AJ Allmendinger‘s cool suit experienced a failure during this past Sunday’s NASCAR Cup Series race at COTA. On a scorching hot day in Austin, that spelled trouble for the 44-year-old.

Allmendinger finished ninth at COTA but upon exiting his race car, collapsed on pit road and was stretchered to the infield care center. Four days removed from the incident, Allmendinger is feeling “fine,” he told Jeff Gluck of The Athletic.

“I’m fine,” Allmendinger said Thursday on the Gluckcast. “Got a little hot in the race car and needed to get out as quick as possible once the race was over. The medical team did a great job of getting me IVs and iced up, and I would say I was back to 90 percent at least within the hour flying back home.”

Allmendinger’s cool suit failed, as did Kyle Larson‘s. Cool suit malfunctions have become more commonplace of late in NASCAR, but they are quite effective when they work. Allmendinger said they can get down to 40-45 degrees, and he believes they work 95 percent of the time. It’s why he wasn’t mad when it failed Sunday, just understandably uncomfortable.

“Put yourself in the smallest box possible where you’re sitting down in it and there’s nowhere to move and crank the heat up as high as it goes. The heat is one thing, but, at the end of the day, the anxiety starts building where you know you can’t get out. It’s almost like panic sets in a little bit,” Allmendinger said. “You’re just like, ‘OK, I just don’t wanna be here anymore, but I gotta focus, I gotta do the best that I can.’ … It’s a struggle. These cars are hot. That’s something that’s part of it. … You just fight through it and make the best of it.”

AJ Allmendinger didn’t give up at COTA

At any point, Allmendinger could have pulled onto pit road, jumped out of his No. 16 Chevrolet and called it a day. Nobody would have blamed him.

Instead, he chose to remain inside the race car and battle through it. He was rewarded with a top 10 finish and the fourth-most points earned of any driver at COTA.

“It’s just mind over matter at that point,” Allmendinger said. “It was definitely certain parts of that race where it was a struggle. Probably fortunate that that caution came out with 17 to go for a couple reasons, just to be able to pit there and get some water so I could at least dump on me to kind of reset myself. I felt like when I would dump cold water on me down my shirt, it would at least reset me for about eight to 10 laps and make me kind of forget about it before it came back.

“At the end of the day, it’s just trying not to give up for my team. We had had a pretty good day going. We had planned to — with the way the points are now — if we felt like we didn’t have a real shot to win the race, go out there and try to get stage points in both stages knowing that would put us behind in the third stage and just do the best possible race in the third stage as we could, and I thought it worked out well. … Being hot and sick in the race car, the way I felt, I couldn’t give up. I did not want to give up and it was tough but that’s all part of it sometimes. You got to deal with it.”