With a strong close to his 2015 NASCAR Sprint Cup Series campaign, Richard Petty Motorsports driver Aric Almirola carries an infectious confidence heading into the 2016 season. The goal for the year is simple: Make the Chase for the NASCAR Sprint Cup after narrowly missing the elimination-style postseason in 2015.
”Every single guy on my race team’s got a fire in their belly to go get started in 2016,” Almirola said during last month’s Charlotte Motor Speedway Media Tour. “And that’s our only goal again, no matter how we do it, whether it’s win a race, do it on points, whatever it is, we want to make the Chase and we feel like we’re going to.”
Almirola made the Chase in 2014 thanks to his July win at Daytona International Speedway, and that postseason appearance “made us extremely hungry,” the driver of the No. 43 Ford said. “It’s like a kid. You give them one piece of candy, they always ask for a second.”
The 31-year-old Florida native achieved the best average finish (17.9) of his career in 2015 and opined that “2015 was even more successful” for the team based on the consistency of performance.
”We set top-15 finishes as the goal and we had a board in my office that had an orange line on it and asked Aric to try to stay above it each week and he did a good job with that,” Sammy Johns, the director of operations at RPM said.
After a season in which Almirola scored top 15s in half of the 36 races, Johns wants to step that target up slightly.
“We are going to move that up to top 12s, but we definitely want to see more top 10s, more top fives. … I think Aric is ready to get to Victory Lane more often as a driver,” Johns said.
Giving the team even more confidence is the strong finish that Almirola and crew chief Trent Owens put together to close out 2015, with two top fives and five of his six top 10s in the season’s final 11 races. An expanded partnership with Smithfield Foods, who will serve as a primary sponsor for 31 races in 2016, also adds a little spring to the team’s step.
“We were caught disappointed with not making the Chase, so we got the group of guys together and said, ‘Let’s try to be that best car that’s not in the Chase,’ ” Owens said. “So it was real good to see the team gather around and put their heads down and we had some of our better runs toward the end of the season. We’ve got to maintain that.”
The Almirola-Owens pairing is entering its third season, and the familiarity between the two brings a level of comfort that only seems to be getting stronger.
“It’s nice to hear the same voice on the radio,” Almirola said. “I’ve got a really unique relationship with Trent. We’re friends away from the race track but at the race track, we’re fierce competitors and we want to compete. He’s so talented at what he does that he’s probably one of the first crew chiefs that I honestly, I don’t even talk shop with and setup or stuff like that with him on a regular basis.
“I show up to the race track and I have full confidence in him and trust what he comes up with for setups, trying to make the cars faster that it honestly takes that worry away from me. I just worry about the race track we’re going to and my driving style at that race track and what we need to do from the previous time we were there.”
For Owens, it’s the subtle understanding of how things are communicated that helps the duo navigate their way during the season.
“Going into a third season, all the little … the tone of voices and all that stuff, you start to understand how big an adjustment or how little adjustment you need to make. I feel like I know him very well as a driver,” Owens said.
“On paper, we should have our best season in ’16. As we all know in racing, you got to have luck before you have anything. So if we can just have a little bit of luck, I do think the relationship he and I got right now is as good as any in the garage.”