He certainly had the car, in more ways than one. No vehicle at Dover International Speedway looked sportier than A.J. Allmendinger's No. 43, painted in that vintage Petty blue/day-glo orange two-tone scheme that the King himself made famous. And for parts of Sunday's event, no vehicle was faster, either. Allmendinger was right up there, hanging with title contenders Kyle Busch and Jimmie Johnson on the concrete mile -- until a series of events ruined what had the makings of a career-best finish.

“

If I get out there and do my job, the rest of it will take care of itself. I feel like we're running a lot better than we show in the points, we've just had some bad luck.

”

-- A.J. ALLMENDINGER

There was the loose lug nut that forced him to pit road, right before a caution that trapped him a lap down. After gaining the free pass, there was the pit-road speeding violation that forced him to serve a pass-through penalty, and put him a lap down again. The end result was 14th, far from awful for a program well down in points, but also far from what the No. 43 team seemed capable of.

"Why," Allmendinger lamented at one point on the radio, "does racing hate me?"

It's easy to commiserate with the guy, really, given that he's seemed on the verge of a breakthrough for so long. Nobody in the Cup garage questions Allmendinger's work ethic -- in fact his teammates, past and present, rave about it. Nobody disputes the commitment of the former open-wheel standout that jumped to NASCAR full-time in 2007. Nobody who has seen the flashes, from his third-place finish in last season's Daytona 500 to Sunday's stint at the front in Dover, doubts that he knows how to wheel a car.

And yet his career has too often been defined by what-ifs and might-have-beens, weekends that started with all kinds of hope and promise and for one reason or another turned unfulfilling in the end. To a point, it's understandable -- Richard Petty Motorsports has endured a degree of upheaval the past two years, to the point where now even Kasey Kahne, the organization's one true star, struggles to make up ground. And in all fairness, you probably should throw out Allmendinger's first 18 months on NASCAR's premier circuit, when he failed to qualify for 22 events and was held out of six others, and became the public whipping boy for a Red Bull program that wasn't ready for prime time. (Continued)