating the need for fuel conservation the rest of the way. After a restart on Lap 110, Busch pulled away to a one-second lead as Dillon and Buescher battled for second behind him.

But Busch scraped the wall on the final run and damaged his truck, allowing Dillon to overtake him for the lead on Lap 125 of 130.

Busch said Dillon’s truck was simply better.

“He had a lot better handle on the bottom of the race track than we did, especially throughout the longer run,” Busch said. “He could hold the bottom better than I could. There, when it’s time to race, when a guy catches you, you’ve got to go somewhere else.

“You’ve got to go to the top, and you try to push and get sideways and hit the fence. There’s no room to catch it up there. It was all I could do to push it as hard as I could.”

Bad luck continued to haunt four-time champion Ron Hornaday Jr., still seeking his first victory since joining Joe Denette Motorsports at the end of the season. On Lap 37, contact from the truck of Tim George Jr. trapped Hornaday against the outside wall in a wreck that also collected Jason White’s Ford.

What looked like a disaster early on for Nelson Piquet Jr. — a spin on lap 56 — turned fortuitous as green flags clicked by to close the VFW 200 at Michigan International Speedway.

Piquet and crew chief Chris Carrier employed a brilliant — and race-winning — strategy to capture the Brazilian’s first victory in the NASCAR Camping World Truck Series. The duo chose to stay out on the race track while the front-runners pitted under green, and milked a huge lead that ballooned to over 15 seconds with seven laps remaining.

“Me and Chris have been fighting for this win since the beginning of last year and we finally made it,” Piquet said. “It came in a dramatic way, but it came. It doesn’t matter how, but we did it and I’m really happy that the whole team stayed behind me this whole time. It is a little weight off my back and for the whole family. I am just living to do what our family always did, win races and win championships.”

Piquet, whose father Nelson is a three-time Formula One champion, led the first 13 laps, stalked by Kurt Busch early on. Busch, the 2000 truck series rookie of the year, had not started a NASCAR Camping World Truck race since June 30, 2001. Busch eventually took the lead on lap 17, and led a race-high 57 laps.

On lap 56, Piquet was racing Busch hard coming out of Turn 2. The two trucks tapped, with Piquet the victim — or so it seemed at the time. The spin forced Piquet to pit road, which put him on a different pit cycle than the rest of the field. That allowed the Brazilian to run the remainder of the race without a pit stop, a side effect that eventually led to Victory Lane.

Piquet is the first Brazilian to win a NASCAR Camping World Truck Series race and only the second driver born outside the United States to win a truck race (Canadian Ron Fellows is the other). Piquet joined the series in 2010 after a two-year stint in F1. This 2012 season has been by far his most successful, with victories coming in the K&N Pro Series East, the NASCAR Nationwide Series and, now, the trucks.

“I want to prove to fans that I can win in any car that they put me into,” Piquet said.

Jason White (second) and Dakoda Armstrong (third) each posted career-best finishes. Parker Kligerman, who ran his first race with Red Horse Racing, and James Buescher rounded out the top five.

Piquet’s truck, from the outset, looked like a winning one — until the fateful spin.

“After they revived me,” Carrier joked, “we just had to push reset and take the situation at that moment. [I said] we’re going to regroup here. All the decisions at that point were no-brainers.”

After the spin, Piquet entered the pits for new tires and a tank full of fuel. Carrier deciphered that if Piquet went full-throttle for the remainder of the race, he’d be a lap and a half short on gas.

In other words, Piquet was forced to practice something quite foreign to a race-car driver: slow down. That’s exactly what he did. On lap 90, Piquet turned a lap of 184.952 mph. On lap 100, the final lap, he was going 158.580 mph.

“I knew that Nelson is very good at saving fuel,” Carrier said. “It comes very natural to him.”

The difficult decision — whether to pit or not to pit — did not come easy. With eight laps remaining, Carrier waved off the call for Piquet to enter the pits.

“We kind of just rolled the dice,” Carrier said. “We changed our minds three times in one lap.”

