Johnny Sauter Wins NASCAR Truck Series Race at Bristol and Claims 2018 Regular Season Title
Johnny Sauter's win of the UNOH 200 was his fifth NASCAR Truck Series win of the season. SHARE
Johnny Sauter capped off the 2018 NASCAR Camping World Truck Series regular season with a win Thursday night in the UNOH 200 at Bristol Motor Speedway in Tennessee. The win was Sauter ’s first at Bristol but his fifth overall of 2018 and garnered him the honor of regular-season champion. Getty Images for NASCAR
Johnny Sauter tops in 2018 regular season
Johnny Sauter hoists the 2018 NASCAR Camping World Truck Series regular-season champion's trophy after winning the UNOH 200 at Bristol Motor Speedway on Aug. 16, 2018. “I‘m so proud of this team,” Sauter said. “I knew we had a great truck today. What a way to cap off the regular season with a win. I had to race really hard with the 52 [Stewart Friesen] there for a while, which was exciting.”
Stewart Friesen finished second to Sauter. It was his third second-place finish of the season and the fourth-career runner-up showing for the driver still looking for his first-career win in the Truck Series. “That was probably the most fun I‘ve had all year,” Friesen said. “Bumping and grinding, and no better guys to race with than John Hunter [Nemechek]  and Johnny. We‘ll take it and move on.”
John Hunter Nemechek finished third after leading 104 of the 200 laps that made up the race. He also won both of the 55-lap stages. After Christopher Bell started on the pole and led the first 31 laps, Nemechek began to dominate the race with his first lead on a Lap 32 restart. Nemechek didn’t pit along with most of his fellow competitors between the first two stages, waiting instead until the end of Stage 2. Sauter got out of the pits first after the second stage, while Nemechek came off fourth. Noah Gragson took the lead from Sauter on the restart, but on Lap 131, Sauter was back up front and Nemechek in second. Nemechek led again for a few laps late in the race before Sauter took his final lead on Lap 196, and Friesen also got by Nemechek for second. Since Bristol didn’t produce a new race winner, the three drivers in position to make the playoffs on points—Matt Crafton, Friesen and Grant Enfinger—did so, joining race winners Sauter, Brett Moffitt , Gragson, Justin Haley and Ben Rhodes to make up the eight-driver 2018 playoff field. Crafton and Enfinger also posted top-10 finishes, finishing eighth and 10th respectively. Getty Images for NASCAR
2018 NASCAR Truck Series playoff field set
NASCAR Camping World Truck Series 2018 playoff drivers (L to R) Noah Gragson, Matt Crafton, Brett Moffitt, Grant Enfinger, Ben Rhodes, Justin Haley, Stewart Friesen and Johnny Sauter with the series championship trophy at Bristol Motor Speedway on Aug. 16, 2018
UNOH 200 RESULTS:
2. Stewart Friesen, No. 52 Chevrolet
3. John Hunter Nemechek, No. 8 Chevrolet
4. Parker Kligerman, No. 75 Chevrolet
5. Todd Gilliland, No. 4 Toyota
6. Justin Haley, No. 24 Chevrolet
7. Ben Rhodes, No. 41 Ford
8. Matt Crafton, No. 88 Ford
9. Noah Gragson, No. 18 Toyota
10. Grant Enfinger, No. 90 Ford
11. Dalton Sargeant, No. 25 Chevrolet
12. Ross Chastain, No. 38 Chevrolet
13. Austin Wayne Self, No. 22 Chevrolet
14. Tanner Thorson, No. 20 Chevrolet
15. Riley Herbst, No. 54 Toyota
16. Codie Rohrbaugh, No. 9 Chevrolet
17. Stefan Parsons, No. 15 Chevrolet
18. Brett Moffitt, No. 16 Toyota
19. Cody Coughlin, No. 2 Chevrolet
20. Clay Greenfield, No. 68 Chevrolet
21. Austin HIll, No. 02 Chevrolet
22. Jordan Anderson, No. 3 Chevrolet
23. Wendell Chavous, No. 49 Chevrolet
24. Justin Fontaine, No. 45 Chevrolet
25. Cory Roper, No. 04 Ford
26. Jesse Little, No. 97 Ford
27. Korbin Forrister, No. 7 Toyota
28. Christopher Bell, No. 51 Toyota
29. Myatt Snider, No. 13 Ford
30. Chad Finley, No. 42 Chevrolet
31. Scott Lagasse Jr., No. 30 Toyota
32.Bayley Currey, No. 83 Chevrolet
UP NEXT: The NASCAR Camping World Truck Series begins its seven-race playoff August 26 with its only road-course race of the season at Canadian Tire Motorsport Park. Austin Cindric is the defending winner of the Truck Series race at the track. In five previous series races there, none of the 2018 Truck Series regulars have won. MORE TO READ

