CONCORD, N.C. — Five feet.
Five feet was all that separated Parker Kligerman from scoring his first NASCAR Xfinity Series win.
Five feet was all that kept Kligerman from advancing to the Round of 8 via a farewell win in his final full-time season in NASCAR.
Five feet was all Kligerman needed to take the white flag at the Charlotte Motor Speedway ROVAL, only for the caution lights to illuminate — and send the race to overtime — nearly 15 seconds after Leland Honeyman stuffed his No. 42 car into the tire barrier.
Kligerman held off the field the best he could on the final restart, but Sam Mayer was the class of the field all day and drove off into the sunset after completing the pass for the win in turn 7.
Five feet was all he needed, and five feet is what turned a win into an agonizing and painful sixth-place finish.
“I said on the cooldown lap I want to cry, but I won’t, and it’s gotten close a couple times as I think about it,” Kligerman said. “I just really loved doing this and I’ve been so grateful to have the opportunity and to be here and to be at this level and to make a career doing this.
“I just love the intensity and the pressure and I really, really wanted that. I just felt like that was poetic. If I could just do one thing, it would have been winning this damn race in that fashion, holding off the best in the world in [Shane van Gisbergen] and AJ [Allmendinger] and Sam Mayer, who’s the new ROVAL master now.”
For someone that had every right to be angry about the manner in which the caution was thrown, Kligerman was gracious in defeat and took it about as well as one could expect.
“I’m not going to get up here and be angry at NASCAR or everything,” Kligerman said. “I’ve watched plenty from the media side and the fan side and thought, ‘oh damn, that hurts,’ but here comes another restart, and you just got to refocus, and we did that.
“… It’s a call and that’s sports, and sometimes … it doesn’t matter if you win by an inch or a mile. Sometimes you get a caution or get the white flag by an inch or a mile, and it was an inch for us this time.”
The caution came out so close to Kligerman taking the white flag that he and his team initially thought they had won the race.
“For a second I thought we had won, but I have done this enough on TV,” Kligerman said. “I was like, ‘hey,…
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