JR Motorsports has earned all the praise it gets this season but lost in translation somewhere is that both Sheldon Creed and Haas Factory Team are both literal champions in their own right.<\/p>\n
There was always a universe in which Creed\u2019s No. 00 team could take the fight to the likes of Justin Allgaier and Carson Kvapil. It\u2019s now literally this one. Creed struck first in the Chase for the Championship with a victory at Darlington Raceway and has now made this an early dogfight of a points battle. \u00a0<\/p>\n
\u201cThe start of tonight looked like that too,\u201d said Creed. \u201cThey qualified in the front row and they kind of controlled the race between them until the end of Stage 2 so it\u2019s tough to judge it.<\/p>\n
\u201cI feel like we’re a really strong team and I think tonight proved that we weren’t great to start, but we just kept working on it and got control of the race and was able to win. I would say I think we’re championship caliber for sure.\u201d<\/p>\n
At the same time that Creed took control of the race, Kvapil and Allgaier lost it, fading to 12th and 17th respectively. But they also ran up front in the first half\u00a0and limited the damage to their overall days with the fourth and seventh most points scored respectively.<\/p>\n
But Creed showed, just as he has somewhat the radar all year, that he can hang with them. It\u2019s a point of company pride for Haas Factory Team president Joe Custer too.<\/p>\n
\u201cI think we have earned the reputation we have,\u201d Custer told Motorsport.com after the race. \u201cWe haven\u2019t led a lot of laps and we haven\u2019t been dominant. I think JRM has earned that. We\u2019re hunting them. It’s a rally cry for us. It’s something that we want to pursue and take great pride in doing so because they’re strong.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe playoffs are just different. You bring your best stuff. I felt like whoever got out first was going to win that race, so we have to be careful not to get ahead of ourselves and go back to work.\u201d<\/p>\n
Creed also gets overlooked in the sense that he is a Truck Series and ARCA champion because of how many years it took for him to win his first O\u2019Reilly Series race earlier this year.<\/p>\n
138<\/p>\n
Now he has two, but Custer also says his results at Haas Factory Team are the byproduct of what they are giving him to work with.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt’s very hard to win these races,\u201d Custer said. \u201cOftentimes, the best car doesn’t win (and) the best driver doesn’t win. So, I think his career speaks for itself. I think he knows what he’s doing.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe encourage him to bring home clean cars and avoid confrontations — just execute, execute, execute — and he’s doing that.<\/p>\n
\u201cI think that serves him well at this point in his career. If he can continue to bring cars home with whatever the car’s got in it, bring it home. I don’t need more, I don’t need less. Bring it home and we’ll build it.<\/p>\n
\u201cAnd the team behind him is strong. We talk a lot about execution at the shop, at the track. And when we get it right, we can run with these guys. But like I said, JRM is the team to beat.\u201d<\/p>\n
Mixed bag for JRM<\/p>\n
Allgaier was already struggling with the handling of his car when he drilled the wall pretty hard just short of 20 laps to go.<\/p>\n
He was fifth at the time and faded hard.<\/p>\n
\u201cAround the second stage, we found out we were not quite as good as we wanted to be,\u201d Allgaier said. \u201cAndrew (Overstreet, crew chief) did a great job with making changes. I felt like we did all the right things but it got to be a handful.<\/p>\n
\u201cI had one big moment down in Turn 3, the left front locked up and I just went straight up the hill and hit the fence. Anytime you hit the wall that hard here, it’s bound to do some damage.<\/p>\n
\u201cI\u2019m sure we\u2019ll get back and find all kinds of stuff, but we obviously don\u2019t want to have a Darlington Stripe like that, and we didn\u2019t want to bleed the way we did. I was just doing everything I could not to wreck with guys catching me left and right.\u201d<\/p>\n
Kvapil didn\u2019t get into the wall but he faded pretty hard too.<\/p>\n
\u201cI’d say the first stage we started kind of free,\u201d Kvapil said. \u201cWe were on the splitter for a while and that would make us tight, but really we were free. And obviously at the end of the run, it would be really, really free, but tightened it up a good amount for Stage Two and fired off pretty good.<\/p>\n
\u201cI mean, that was when we were right behind (Allgaier) and pressuring him and eventually got around him. I feel like looking back, if we would’ve had a caution with 20 to go, I would’ve told (Rodney Childers, crew chief) to free it up to make it go better on the short run, but that would’ve just killed our long run even more.<\/p>\n