Johnny Sauter Wins NASCAR Truck Series Race at Bristol and Claims 2018 Regular Season Title

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Martin Truex Jr., driver of the #78 Auto-Owners Insurance Toyota, signs the UNOH pole award after qualifying for the pole position for the Monster Energy NASCAR Cup Series Quaker State 400 presented by Walmart at Kentucky Speedway on July 13, 2018 in Sparta, Kentucky. July 13, 2018 at 6:38 pm
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Truex clocked 188.890 mph to earn his first Kentucky pole and 19th of his career on Friday. He led 152 of 274 laps on his way to winning this race last July. Truex’s No. 78 Toyota led a front-row sweep of Camrys for the 400-mile race Saturday night. Erik Jones, who earned his first career Cup win last week at Daytona, will start second after turning a lap of 188.739 mph in the No. 20 Toyota. Kevin Harvick (188.547) and three-time Kentucky winner Brad Keselowski (188.390) were next in Ford Fusions. Points leader Kyle Busch, a two-time Kentucky champion, rounded out the top five by clocking 188.206 mph in the No. 18 Toyota. Tags:

Martin Truex Jr. wins pole at Kentucky Speedway

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After raising a $75 million chunk of investment at a $1 billion valuation earlier this year, Mercari today announced it has seen more than 20 million app downloads in the U.S. The company started a North American hiring binge earlier this year and is aiming to double its staff in the U.S over the next 12 months. Mercari’s ultimate goal is to take on eBay and Craigslist on their home turf — and beyond. The company is tremendously successful in its home country of Japan. Counting more than 40 million users means that 30 percent of the population is using the platform to buy and sell new and used goods. “From a buyer’s point of view the buying process is similar to making a purchase from Amazon,” the company’s CEO Shintaro Yamada told me at the TechCrunch Tokyo conference. “From a buyer’s point of view, it is much easier than the service our competitors offer. We are mobile-first and our users are delighted by how easy it is to take a photo and list a product for sale.”
Mercari has seen huge growth in Japan. This graph ends in August; in the time since, the company’s CEO tells me Mercari has crossed the 40 million downloads mark. Gunning for global domination
Mercari
Founded2013
OverviewMercari aims to provide a solution by enabling people to easily sell and purchase second-hand items in a mobile marketplace with their smartphones.Japan’s mobile shopping obsession is finally in the US. Mercari, the resale shopping app, is the country’s biggest community-powered shopping fair in the palm of your hands. The intuitive app lets you buy and sell anything, from anywhere, in seconds …
Shintaro Yamada
BioDuring his years at Waseda University, Shintaro worked at Japan’s biggest e-commerce mall, Rakuten, Inc. On August 1st 2001, Shintaro established “Unoh Inc.” after graduating university. At Unoh he was responsible for designing and developing several web services, one of which was the online magazine subscription .Services provided by Unoh include planning, development and management of …
Full profile for Shintaro Yamada
Mercari launched in Japan three years ago, but the company has always had international ambitions. This means making design and product decisions that work for a global audience. “When features are too focused on Japanese culture and our local needs, we end up making a product that doesn’t work internationally,” Yamada says, hinting at one of the company’s early challenges. “We are trying to keep things as universal as possible in able to facilitate international expansion.”
Coming from a Japanese design aesthetic, that is easier said than done. To American eyes, many Japanese apps can look tremendously cluttered and confusing, but the opposite is also true. Apple’s notoriously minimalist interfaces, for example, look almost barren when translated into Japan’s compact written language. Striking a balance is far from easy, and Mercari has dedicated a lot of time to ensuring its apps have international appeal. Latest Crunch Report
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The company is constantly fielding questions about a rumored IPO, rumors that were further fueled when the company announced its most recent financial results earlier this week. Posting more than ¥13 billion ($127 billion) of revenues in Japan over the past year and growing its number of customers to more than 40 million in its domestic market, the company is experiencing tremendous growth. On the topic of an IPO, Yamada says that the timing isn’t right yet. He says the company would prefer to wait until it is becoming more clear how the international expansion is panning out. Listing the company on a Japanese stock exchange would be possible now, but he adds that the international exchanges could potentially be a better fit. Through a combination of advertising and viral campaigns, Mercari has grown to 20 million downloads in the U.S.
