RELATED: Full race results | Post-Pocono standings
LONG POND, Pa. — Justin Allgaier was patiently waiting out Saturday’s rain-interrupted Pocono Green NASCAR XFINITY Series race in his JR Motorsports team hauler.
Crew members wandered back and forth between the hauler and the garage stall, where the No. 7 Chevrolet was in a state of mid-repair.
The red flag was out, putting work on the car on hold.
And then rain-interrupted became rain-shortened.
“Honestly, I’m hoping we can get back out there,” Allgaier said before the inaugural XFINITY Series race at Pocono Raceway was called with 53 of 100 laps completed. “If we don’t, we won’t be able to get back out there and get those points.
“But that’s how racing goes, right?”
Rain showers came and went, negating constant attempts to return the track to race-ready conditions.
Finally the decision was made to call the race officially completed.
And Allgaier found himself saddled with a 39th-place finish in a 40-car field, only the second result outside the top-12 this season.
MORE: Relive the day in photos
Just moments after a restart following a competition caution (Laps 17-19), Allgaier’s Chevrolet had slid up into the outside wall in the Tunnel Turn. There was no contact from another vehicle but both the car and Larson’s expectations suffered heavy damage.
“When I went to turn down into Turn 2, I started wrecking as soon as I turned off the wall and ultimately ended up crashing more toward the exit,” he said. “It was one of those crashes that seemed like it was never going to end.
“It was just one of those situations where maybe it was just aero. Get behind two cars, having a car behind me just unhooked the car that much.
“The part that’s frustrating is this is one of those race tracks on our schedule that I had circled, that I couldn’t be more excited to come to. I’d been asking (track president) Brandon Igdalsky if he could make it happen for like the last six years.
“The fact that we finally got it here and then here we are making, what, 16, 17, 18 laps, something like that? A frustrating day for sure.”
The frustrations have been few and far between this season for the soon-to-be 30-year-old.
In his first start with the team this year at Daytona, he finished 12th. He finished 10th or better in the next six races and the previous three heading into Saturday’s event. The only bump came at Richmond, where Allgaier raced off pit road with the lead only to crash after contact with Brennan Poole on the restart and wound up 35th.
Third in points coming into the series’ 12th stop, the Pocono result dropped him four spots to seventh and he now trails points leader Daniel Suarez by 53.
The team’s consistency hasn’t been surprising, he said, but that it came so quickly was somewhat unexpected.
Former XFINITY Series driver Regan Smith won twice with the team just last year and finished fourth in points before making the move back into the Sprint Cup Series garage.
The driver change was significant; the crew, headed up by crew chief Jason Burdett, for the most part has been left intact.
“I knew that the group at JR Motorsports that I was getting was a great group,” Allgaier said. “I knew they worked really well together, that things would be pretty seamless as far as how well they worked … a few changes from what they had last year but for the most part pretty similar.
“Obviously, the communication between the crew chief and driver and all that takes time to figure out if it’s going to work or not. That’s probably the part that surprised me. … I’m not surprised that we’ve had the season we’ve had, but I am surprised that we did it as early as we did.”
Sprint Cup Series regular Kyle Larson, who led 27 of the 53 completed laps, won Saturday’s inaugural event — his first XFINITY Series win of 2016.