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As Kyle Busch races his way toward 30th in the driver standings, HScott Motorsports‘ Justin Allgaier has hovered around the magic spot that makes a winning driver eligible for Chase for the NASCAR Sprint Cup.
The 29-year-old driver is 29th with five races to go until NASCAR’s playoffs. While a win will get him into the postseason, his goal has been to be a little higher in the points standings.
“You always set goals that are a little bit higher than what you can accomplish trying to get there, and if you accomplish them, then you’ve really gone above and beyond,” Allgaier said at Pocono Raceway. “Realistically, I thought we’d be 25th. We’re not quite there. There’s still a lot of races left to go. Not saying that it can’t be done.
“Kyle Busch has proven that you can gain a massive amount of points in a short amount of time. I’d be OK with going on a win streak of four out of five. I don’t know that that’s in the cards for the near future but…”
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Instead, Allgaier and his team are battling to make bad days not take too much of a toll on his points position, which reached a peak of 24th after the fifth race of the season at Auto Club Speedway.
“We’ve given up a lot more points than we’ve gained,” Allgaier said. “The part that’s crazy is when we race on a weekly basis, let’s just say we finish 25th. Even finishing 25th, you’re only gaining on the guys that we’re racing with, you’re only gaining two to six points a week.
“The problem is when you finish 40th, you’re losing 10 to 15 points. Unless you have a great day, like Bristol or some of those places where we’ve run really well, you’re not really gaining any points. You’re just kind of trickling out.”
Of the tracks left to qualify for the Chase, Bristol is Allgaier’s best chance. His 14.7 average finish is fifth among drivers in the top 30 who haven’t won a race yet, behind Ricky Stenhouse Jr. (9.2), Kyle Larson (9.7), Jeff Gordon (12.0) and Greg Biffle (12.6).
Allgaier had a career best eighth-place finish in April at the Tennessee short track, and his first of three XFINITY Series wins came at the World’s Fastest Half-Mile in 2010.
“The key to all of it is that 30th is the number, and as long as we stay there, and if we were to get that win, it’d be huge,” Allgaier said. “It’d be unbelievable, but at the same time, we’ve got to go get the win. The only way we’re going to do that is by firing on all eight cylinders and going better.
“If we do that, though, I don’t think we’ll lose as many points. I don’t think we’ll fall out of the top 30. If we’re running well enough on a weekly basis to go win one, I don’t foresee us falling out of the top 30 in points.”
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His third XFINITY win came on the road course in Montreal in 2012, and Allgaier is looking forward to Sunday’s Cheez-It 355 at The Glen (2 p.m. ET, NBCSN, MRN, SiriusXM). When he thinks of Watkins Glen this weekend, it brings back memories of a moment that means more than any victory .
“I remember two years ago my daughter came kind of a day late,” Allgaier said. “Not necessarily a day late in the process, she was pre-due date, but they induced my wife. By the time they started inducing, we went in on like a Tuesday, and she didn’t have Harper until Thursday morning so it was crazy the time frame of everything. So literally we had Harper, and it was 7 o’clock in the morning, and it was 9 o’clock (at night) by the time we actually got to be with her and everything.
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“We were supposed to take off at noon on that day and so I ended up figuring out somebody that had an open seat on a plane to fly out at like 5 o’clock, but I literally got like five or six hours with my daughter and then had to get on a plane.
“It’s crazy. People always talk about kids and the things that you don’t realize and take for granted. You have kids and it’s like yep, I can already see that and I’m half a day into it. But it’s cool.”
That perspective and planning will come in handy as he looks ahead to an uncertain 2016 but hopes to follow the same plan that got him into a full-time Sprint Cup ride in 2014, bringing sponsor Brandt with him from the XFINITY Series.
“I feel like we’ve got a great organization, we’ve got a great team,” Allgaier said. “It’s kind of a weird situation. In one aspect, I’m kind of in limbo in the fact that all the pieces of the puzzle have to fit back together. They’ve done that in the past the way that this program has worked out. We’ve had great support from Brandt, I think this is their fifth full season that they’ve been on the race car so there’s so many things that have kind of fallen into place the last few years.
“So I hate this time of the year where you don’t really know. But at the same time, I’ve got great people around me, and we haven’t changed what we’re doing because of it. We’re still on the same path. We’re still pushing just as hard every week to win races whether tomorrow is your last race or you’re going to be here for another 10 years.
“That’s the only advantage to it right now. We really haven’t gotten to that point where we’re in scramble mode. We’re still sitting pretty well so I have no complaints at the moment.”
Sunday’s wacky ending at Pocono shows strategy plays a big role in racing. If Allgaier and crew chief Steve Addington can grab a victory in the next five races and stay in the top 30 in points, he’ll make the Chase at Chicagoland Speedway, where he won his second XFINITY event, about a two-hour and 20-minute drive up Interstate 55 from his hometown of Riverton, Illilnois.