“We still have room to grow in Japan, but the next phase of growth is strongly linked to how well our international expansion goes. We are currently dedicating 90 percent of our resources to our U.S. expansion,” Yamada explains. “The market in North America is huge, and the U.S. is our jumping-off point for taking on the rest of the world.”
Originally, Mercari was hoping to be able to expand to the U.S. by sending staff over from Japan for a few weeks at the time. The team quickly realized that this wasn’t a sensible way of going about it. Focusing on the U.S. market for international  growth
Mercari’s growth has been driven by advertising and social media referral programs. “When we realized we needed a permanent presence, we changed strategy. At the beginning of this year, we started establishing a permanent base in the U.S., and Mercari now has an office in San Francisco and one in Portland. Our Chief Product Officer is now based in the U.S., too,” Yamada says, highlighting the company’s commitment to the U.S. market. “We currently have 40 staff in America, and we’re growing that by another 50 in the next year.”
Starting a marketplace is lucrative, of course, but finding success as a marketplace company is completely dependent on leveraging the network effect of users. The reason eBay is so successful is that that’s where sellers and buyers go to conduct their business by default. To take a bite out of eBay’s success, Mercari would need to build up a strong user base both on the supply and demand side. That sounds like an impossible task (and many startups have tried and failed), but Mercari has already succeeded in taking on a seemingly unassailable giant once before. Related Articles
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“When we launched in Japan three years ago, other services such as Yahoo Auctions  dominated the market,” Yamada said. “But the existing players were aiming at power sellers and seemed to be forgetting about the regular, casual sellers. Selling was too complicated for normal users. To take on this market we focused on smartphone users. Once we were successful in creating a great selling experience on smartphones, we saw very rapid growth.”
Marketplace dynamics and local challenges
“In the U.S., we are following the same strategy. Our growth isn’t as fast as it was when we launched in Japan, but we are growing every month. We have to adapt the product to the U.S. customers and get a deeper understanding of what works and what doesn’t,” Yamada explains. “For now, we are relying on our development resources in Japan, but we are hoping to expand our non-Japanese engineering teams too, to be able to adapt faster.”
In the U.S., Mercari’s biggest categories are women’s fashion, makeup and consumer electronics. Of course, in entering a brand new market, the company is facing a fragrant cornucopia of other challenges, too. The aforementioned design challenge is only a small part of it, and Mercari soon learned U.S. customers can be quite different from their Japanese counterparts in a few key ways. Fraud is one of those challenges. Japan is a famously low-crime country . One of the things that surprised me in Tokyo was that people often leave their laptop or mobile phone on a table to mark the table as taken. Not a recommended course of action in most of the U.S. and Europe. Mercari had a rude awakening in this respect when entering the U.S. market. Yamada tells me that their nascent U.S. operation is suffering from 10 times more fraud than its Japanese platform. There’s also a cultural difference around returns. “Buyers in the U.S. are very strong, and if people don’t like an item, they want to return it,” Yamada tells me. It isn’t that it’s impossible to return an item in Japan, but people generally don’t; instead, they’ll give it away or sell it, rather than returning it to the store where it was bought. “We knew there would be a difference compared to Japan, but we were surprised by the volume of enquiries. Our customer service load in the U.S. is a lot bigger than in Japan.”
Yamada and his team are continuing their U.S. hiring binge in order to continue the company’s attack on the extremely well-established incumbents. It will undoubtedly be a hard-fought battle against some formidable opponents. Given that both eBay and Craigslist feel a decade out of date at this point, the company might just succeed. Definitely one to keep an eye on. 0


