If you take a look at Ben Rhodes in the 2026 championship standings, his statistics look too average for a two-time champion. With four top 10 finishes and 300 points to his name, he is sitting in P7 with one DNF to his name. While it may look like Rhodes is having a bad season on paper, the reality is much more complex. And the officials at NASCAR only add to it.

While he was racing in the final stage of the Truck Series race at Nashville Superspeedway, Rhodes had a loose wheel, which ended up coming off his truck right after the race restart. For the same, NASCAR has issued a fine to his team.

“Jackman Evan Clay and rear tire changer Pedro Martinez have been suspended for the next two points races through Naval Base Coronado after a wheel came off driver Ben Rhodes’ truck during the final stage at the 1.33-mile concrete oval near Music City,” the official wording reads. “The loose wheel is a safety violation noted in Sections 8.8.10.4A and 10.5.2.5D of the NASCAR Rule Book.”

After this penalty, Jabari Carney and Matt Kurinyj will be the jackman and the tire changer for his entry at Michigan’s Truck race on Saturday.

It should not be a major issue, since drivers do get penalized for these infractions regularly. A one-off incident is easy to overlook. But in this case, it is just another example of the problems that have plagued Rhodes and the No. 99 ThorSport Racing truck all season.

From bad luck to mechanical failures, almost everything seems to be falling on their team at once this season, drawing them further and further from the championship-winning team they were in 2021 and 2023.

Going through each of them in a chronological manner, we find that this bad luck struck him for the first time in February. The race became famous for Kyle Busch and Carson Hocevar’s teamwork as Hocevar pushed Busch’s Spire Motorsport truck to victory. Except that it wasn’t supposed to be like that.

It was Ben Rhodes who led the race-high 70 laps that day at EchoPark Speedway. He led a race-high 70 laps and still sat out front in Stage 2 when everything unraveled. The No. 99 truck suddenly ran dry, forcing him to the back and dropping him a lap down. What looked like a race slipping away quickly turned into a test of recovery.

Rhodes responded with urgency and grit. By Lap 107, he lined up 19th for the final restart in a time-shortened race impacted by earlier rain and the looming NASCAR O’Reilly Auto Parts Series event. In less than 20 laps on the 1.54-mile drafting track, he carved through the field with an ill-handling truck and surged back into contention, ultimately securing a remarkable fourth-place finish at Lap 126. Ask Rhodes about it, and you would not hear the drama in his voice.

“Well, we had some new tires on the truck and a lot of anger behind the wheel after we ran out of fuel,” he admitted post-race in February.

Bristol arrived with its own set of problems for Rhodes. He would start the race in P9 and end up claiming victory during stage 2. However, with only 27 laps to go, Rhodes fell down the order from third, losing positions until he was almost out of the top 10. The reason behind it was rather simple. An alternator issue had caused him to lose out in the final segment of the race.

“Basically, we won the second stage. We were running up front, and then we got off sequence. When we started in the back, all the debris, all the wrecks, and all the long caution laps just got the motor really hot, and we could not get it cooled down enough,” Rhodes informed.

He tried everything in his power to try and diagnose the issue during the race and keep his truck running, but ultimately, fate was not in his favor. He would finish the race in P11, but in his eyes, had the entire fiasco not happened, he would have stood in the victory lane. Such was his confidence in himself and the pace of the truck.

Ben Rhodes can’t catch a break right now

It looks like Rhodes’ team has some prominent issues with fuel calculations, because this issue has particularly haunted his No. 99 truck multiple times this year. Just like EchoPark Speedway, Rhodes’ car ran out of fuel again on the last lap while racing at Dover. At that moment, he was running in P6. Unfortunately, he couldn’t commit the heroics he was able to do in Echo Park.

Finally, Rhodes would finish the race in P19, and he wasn’t happy about it.

“Ran out of fuel while running 6th with just one lap to go. Needed more fuel and more laps. The track was changing and coming to us at the end,” he wrote on his Instagram post race.

But little did he know, the next race was going to be equally brutal for him and his truck.

Again in Charlotte, his truck was not performing according to his wishes, and as he confessed during the post-race interviews, it was “only good for 2-3 laps during restarts.” The condition was so dire that Rhodes was glad that the truck race ended early. If not, he might not have been able to defend the P4 finish he finally brought home.

“If it had gone 20 more laps at the end, I think I might’ve fallen out of the top 10. So, I am not going to complain about the short breaks at all…,” he couldn’t help but admit in front of the media. And that was really difficult for him to do. Rhodes thought that the truck race at Charlotte should’ve gone on for longer, and NASCAR should’ve allowed the viewers some action.

Despite that, he had to stay satisfied with his current finish as his truck never had enough power or pace to survive that extra time. And finally, in Nashville, he would end up coming back to the garage in P28. For now, it is clear that as a driver, Rhodes is currently facing one of the worst seasons when it comes to his overall luck. Because all these situations make it clear that he has all the raw talent necessary.

Yet, he still loses positions and victories and gives up points because, seemingly, his team has forgotten how to make good trucks again. If not for these incidents hammering him down, there’s no doubt that he would have at least one victory and would be among the top 3 in the driver standings currently. He is only 158 points behind the leader after Nashville.

The way he keeps brute-forcing through stages and tries to keep his truck running in the top 10 is only going to be good enough for the regular season. In the final 10 races of the season, any mistake is going to bring him down hard. If Rhodes faces such mechanical failures and fuel miscalculations during the Chase, his bad luck will cause him to lose out on a championship fight halfway through the post-season.

It is an outcome that both he and the team would want to avoid.