With eye on playoff berth, Allmendinger aiming for Sonoma speed from start to finish

RELATED: Most memorable Sonoma moments AJ Allmendinger's road-racing background would seem to give him a leg up heading into this weekend's Monster Energy NASCAR Cup Series event at Sonoma Raceway. His recent qualifying efforts say so; his recent race results, not as much. Allmendinger enters the race weekend at the 1.99-mile road course with a considerable chance to prevail in Sunday's Toyota/Save Mart 350 (3 p.m. ET, FS1, PRN, SiriusXM). His only victory in NASCAR's premier series came at the tour's other permanent road-racing layout, Watkins Glen International, in 2014. Allmendinger has started on the front row and led laps in each of the last three Sonoma races. Though speed has been abundant, the results haven't shown as much. A late spin in 2014 left him 37th. He matched that finish the following season because of a mechanical issue. And Allmendinger mustered just a 14th-place performance last year after a late-race penalty on pit road. So though he figures in as a pre-race favorite, the 35-year-old veteran is taking an introspective approach toward converting a regular-season win at Sonoma into a playoff berth. "All you can do is just go do your best. That's all I can do, and that's all the team can do," Allmendinger said last weekend in a roundtable with reporters at Michigan International Speedway. "I know on the outside world, people are like, 'this is your best chance.' Maybe it is, maybe it's not. Maybe Martinsville is our best chance, I don't know. Just do your best every weekend and if that gives you a chance to go win a race and you're in Victory Lane, great. If you finish 20th and that's all you have, then that is what it is." Sonoma presents an opportunity for a bright spot in a season of transition for Allmendinger's JTG Daugherty Racing team. The organization expanded to two cars this season, bringing in Chris Buescher as a teammate, but Allmendinger attributes the operation's recent woes to its slow adaptation to the current rules package and not because it has spread itself thin. Still, since a third-place run in the season-opening Daytona 500, Allmendinger has just one other top-10 finish (a sixth at Martinsville in April). After four straight results of 30th or worse, JTG Daugherty made a change at crew chief for the No. 47 Chevrolet team in early May, moving Ernie Cope over from his competition director's role to replace Randall Burnett. The gains have been modest in the four races since the personnel shift, but Allmendinger still sits 26th in the series standings -- one spot behind his teammate Buescher -- with 15 races complete in what's been a character-builder of a season thus far. "The chemistry in our race team has been really good, and in the time of struggle, that's when you really see what you're made of as a race team," Allmendinger said. "Do you start falling apart at the seams and everybody starts fighting with each other, or do you stick together and go out there and work harder and make things better? I feel like we've slowly been getting there. "We're by no means anywhere close to where we want to be, but over the last few weeks working together, everybody's really pitched in and worked hard. We're slowly learning." Drivers and crew chiefs alike will have to be quick learners this weekend as the stage racing format introduced this season makes its debut at a road course. The first stage is set to end at Lap 25, the second at Lap 50, with the overall finish set for Lap 110. The early intermissions may remove some of the guesswork for teams at a track where fuel and pit-stop strategy often makes the difference between winning or losing. Allmendinger suggested it may not be as straightforward as it might appear. "You know you've got to run and get through those stages and then the last stage, you'll probably just break it up into two 30-lap runs," Allmendinger said. "That might make it a little easier, but that said, typically a caution falls at the right or wrong time for whoever's hoping for it or not hoping for it, so you've always got to play that as a factor as well. I feel like if you get that late-race caution, that breeds more cautions, so it's always a challenge."