The win moved Piquet up to eighth in points. Timothy Peters, who finished 13th, remains the standings leader, but in a points tie with rookie Ty Dillon. Peters wins the tie-breaker thanks to his victory at Iowa in July.

Coulter charged from third to first moments after a restart on Lap 44 of 50 at the 2.5-mile triangular track, after a caution on Lap 39 that took series leader Timothy Peters out of the race. Peters was racing through the tunnel turn, got loose beneath another truck and spun into the wall, as two separate incidents in the same corner damaged five cars.

“As soon as the spotter said ‘Green,’ I put the foot to the floor and just let the ECR (Earnhardt Childress Racing Engines) Chevrolet horsepower do the rest,” Coulter said. “We needed to make moves quick. Track position was real important.

“It was new pavement (since last year’s truck race), and it picked the speeds up, but it sure did make it hard to pass. I knew we had to get it done right there, or we weren’t going to have a second chance at it.”

Third-place finisher and pole-sitter Nelson Piquet Jr., who led 33 laps and brought the field to green for the final time, said restarts are complicated at Pocono, which features the longest straightaway in NASCAR racing at 3,740 feet.

“The last restart was a bit of a problem,” Piquet said. “It’s so wide. I didn’t know if I would defend on my left — Coulter — or if I would try to keep my line with James (Buescher) next to me, and it ended up being three-wide in the first corner.

“That was it. I lost all my position — still recovered to third. But it was a shame. Obviously, we had a fast truck, the quickest one out there. All we wanted to do was win.”

Matt Crafton and Denny Hamlin finished fourth and fifth, respectively. Ty Dillon, Parker Kligerman, John Wes Townley, Justin Lofton and Ross Chastain completed the top 10.

Piquet survived a run-in with Todd Bodine, who surged forward after a restart on Lap 34 but turned across the nose of Piquet’s Chevrolet when he moved down the track into Piquet’s line.

“I’ll take the blame for that whole thing just because I should have known better than to trust an idiot to do the right thing,” Bodine said. “I pulled down to draft off of James (Buescher) and I should have known that Nelson wasn’t smart enough to pull over with me and side-draft me.

“If it was the last lap of the race, I could see that. He thinks he owes me one anyway from Kansas, I think it was, but it’s a shame.”

Piquet dismissed Bodine’s suggestion.

“It was right at the exit of the corner, James was to my outside, and they passed me to the outside, so I didn’t even have time to tuck behind (Bodine),” Piquet explained. “His spotter should have told him that I was beside him . . .

“There’s nothing I could have done. I was never expecting something like that. The move he did was a bit inexperienced. You would expect somebody like me to do something like that. (Piquet is in his second full NCWTS season; Bodine is a two-time series champion.)

“It was after a corner, after a restart — everybody’s kind of chaotic over there. Not much to say. I couldn’t have done anything else.”

Notes: Dillon cut Peters’ series lead to eight points. . . . Townley scored the first top 10 of his career.

Buescher not only made up those two laps, he needed just one lap –- the final one –- to grab the lead and go on to win his NASCAR Camping World Truck Series-leading third race of the season at Chicagoland Speedway.

Leading just six laps in the entire event, Buescher passed points leader Timothy Peters and then held off Brendan Gaughan, who led 83 of the 150 laps, to win his second race in the last three events.

“We had issues early on where we kept losing power, so we decided to pit, changed the carburetor and the car came to life,” Buescher said. “From there, it was a matter of getting our laps back and going forward from there.”

And then, with a smile on his face, Buescher added, “We just had to pass 20 other trucks to win.”

Gaughan was looking to get his first Trucks win in nearly nine years, and it appeared he would do just that, given how strong he and his Chevrolet truck looked early on. After spinning his tires on a late restart, he valiantly rallied from sixth to settle for second place.

“I think about not winning (since 2003) every single day,” Gaughan said. “I thought tonight might finally be our night. But still, to run the way we did, and the great equipment Richard Childress gave us, this was really a great run, especially since we’re only racing a part-time schedule.”

