DAYTONA BEACH, Fla. — Justin Allgaier and the No. 40 JR Motorsports crew will have to race their way into the 2025 Daytona 500 by way of Thursday night’s Duel at Daytona.
Allgaier’s single-car qualifying speed (180.495 mph) was 33rd fastest overall on Wednesday, third of the nine Open entries. Former champions Martin Truex Jr. and Jimmie Johnson were the two quickest Open cars who were previously not locked into the Daytona 500. Allgaier will start 17th in Thursday’s first duel (7 p.m. ET, FS1, MRN Radio, SiriusXM NASCAR Radio).
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The reigning NASCAR Xfinity Series champion is hoping to wheel the No. 40 Chevrolet into Sunday’s “Great American Race” (1:30 p.m. ET, FOX, MRN Radio, SiriusXM NASCAR Radio) to earn JR Motorsports — co-owned by NASCAR Hall of Famer Dale Earnhardt Jr. and sister Kelley Earnhardt Miller — its inaugural start in a NASCAR Cup Series race.
If Johnson and/or Truex finish first among Open teams in their respective duels, Allgaier and Corey LaJoie could lock into the event on time. The other five Open drivers must finish first among Open teams in their duel — a 60-lap qualifying race — to advance.
“I mean, obviously you want to qualify your way in,” Allgaier said Wednesday night. “You want to be locked in. You want to have all the pleasantries of knowing that you’re in, right? But at the same time, we knew that it was going to be an uphill battle. The guys that you’re racing against — I mean, Jimmie and Martin both laid down incredible laps and did exactly what they needed to do.
“I look at the lap. I mean, I’ll go back and study it and try to figure out what we needed to do to be better, but we did the best job we thought we could do, and it just came up a little bit short.”
The Open contenders in Allgaier’s Duel include Truex (starting 12th), four-time Indianapolis 500 winner Hélio Castroneves (20th), Chandler Smith (22nd) and J.J. Yeley (23rd).
Along with a number of team members and representatives from sponsor Traveller Whiskey, Earnhardt Miller watched with nerves from pit road as Allgaier completed his lone lap of the evening. A day that began by unloading the tan-and-orange Chevy at 6 a.m. with excitement ended with a tinge of anxiety with no guarantees yet of a spot on the starting grid.
“It’s weird because we said weren’t gonna be disappointed – like we were OK if we don’t make it or whatever. But I’m not really OK about it,” Earnhardt Miller told NASCAR.com with a laugh. “Like, you get out here and you do it and you just see you’re just off that much. But we have another shot tomorrow. We’re fast, we’re good. Now tomorrow will just be up to a lot of variables around other people and everything.
“I hate that we have to go through that part, but it is what it is, and we knew that coming down here. But it’s been really exciting all day.”
Indeed, as the team pushed through technical inspection before a 10:05 a.m. practice, there was a buzzing anticipation that surrounded the JRM party. At that time, the buzz stemmed from enthusiasm and optimism. The optimism still exists, but it’s now accompanied by a nervous tension instead.
“It definitely changes the race for tomorrow for us,” Allgaier said. “If you get in on time, you can be a little more fluid in the duels and work on different things that I think we’re probably going to work on tomorrow, now. Now, we have to be aggressive. We have to race our way in, right? So we’ve got to be aggressive, but on the other side of it, we don’t have a backup car. And if you wreck, it doesn’t really matter if you’ve got a backup or not because if you wreck, you’re probably not gonna make the race. Those are the things that I have to be mindful of. …
“The reason why fans and drivers and teams all love and hate this place is because the fear of the unknown, right?”
With that comes a delicate balance Earnhardt Miller and Co. will try to navigate: trusting Allgaier and the team around him to excel while understanding others on the race track could dictate his fate.
“That’s Daytona, right?” said Earnhardt Miller, who has helped head JRM since it debuted as an Xfinity team in 2005. “I say it every year about the Xfinity cars: You try to come here with no expectations, and then that way, you’re not disappointed when you go home on a wrecker, or you’re just super thrilled that you made it through and or you won. And I think we have to look at this the same way. We can’t control everything else, so it will be what it is.
“And somebody already knows. It’s already determined somewhere, is the way I feel about it. So let’s see what happens.”