Parker Reztlaff‘s sophomore season in the NASCAR Xfinity Series has been an up and down one.
The Jordan Anderson Racing driver has shown a lot of speed at times. He doubled his top fives from last year in just the first two races of the season, and he also picked up his first career NXS pole at Richmond Raceway.
However, the Rhinelander, Wis,, native has also had horrible luck, failing to finish eight of the 25 races so far. He only had four DNFs in all of last year. He’s currently 18th in Xfinity points and would need to win the regular season finale this weekend at Bristol Motor Speedway to meet his goal of making the playoffs.
On the bright side, Retzlaff made the first two NASCAR Cup Series starts of his career this season. The second start came at Daytona International Raceway, where he pushed Harrison Burton to the win before his No. 62 Beard Motorsports machine crossed the line in seventh. The finish sparked controversy though, as Retzlaff pushed Burton past fellow Chevrolet driver Kyle Busch.
Frontstretch spoke with Retzlaff in early September at Atlanta Motor Speedway, where he discussed the Daytona controversy, his bad luck, what the Richmond pole mean to him and if he wants to move up to Cup full time.
Michael Massie, Frontstretch: Did that strong run in the Cup race at Daytona help your confidence, superspeedway skills?
Parker Retzlaff: Yeah, I think it’s always good when you can run good. Especially in a Cup race like that. We’ve ran good this year, just haven’t had the luck to finish these races. Hopefully, we can turn all that around, we can show the speed this team’s had.
Massie: What happened to the car at Darlington? I saw you guys had a problem.
Retzlaff: We broke a fuel cable lap 1. It’s just, I don’t know. It’s just so unlucky to break it as soon as the race started. I mean, it could’ve happened in practice. It could’ve happened in qualifying, and we would’ve been able to fix it. But of course with the way our luck’s been this year, it breaks lap 1, turn 1.
Massie: Did you see all the conspiracies going around on the internet about it?
Retzlaff: Yeah, it’s just like Daytona, the stuff that I dealt with. The fans always come up with some speculation of what they think is going on.
Massie: How does this year compare to last year plus the goals you had going into this year?
Retzlaff: My goal was…
Click Here to Read the Full Original Article at …