Japanese unicorn Mercari is gunning for eBay’s crown

UNOH 175, New Hampshire Motor Speedway, Loudon, NH
Practice — FS1, 1:30 p.m. Final Practice — FS1, 3 p.m.
Xfinity Series
VisitMyrtleBeach.com 300, Kentucky Speedway, Sparta, KY
Practice — NBCSN, 3:30 p.m. Practice 2 — NBCSN, 6 p.m.
NFL
NFL HQ — NFL Network, 8 a.m.
NFL Insiders — ESPN, 2:30 p.m.
NFL Live — ESPN, 3:30 p.m.
Madden NFL Live — NFL Network, 4 p.m.
NFL Fantasy Live — NFL Network, 5 p.m.
Around the NFL — NFL Network, 6 p.m.
Top 10: New York Giants — NFL Network, 8 p.m.
Dexter Manley: A Football Life — NFL Network, 9 p.m.
NHL Preseason
Chicago at Montreal — NHL Network, 7:30 p.m.
Los Angeles at Anaheim — NHL Network, 10 p.m.
Scottish Championship League
Falkirk vs. Queen of the South — Fox Soccer Plus, 2:40 p.m.
Soccer
Football Focus — BBC World News, 4:30 p.m.
English Football Cup Highlights: Round 3 — beIN Sports, 5 p.m.
El Clasico — beIN Sports, 5:30 p.m.
ESPN FC — ESPNews, 6 p.m. The Keys & Gray Show — beIN Sports, 6 p.m. The Express Xtra — beIN Sports, 10 p.m. The Locker Room — beIN Sports, 10:30 p.m.
Sports Talk
Sport Today — BBC World News, 5:45 a.m.
Boomer & Carton — CBS Sports Network, 6 a.m. Morning Drive — Golf Channel, 7 a.m. Sport Today — BBC World News, 8:45 a.m. The Dan Patrick Show — Audience Network (DirecTV)/NBCSN, 9 a.m. The Dan Le Batard Show With Stugotz — ESPNU, 10 a.m.
MLB Central — MLB Network, 10 a.m. Sport Today — BBC World News, 11:45 a.m. The Rich Eisen Show — Audience Network (DirecTV)/Root Sports (Northwest/Rocky Mountain/Southwest), noon
His & Hers — ESPN2, noon
Russillo and Kanell — ESPNews, 1 p.m. The Box Score — Audience Network (DirecTV), 3 p.m. The Doug Gottlieb Show — CBS Sports Network, 3 p.m.
SportsNation — ESPN2, 3 p.m. The Paul Finebaum Show — SEC Network, 3 p.m. Highly Questionable — ESPN, 4:30 p.m.
America’s Pregame — FS1, 4:30 p.m.
Around the Horn — ESPN, 5 p.m. Pardon the Interruption — ESPN, 5:30 p.m.
Outside the Lines — ESPN2, 5:30 p.m.
BTN Live — Big Ten Network, 6 p.m.
Time to Schein — CBS Sports Network, 6 p.m.
American Heavy: Deontay Wilder — NBCSN, 7:30 p.m.
SportsCenter at Night With Scott Van Pelt — ESPN, midnight
Tennis
Moselle Open, Les Arènes Metz, Metz, France
Quarterfinals — Tennis Channel, 4 p.m. (same day coverage)
WTA Tour
Toray Pan Pacific Open, Ariake Colosseum and Ariake Tennis Forest Park, Tokyo, Japan
Quarterfinals — Tennis Channel, 8 p.m. (same day coverage)
Tennis Channel Live — Tennis Channel, 10:30 p.m.
Center Court — Tennis Channel, 11 p.m.
About Ken Fang
Ken has been covering the sports media in earnest at his own site, Fang's Bites since May 2007 and at Awful Announcing since March 2013.He provides a unique perspective having been an award-winning radio news reporter in Providence and having worked in local television.Fang celebrates the three Boston Red Sox World Championships in the 21st Century, but continues to be a long-suffering Cleveland Browns fan.


Viewing Picks for September 25, 2015

Steven Tyler to headline pre-race... The UNOH 200 is the mid-week contest at BMS prior to the Sprint Cup Series Saturday night race, the IRWIN Tools Night Race. Spencer Gallagher, driver of the No. 23 Allegiant Travel Chevrolet, will be making his first NCWTS start. It’ll also be Gallagher’s eighth NCWTS track debut on his rookie campaign. Also, 18-year-old Brandon Jones will return to the seat of the No. 33 MasterForce Chevrolet. The 200-lap event marks Jones’ third NCWTS start at Bristol and ninth NCWTS race of the 2015 season. Ticketholders can visit the all-free Kids Zone, which will have extended hours, 10am to 8pm. Check out the zip line, euro bungee, face painting, climbing wall, inflatables, mechanical bull, and ferris wheel. There will also be free live music on the Fan Zone stage from 11:30am to 5:30pm. The first 1,000 kids who visit the Guest Services booths inside the grandstand will receive a complimentary pair of bam bam sticks and a back-to-school pack with ruler, pencil, and eraser. Thursday at 8:30pm, take part in the Night Race 5K Road Race . It follows a winding route that includes a sprint down Thunder Valley’s legendary drag strip, a spin around the Speedway’s challenging high banks, and a finish line party celebrating the arrival of NASCAR’s finest haulers as they pull in to the track. You must pre-register and spaces are limited. This benefits Speedway Children’s Charities . Then, at 9, see the biggest, longest-running parade of team haulers in NASCAR. This year, the NASCAR Drivers Hauler Parade begins at the Bass Pro Shops in The Pinnacle. The semitrailers start rolling, follow a nine-mile route to the Speedway, and arrive at the track at 10. Fireworks will be shot from four different locations along the route, with a party celebrating the trucks’ arrival. Also at 9pm, Lance Stinson will perform live on the Fan Zone Stage. Louisiana Rice Mill, along with Food City, are partnering to fight hunger in Northeast Tennessee. They’re donating half a truckload (about 20,000 pounds) of rice to Second Harvest Food Bank of Northeast Tennessee . Louisiana Rice Mill will be recognized for their donation during race night on Thursday. Also Thursday, Food City Race Night will take place from 1 to 9pm on State Street. Stroll Downtown Bristol, visit with dozens of drivers and vendors, and hear live music. Click here for highlights of the events and shuttle bus information to help you get there! Copyright © 2015 by WCYB. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.


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