ROCKINGHAM, N.C. — First-time winner William Sawalich led the final 79 laps of Saturday’s North Carolina Education Lottery 250 NASCAR O’Reilly Auto Parts Series race at Rockingham Speedway.
Pursuing Sawalich for much of that period were Brandon Jones and Justin Allgaier, both of whom appeared to have a shot at testing the leader in the closing laps. On a day when passing in the front group was a major challenge on a recently paved track where grip remains strong, the followers made sporadic gains on Sawalich but couldn’t close the transaction.
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Jones was 0.863 of a second behind in the runner-up spot, and Allgaier was a close third, 2.075 seconds behind Sawalich.
The chances to make gains, Jones said, were few.
“I was pushing so hard that I was making little mistakes here and there,” Jones said. “I missed the corner one lap, and then I was about a tenth-and-a-half (of a second) better the next lap. The track is so finicky. This place is very high grip, and that means you’re going to be on edge at times. I’m doing all the things I can do inside the car to adjust, but there’s not much you can change. There are just little things you can try to improve your balance on.”
Jones said Sawalich had better speed out of the gate on restarts.
“His short-run speed was great,” he said. “He took off really well. We were a little bit worse than them to take off, but if you look at it like a graph it’s like my car would get a little better and his would get a little worse over the long run. But he was able to build such a big lead early that it was hard to get back to him.”
Jones said he was adamant about being “super aggressive” Saturday after running what he called a disappointing race the previous week at Martinsville Speedway, where he finished 18th.
“I left Martinsville a little frustrated at myself last week,” he said. “I am going to take all of the runs I can get. I’m going to put people in bad situations, if I can, and just move forward. I think we did a really good job of it. We kept fighting both sides of it with balance today. Sam (McAuley, crew chief) did a great job taking all of my feedback and making a car, I think, capable of winning. It was just a matter of trying to get some track position, and he (Sawalich) got such a big restart on that last restart that it was hard to catch him.”
Jones has scored two runner-up finishes in the past three races. “I’ll take that,” he said. “I like the momentum we’ve got.”
Allgaier, the series’ dominant driver this year, missed a shot at a fourth seasonal win but expressed satisfaction with a fifth consecutive top-five run and sixth of the season.
He echoed Jones’ frustration at trying to catch Sawalich.
“We were all fighting the same thing,” Allgaier said. “When we got to lapped traffic, it would slow the 18 (Sawalich) and then we’d catch him and then it would all kind of accordion back and forth.
“Track position made all the difference in the second half. When you were able to get some clear air and get separated some, that was so important. I was loving the fact that the track kind of widened out and we were able to move around a lot. But when you caught the cars in front of you, you had to have clean air. If you couldn’t get to that point, you couldn’t do much with it.”
Along pit road after the race, there was talk that passing conditions between mostly equal cars would improve significantly as the track surface ages.
“You had to make the moves when you could and get past those guys when you could,” Allgaier said. “I just didn’t do a very good job of that today. But when you get out of here with a bunch of stage points and finish third, it’s hard to be really upset about it.”
Allgaier leads the points by 126 over Jesse Love, who finished 27th, two laps down.