After 14 full-time seasons and eight straight years with a victory — seven of which were multi-win campaigns — a Justin Allgaier rise to the NASCAR Xfinity Series champion’s stage at Phoenix Raceway in November just feels like a matter of time.
The driver of the No. 7 JR Motorsports Chevrolet has been so tantalizingly close for so long, qualifying for the Championship 4 in five of the last seven years and placing runner-up in the title-deciding finale in 2020 and 2023 but yet to seal the deal.
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Allgaier, 38, enters the 2024 Xfinity Series Playoffs as one of the favortites as the No. 1 seed with two wins in hand this season. Six races separate him from another shot at finally scoring that ever-elusive title. There is at least one lingering question, though.
“I think that’s the hard part — how do you kind of regenerate something different after having success year over year and still not being able to get a championship?” Allgaier pondered during Xfinity Series Playoff Media Day on Tuesday. “How do you go into Phoenix and have a different school of thought or different mindset?”
Allgaier’s last visit to the 1-mile track in Arizona felt almost emblematic of his prior championship quests. The No. 7 Chevrolet was cruising to a sure victory at Phoenix in March, nursing a three-second lead with five laps to go. That was until a flat left-rear tire sent him spinning backward into the Turn 1 wall, abruptly ending his day without a trophy in hand.
Perhaps, though, the bad luck that has plagued Allgaier and Co. is out of the way and was left behind in the regular season. The finale at Bristol Motor Speedway was another painfully perfect example of chances souring. Entering with a 43-point lead to win the Regular Season Championship, Allgaier was leading when the lapped car of Austin Green blew a tire and bounced off the wall, clipping Allgaier and damaging the No. 7 car. He charged all the way back to the top five — then got spun into the inside wall when Sheldon Creed and Allgaier moved for the same spot on corner exit and sent him spinning. Allgaier ultimately finished 30th, 10 laps down, and lost the regular-season crown by a mere three points.
“I think for us, this year’s been really weird,” Allgaier said. “I would say, arguably, finish-wise, it’s been one of the worst years we’ve had. I mean, it just seems like if it could go wrong, it’s gone wrong. We’ve put ourselves in bad position at the end of these races numerous times, and we’re still right there points-wise. We’re still doing all the right things. We’re still going to go into these playoffs as the point leader with the most amount of bonus points at the end of the regular season. So I think that that’s where it’s been really odd or a weird season, if you will.”
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Now comes a reset: a three-race Round of 12 beginning with a trip to Kansas Speedway on Saturday (4 p.m. ET, The CW, MRN Radio, SiriusXM NASCAR Radio) with a 27-point buffer to the provisional elimination line for Allgaier. But for as questionable as his luck has been — five DNFs and seven finishes of 28th or worse in the opening 26 races including two of the last three — Allgaier takes nothing for granted.
“While I would love to go to Phoenix and have a shot at a championship, I also know that we’ve got to get to Phoenix,” he said. “And if I look at the two individual rounds before the final round, there’s a lot of unknowns. There’s a lot of question marks. There’s a lot of things that could go in your favor and could go against you. So we just have to go into it with a mindset of, we scored a lot of points this year. We’ve done all the right things, and even if we don’t have the finishes to show for it, we’ve had the points to show for it. So we can point our way in just as easy as you can win your way in.”
JR Motorsports co-owner Dale Earnhardt Jr. sees the potential in both Allgaier and crew chief Jim Pohlman. Since joining forces to begin the 2023 season, Allgaier and Pohlman have compiled six victories, 22 top fives and 35 top 10s in a combined 59 races. Earnhardt doesn’t view this year as a now-or-never moment for the duo — but “soon” is safely on his radar.
“I really believe that he is in the best possible position to win it,” Earnhardt said at Bristol last weekend. “Him and Jim, they’ve got a past and a trust in each other. And when he asked to have Jim as his crew chief, I was like, ‘All right, you’re picking your guy.’ And man, it has been as good as you could hope. I know if you just look at the stat sheet, you can say there’s an issue in stage three for a handful of races, where they swept the stages but don’t get the result. But I look at just the car’s speed. When he unloads and they go through the process of the weekend, he’s had some really, really great race cars comparable to our other cars. I feel like Jim’s exceeding or overachieving a bit in some moments.
“And so I’m not really worrying about if you don’t win it [this year]. I’m more saying in the next handful of years, I think he’s got the best shot he’s ever had to do it, and I would be surprised if he didn’t. If he doesn’t win a championship in the next couple of years with where we are as a team and him and Jim and what they’re doing, I will be a little bit surprised.”
On Tuesday, Allgaier talked about how strong the relationship is between himself and Pohlman and pointed to the fun and success they have had together as a driver/crew-chief combination. Through 2023, Allgaier felt like they couldn’t make a wrong call — every decision fell in the No. 7 team’s favor. This year has featured only some of those moments while also adding in some significant headwinds.
Don’t be mistaken, though — Allgaier relishes it all the same.
“I think sometimes you need the peaks and the valleys, right?” he said. “You need the peaks to really enjoy the moment and to have the successes of what goes on in this sport. But you really need the valleys to kind of reset yourself and give yourself that extra little bit of of drive and want.
“Listen, there’s no question Bristol did not go the way that we wanted it to go. But that’s great motivation, right? I look at that race and I look at all the the challenges that we went through; it’s great motivation to go into Kansas this week and go try to right the wrongs, right, to do the things that we didn’t do at Bristol. And I think we have the car to do that.”
What he has with certainty is faith and support from within his team. Allgaier has driven for JR Motorsports since 2016 and has collected 22 of his 25 Xfinity wins in the No. 7 Chevrolet, becoming a perennial threat for the Xfinity Series championship. Earnhardt, a Class of 2021 NASCAR Hall of Fame and two-time series champion himself, believes that Allgaier has what it takes to hoist that trophy as well — whether in November 2024 or in the future.
“We’ve made some great decisions in our company, but hiring Justin was one of those,” Earnhardt said. “He has been so professional, just represents all our partners so well — everybody that’s ever connected to him with Unilever or obviously Brandt that he’s cultivated on his own, all the other partners that have ever been on his car. They love him. He’s perfect. He just handles all that stuff so well. And he’s measured in his criticism when things don’t go well. He doesn’t do something or say something that is difficult for you as an owner or the team or the organization.
“He’s just so, so good, and I’m thankful for that. So I’m wanting to help him get this championship because I know it means a lot to him, but I think we’re putting him in really good position to do that.”