Breaking: AJ Allmendinger will return to Kaulig Racing to drive the No. 16 in the NASCAR Cup Series next season.
Not that this was ever an open question but team president Chris Rice said as much on Sunday when asked about his senior driver coming through in the clutch the way he did with a fourth-place result in the Coca-Cola 600 at Charlotte Motor Speedway.
The result comes after two gut-punch finishes at Texas and Kansas where Allmendiger was crashed and suffered an engine failure, respectively.
It had the potential to derail a solid start to their season that had them 14th in the championship standings and steadily holding a playoff spot. But the consecutive DNFs dropped them to 25th and considerably out of the mix.
Allmendinger and crew chief Trent Owens responded by running top-10 all race, scoring 16 stage points, all before finishing fourth and closing within 13 points of the final provisional playoff spot with 13 races remaining in the regular season.
“This was important, right,” Allmendinger said after the race. “When we have a car like we did, the execute and run basically top six every stage, none of us made mistakes today. The pit crew was on it. Trent was on it. There were times I thought maybe we needed to adjust a bit more but he said no and sometimes, I struggle to rip the fence here but I had a good night even if I’ll never be Kyle Larson or Tyler Reddick doing it.
“It was just an important night to have a night like this and finish the job too.”
Rice said it was an example of his driver picking up the organization as he’s done so frequently over their relationship.
“You know, someone asked me over the weekend, is AJ coming back next year and I can tell you he is coming back next year and he is going to be Cup racing,” Rice told The Sporting News. “When we stepped out on a limb and hired AJ when no one really wanted him, we fell in love with each other, and have become best friends.
“And he has constantly picked us up when we are down in the dumps. Every time, there’s AJ and it doesn’t matter if it’s Cup or Xfinity, he makes us better wherever we need him. And so we’ve told him, he’s not running any Xfinity because we are focused on making the playoffs over here and he’s the guy to get it done for us.”
And Rice says their dynamic is so effective because at 43-years-old, Allmendinger doesn’t need company leadership to remind him of the stakes on any given weekend. They’re hands-off.
Instead, they’re going to go golfing.
“We don’t have to tell him anything,” Rice said. “He knows everything that’s going on and we don’t need to tell him anything he already knows. All we have to do is take him to play golf.
“We’re going on Thursday. Him and I, Ty Norris and Matt Kaulig. We’re going to go enjoy a game of golf and celebrate what he’s doing for us this season. He understands the cadence of a season and how to race any given situation. We just take him golfing.”
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In other words, no one has to tell Allmendinger that he has some of his best tracks coming up either. Sure, the road courses are his bread and butter but he’s really confident about Nashville Superspeedway this weekend too.
He is a legit playoff threat if he just continues to manage the things he can control.
“You look at the road courses, and yeah, they stand out but it’s not like these guys are bad at road courses anymore,” Allmendinger said. “These guys are really strong everywhere. At Chicago, I need to get better there actually.
“I don’t look at any track as like a must-win. It is important to run top five on the road courses. But I view it as we need to bring the most speed every weekend and when we do like we did (at Charlotte) good things happen.”
And that also means shrugging off the things they can’t control, like two engine failures. Sure, Allmendinger snapped over the radio in real-time but that was a spur of the moment reaction to blowing up six laps into a race. Rice says everyone at Earnhardt Childress Engines are ‘still trying to figure it out’ and treating it with diligence.
“What we did (at Charlotte) was a big deal because they were worried,” Rice said of ECR’s longevity over 600 miles. “Richard (Childress) is hot and heavy over it. He’s an old man but he was hot over it.
“Bob Fisher, Jimmy Wallace, everyone has done a good job of trying to figure out what went wrong and they haven’t figured it out. Hopefully we get answers but they’re working hard on it.”