Rather than risk wrecking on the final lap, points leader Peters wisely played it safe, finishing third. Matt Crafton finished fourth and Parker Kligerman rounded out the top 5.

“We did the right thing, used the right strategy and padded our points lead,” Peters said. “You can’t ask for much more than that – other than winning.”

Rounding out the top 10 were Cale Gale, Ron Hornaday Jr, Jason Leffler, Jason White and David Starr.

With six laps left, pole-sitter Justin Lofton slammed into the outside wall, bringing out the final caution of the race, setting up a shootout to the checkered flag between Peters and Buescher.

Gaughan, starting only his fourth NASCAR Camping World Truck Series race of the season, was hoping for his first NCWTS win since Oct. 11, 2003 at Texas Motor Speedway, his sixth triumph of that season. Unfortunately, he would come up short, extending his current winless streak to 130 races.

Bryan Silas’ spin on lap 8 brought out the first caution flag, right after Miguel Paludo and Ron Hornaday Jr. got together. Paludo bounced off Hornaday and slapped the wall, damaging the right side of his Silverado and forcing him to pit for right-side tires.

Eight laps later, although there was no resulting caution, Johnny Sauter bounced into Nelson Piquet Jr., causing heavy damage that cost Piquet a number of laps on pit road as the damage was repaired.

After getting back on the track, Piquet was forced back to pit road when the splitter on his truck snapped off, prompting a replacement and eventually causing him to miss 36 of the first 75 laps.

On Lap 45, Jason Leffler missed his pit box, forcing him to go all the way around the 1.5-mile track. Then to make matters worse, Leffler’s crew struggled to perform necessary service. As a result, Leffler went from being a top-five truck prior to his mistake to nearly two laps down.

Others also suffered pit stop mishaps, most notably drivers having issues finding their appropriate pix box, including series veterans Todd Bodine and Ron Hornaday Jr.

The yellow caution flag came out for a second time on lap 71 for debris. On the resulting pit stop, Gaughan came in only for fuel, allowing him to retain his lead over the rest of the field.

When Jennifer Jo Cobb brought out the caution flag for the third time due to a single truck spin, Buescher was forced to pit for a lengthy stop as his team replaced a faulty carburetor.

Chris Fontaine brought out the fourth caution of the race with 51 laps remaining following a solo spin.

Joey Coulter had one of the fastest trucks throughout the two practice sessions, qualified on the outside pole and remained in the top five for much of the first two-thirds of the race, but got caught up in a wreck with 44 laps left. His crew quickly repaired the damage and got him back on track (in 18th position) without losing a lap.

Four drivers were sent to the back of the field to start the race: Parker Kligerman and Chad McCumbee, both for adjustments after impound, and points leader Timothy Peters for and engine change and Johnny Sauter for missing the pre-race drivers meeting.

Several drivers reached significant milestones in their respective careers:

–Just one lap before halfway through the 150-lap event, four-time series champion Hornaday became the second driver in NCWTS history to complete 50,000 laps in his career. Hornaday finished 6th.

–Todd Bodine, who made his 200th series start, became the first driver to earn at least 200 starts in each of NASCAR’s three premier series: NASCAR Sprint Cup, Nationwide and Camping World Truck Series, finished 18th.

–David Starr became the fifth driver in series history to reach 300 starts. Starr finished 10th.

Keselowski passed Dillon with two laps left to run second, 3.805 seconds behind Buescher. Dillon came home third, followed by pole-sitter Matt Crafton and Timothy Peters, who grabbed the series lead from Justin Lofton.

Johnny Sauter recovered from a pit road penalty to finish sixth, followed by Joey Coulter, Jason Leffler, Ron Hornaday Jr. and 19-year-old Kyle Larson, who was making his series debut.

Buescher drove the same No. 31 Chevrolet he drove to his first NCWTS victory at Kansas in April.

“I think this race especially — both the truck wins we have were won in the shop,” Buescher said. “This is the third time I’ve raced this truck, the second time I’ve gone to Victory Lane with it. . . . The truck was phenomenal.

