AVONDALE, Ariz. — Las Vegas may have happened one week ago, but Justin Allgaier was still dealt the biggest of bad luck hands.
After starting fifth and finishing top five in the first two stages, Allgaier was out in front of the field after the Big One struck on lap 144. He then checked out from the rest of the field on the restart, and his car had become one of the best on long runs.
Allgaier had upped his lead to three seconds over Chandler Smith with 10 laps to go, a virtual guarantee of victory without a caution. But a caution came out with five laps to go, and unfortunately, it was for him.
With victory in sight, the left rear tire went down going into Turn 1, and the 37-year-old slammed the outside wall.
“Not [feeling] a lot of good emotions right now, to be honest with you,” Allgaier told Frontstretch after the wreck.
He believed that the flat tire was a fluke occurrence.
“I definitely had to have run something over,” Allgaier said. “Wear wise, there’s no way we were wearing the left rear far enough to do that. Going through the dogleg, I felt it wiggle a little bit, and I kind of knew what that already meant. But at that point, there were three laps to go, and you got to hope that it holds on. As soon as I lifted, it blew out, and that was the end of it.”
Allgaier was cruising to his third Xfinity win at Phoenix and the 24th of his Xfinity career, but he was left with a 29th-place finish and a wrecked race car instead. It’s the second straight race that Allgaier lost positions over something outside his control, and he remains eighth in the standings after the fourth race of the year. The off week before the next race at Circuit of the Americas will be a welcome one for the No. 7 team.
Instead of Phoenix being a track that could put his season back on track, it became the second verse of the same song.
“I hate it for all of our guys, I hate it for all of our partners. Sucky way to end the day.”
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