JR Motorsports entered the NASCAR O’Reilly Auto Parts Series Chase presented by Mobil 1 as the organization to beat, and for good reason. Justin Allgaier won a career-high six times over 24 regular-season races, earning the No. 1 seed. Carson Kvapil won two of the last three before The Chase, banking the No. 2 seed.
Yet a third of the way through the postseason, that narrative has now shifted in favor of the hottest driver: Sheldon Creed.
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The No. 00 Haas Factory Team pilot scored the victory two weeks ago at Bristol Motor Speedway, using a four-tire call with 20 to go and avoiding late chaos at the front for his second win in three Chase races. It doubled as the third of his career — all of which came this season — and put him 11 points ahead of Allgaier for the series lead. All put together, Creed is on a 1-2-1 finishing stretch to open the postseason. Allgaier paced the series after each race from Phoenix Raceway in March to Darlington Raceway in September.
For a driver who finished runner-up a record 15 times before scoring an O’Reilly Series victory, the September breakout might seem like a surprise to an outsider. He had stints with Richard Childress Racing and Joe Gibbs Racing that resulted in a points finish no higher than sixth. But Creed believed all along that, eventually, he would see the fruit of his labor.
“I feel like I always knew that I could do it,” Creed told NASCAR.com earlier this week before Saturday at Las Vegas Motor Speedway, the fourth of nine Chase races (7:30 p.m. ET, The CW, ESPN Unlimited, MRN Radio, SiriusXM NASCAR Radio). “For whatever reason, they just come a little easier, or they just come a little more natural after that (first win). I knew that if I could just finally break through that, at least I hoped that they would come easier, and they kind of seemed to do that the last two times.”
That’s the old adage in NASCAR, and it’s seemingly valid. Coming in his 138th start, Creed prevailed in a wild finish at EchoPark Speedway in February after five-time track winner Austin Hill went sideways in the final set of corners. The victory was long in the works for the 2020 NASCAR Craftsman Truck Series champion, who had gone nearly five years without a win at any level of NASCAR. And that opened the floodgates … eventually.
Seven-plus months later came win No. 2 in quite impressive fashion. He led the final 49 laps at Darlington, often coined as the toughest track on the circuit, to open The Chase strong after Allgaier suffered late handling issues and finished 17th.
That win, along with the Bristol triumph, felt even more rewarding than in the draft at EchoPark.
“Everyone looks at it maybe a little different, but yeah, winning at a drafting track is cool, and it’s really hard to do. But to win anywhere else, it’s a lot harder,” Creed said. “I really just wanted to win somewhere where you had to drive the race car and somewhere that’s hard to drive the car.
“I feel like we’ve been building toward this for — I don’t want to say just this season, but the back half of last season, we’ve just slowly been building and building, and we’re just now starting to reap the rewards of all the work.”
But even between his first and second victories, Creed never eased the throttle. He finished inside the top 10 16 times during the regular season, including a stretch of nine straight where he placed no worse than seventh. After the EchoPark win, Creed dropped lower than fourth in points just once.
That model of consistency isn’t new for Jonathan Toney, who crew-chiefs the No. 00 Chevrolet. Before pairing with Creed last year, he spent two seasons leading Cole Custer at then-called Stewart-Haas Racing, resulting in a championship and a second-place finish in points.
“Personality-wise, driving style, I think they’re very, very similar. I don’t know that I necessarily anticipated that off the bat,” the fourth-year shot-caller told NASCAR.com. “The way they drive the cars, just being consistent, not putting themselves in a bad spot in occasions that they could, and then staying around at the end of the race and maximizing the days … going from Cole to Sheldon has almost been a natural transition, and we’ve just continued to work on and hone on things very similar to what we would have done for Cole when working with Sheldon.”
And for a crew chief as accomplished as Toney in such a short period of time, pushing Creed over the hump and into the championship limelight is admittedly a career highlight.
“He’s worked so hard and has been part of some really good teams that has helped mold him and turn him into the young man that he is and the race car driver that he’s become,” Toney said. “We’ve benefitted from those times, for sure, the learning lessons that he’s been through. I think that now, the last few weeks and this year, the three (wins) this year have kind of fell his way finally, and it’s been very rewarding to be part of that for sure.
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“There’s a genuine respect there between us and everybody on the team … that’s a key component. I think we got confidence in one another that we got each other’s best interest in mind, so to speak. So I think if you put that combination together, that’s just a good recipe for a relationship.”
Creed says that Haas is his favorite organization that he’s driven for. His bond with Toney is a huge reason for that.
“Just because he’s awesome,” Creed said, laughing. “He’s just really good at his job, kind of reading the driver and listening. Like honestly, I feel like he’s listened to me way more than any of my other crew chiefs on what I asked for in the race car, and we went through some paths that I didn’t like with the car, and then we’ve kind of just hit on things this year that I’ve really liked.
“The way we work together and get along with my teammate (Sam Mayer), I feel like we have very similar feedback to the race cars, which is a good thing. If we’re saying different things, that makes it harder to lead a direction for the guys to work on things and make the cars faster, so I feel like all of that’s just been in sync really well, and it’s a place I’ve fit in really well.”
Creed and Toney have spent nearly two seasons building to this point. But now it is time to hammer down. Fresh after an off week, the O’Reilly Series finishes with a stretch of six straight races — three of which are at intermediates, including the finale at Homestead-Miami Speedway. Creed feels the pace he showed at Darlington could translate well to Homestead, but just needs to stay within 25 points of the series lead.
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Those might be modest expectations for the driver leading the series. But Creed entered the season thinking “everything would have to go well” to even contend for the title. He’s here now, though, and a title would make him the first to ever win championships in the ARCA Menards Series, Truck Series and O’Reilly Series — something Creed said he’s certainly thinking about.
“I just try not to change anything and just have a lot of fun and enjoy being at the track,” the 29-year-old said of his mindset. “The way I try to race everyone, like maybe at the end of races you would see more aggression out of me, but I kind of go with the opposite approach of just trying to be super clean and not run into anybody and keep the fenders on it.”
Said Toney: “Just go do what we can do and control what we can control, and just do what we’ve been doing. That is a very talented group of drivers over at (JR Motorsports) and a very talented group of people that’s building those race cars and coming to the race track and executing on a weekend basis. I enjoy competition and love competing against people that bring out the best in you.”