“We unloaded a little bit off and made some changes right away in practice this morning, and the truck came to life pretty good. We worked on it throughout practice, and I knew halfway through the first practice that we had a truck capable of running up front, possibly a truck capable of winning.

“Then, in the second practice, we found some more speed. I’m so excited to be able to get (sponsor) Exide Batteries to Victory Lane, to lead that many laps and dominate like that.”

A three-car wreck on Lap 69, involving two-time series champ Todd Bodine, Lofton and last week’s Nationwide Series winner Nelson Piquet Jr. put Lofton’s points lead in peril.

With a strong run to the inside in Turn 1, Bodine dived beneath Lofton, broke loose and knocked Lofton’s truck into the Chevrolet of Piquet, who slammed into the outside wall. Bodine blamed Lofton for not giving him enough room.

“I thought Justin was blowing up,” Bodine said. “I caught him so fast — I didn’t know what was going on, if he got loose off of (Turn) 4 or what. I caught him so fast, thought he was blowing up, so I went under him, and, obviously, he wasn’t blowing up. . . .

“He’s got plenty of room outside — he’s got to learn to give some space here. When you get that close and that tight on somebody, you’re just taking all their air, and there’s absolutely nothing you can do about it.”

Both Bodine and Piquet retired from the race at that point, but Lofton was able to continue. Taking a wave-around under the sixth caution — called on lap 102 because of Tim George Jr.’s spin into the Turn 2 wall — Lofton regained a lap lost during repairs to his truck and salvaged a 14th-place finish to limit his damage in the standings.

Dillon took the lead briefly with a two-tire pit stop under that caution, but Buescher regained the top spot moments after a restart on Lap 108. All told, Buescher led 119 of 150 laps.

Peters leaves Kentucky with a four-point lead over both Lofton and Dillon, with Buescher in fourth place, nine points back.

After a restart with four laps left, Logano crossed the finish line .208 seconds ahead of runner-up Buescher to claim his fifth victory in 11 Nationwide starts this season and the 14th of his career. The win was the first for Toyota in the Nationwide Series at Michigan.

Kurt Busch came home third, followed by Cole Whitt and pole-sitter Austin Dillon.

Buescher chased Logano for three laps after the final restart and made his move in Turn 1 on the white-flag lap, powering to the inside of Logano’s No. 18 Joe Gibbs Racing Camry. But Buescher couldn’t make the pass stick, and Logano pulled away.

“Racing there with James at the end was a lot of fun,” Logano said. “I knew exactly what he was doing the whole time, laying back there and trying to make that run on the last lap. I knew he was going to slide it down into 1, and I felt like, as long as I had position on him, I could pin him down enough to get a big enough lead off the corner.

“He did exactly what I thought he was going to do, and I was able to work my game plan and come out ahead enough to win the race.”

For Logano, the victory was yet another case of capitalizing on a chance to win and extending his remarkable success rate.

“I’ve had a lot of confidence in myself lately, in my abilities, knowing what I can do with the race car,” Logano said. “I feel like I’m feeding my crew chiefs the best information, and they’re doing the best jobs they can do to make the best race cars for me.

“There hasn’t been an opportunity we’ve let slip up yet. We’ve been in position to win races, and we’ve capitalized every time we’ve been in that position.”

NASCAR red-flagged the race on Lap 119 after the cars of Josh Richards and Jamie Dick wrecked in Turn 3. Dick’s car caught fire, but both drivers escaped. So did Richards’ car, which rolled driverless down the banking and came to a stop in the infield grass.

After a stoppage of eight minutes, 46 seconds, the field took the green flag on Lap 122 of 125. Logano and Buescher quickly made it a two-driver race. The win comes six days after Logano picked up his second career Cup victory, at Pocono.

Danica Patrick finished 18th in an up-and-down race that saw her involved in three of the seven cautions. Series leader Elliott Sadler ran 11th, but Ricky Stenhouse Jr., second in the standings entering the race, had a miserable time with handling problems and came home 25th.

Dillon moved into second place, eight points behind Sadler. Stenhouse, the defending Nationwide champion, fell to third in points, 27 behind the series leader.