BRISTOL, Tenn. — Staring down a 43-point deficit to Justin Allgaier with one race remaining in the NASCAR Xfinity Series regular season championship, it appeared that Cole Custer would need divine intervention to pull off the upset.
The No. 00 team had three DNFs and four finishes of 21st or worse in the last five races, and the team had little momentum after what Custer described as a “tough month-and-a-half” where “we crashed a lot of stuff.”
Forty-three points is a tall deficit for anyone to overcome in a single race, and Custer would have to do it at Bristol Motor Speedway, one of Allgaier’s best tracks on the Xfinity schedule. Allgaier won Bristol a year ago and had led a whopping 901 laps in his last seven Bristol starts.
And when Allgaier started Saturday night’s (Sept. 20) race by leading the first 60, it looked like the regular season title battle would be won without contest.
That is, until an Austin Green mechanical failure tore the back bumper off the No. 7 car.
“Having the best car at the beginning, I mean, I thought our Brandt Camaro was phenomenal,” Allgaier said after the race. “And then we got the damage from the [No.] 32. That kind of put us behind the eight ball.”
Allgaier was forced to pit and missed out on stage points, but he still had a fast car and used pit strategy to get back up to second place.
“We had to flip the stage, and once we were on a little bit older tires those guys were coming, but we were making really good time on the bottom and putting ourselves in a good position,” Allgaier said.
But then disaster struck on lap 154, as Sheldon Creed and Allgaier made contact on the frontstretch, which sent the No. 7 hard into the outside wall.
“Then the [No.] 18, I just don’t know if he got loose off the corner or what, but he came down off the wall and caught the right front, and that was kind of the end of it,” Allgaier said.
For the second incident, Allgaier wasn’t as lucky; the heavy damage to nose turned his No. 7 car into a parachute, turning in laps that were two seconds slower than the leaders.
“You’re just kind of hanging on, and all those laps we lost just spot after spot after spot,” Allgaier said.
The crew managed to put some speed back in the No. 7 car for the final sprint to the finish, but it was too little, too late, as Allgaier ended the race in 30th, 10 laps down.
“The team did a great job fixing [the car],” Allgaier…
Click Here to Read the Full Original Article at …