\u201cSo, it\u2019s hard to say what we really needed. I feel like it’s a combination of a few things.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u00a0Childers didn\u2019t have a lot of answers either.<\/p>\n
\u201cThis place works just like Myrtle Beach used to,\u201d said Childers to Motorsport.com of his short track racing days. \u201cIf you’re too tight in the center, you just burn the right rear tire off of it. And he though he got too loose there at the end of that second stage and we tightened it up for the third stage. It was way the wrong way to go.\u201d<\/p>\n
Like Allgaier, Kvapil and Childers didn\u2019t have a good feel for what adjustment to make either.<\/p>\n
\u201cI feel like with these temps and maybe this new right side tire, it was giving them a weird feel,\u201d Childers said. \u201cThat’s really all it came down to. We tightened it up and we had a really bad restart there when we took tires and we tried to make it three-wide on the bottom and lost everything.<\/p>\n
\u201cBut if I had to redo it, once we had the bad restart and we were back to about seventh, I probably should have just refit it and readjusted the car. I just assumed that we would get another caution and I didn’t want to be the guy with no tires at the end.\u201d<\/p>\n
Meanwhile, Sammy Smith finished fourth and gained on Allgaier too, and it was his best finish since Talladega in April.<\/p>\n
Meanwhile, Rajah Caruth entered this race as the 12th and final seed but his No. 88 car was the third-ranked entry in the owner\u2019s championship since he split it with several Cup drivers this season.<\/p>\n
Caruth was forced to pit with a fuel pickup issue, one that cost him two laps, which he made up and was running fifth with less than two laps, when it bit him again.<\/p>\n
\u201cI was a little bit worried because the lap that we had it, the issue in the first stage, we went green with maybe 40 something to go and I knew that’s right around the same time,\u201d Caruth said. \u201cAnd I was trying to save under caution in case it came back and it did. Bummer.\u201d<\/p>\n
Could he manage it behind the wheel at all?<\/p>\n
\u201cNo, I was trying to shake it and keep fueling the pickup, but it just was dying,\u201d Caruth said. \u201cI couldn’t let the engine die because then it would’ve made it longer to get it refired and filled back up.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt was unfortunate. I’ve had it happen one time. I had it in a truck at Nashville when I was leading. So, it\u2019s a bummer, but it happens. I haven’t been perfect either this year and it could have just been circumstantial. No way to totally know. But yeah, proud of the effort to fight back and keep digging.\u201d<\/p>\n
Updated standings<\/p>\n
Justin Allgaier
Sheldon Creed -7
Carson Kvapil -19
Austin Hill -36
Corey Day -46
Jesse Love -48
Sammy Smith -55
Brandon Jones -58
Sam Mayer -66
Parker Retzlaff -78
Taylor Gray -79
Rajah Caruth -104<\/p>\n
Quotables<\/p>\n
\u201cIf this had been Phoenix last year, I’m really aggravated because I’m completely out of a championship. We can live to fight another day. We got a lot of great racetracks coming up for us. We just have to execute. And tonight, while it is a bump in the road, I have to be good over nine. I don’t have to be good over one. We did our job. We got the points that we needed to get in the regular season. The bonus points for the Chase structure were good. Now we just got to look at next week and say, “Hey, we’re only seven points ahead.” But like I said earlier this week, we went to Daytona in the beginning of the year. We started with zero points. I am beyond glad that we are not doing the one race format. It\u2019s tough because you\u2019re battling the same guys over the course of nine weeks \u2026 But you look at (Creed), (Hill) and (Day), those guys did a great job tonight and they did a great job rising to the occasion.\u201d
-Justin Allgaier<\/p>\n
“I feel like, obviously, if we didn’t have those stage points, we wouldn’t be sitting too good right now. So thank God we were able to get those stage points and kind of mask the finish we had there at the end. We did our jobs on the first two stages, just didn’t have the long run car there at the end.”
-Carson Kvapil<\/p>\n
“We need two more wins, I think, and to run top five pretty much every race, and get stage points. We have to keep the 7 from winning because once they do, they get on a roll and roll off a bunch of them.”
-Sheldon Creed<\/p>\n
\u201cWe came in 48 and left 48, and that\u2019s really what has me frustrated the most, because this was a real opportunity to make up ground of the races they had too.\u201d
-Jesse Love<\/p>\n
\u201cWe gained five on the leaders, gained a (point) position and just kind of slowly chipped away at it. That\u2019s kind of what it\u2019s going to take. Hopefully, we can go get another good run. It\u2019s a little bit of a reset now.\u201d
-Sammy Smith<\/p>\n
\u201cI think the fans are the winner here from a standpoint of the 7 car had a pretty big lead on us and now everybody’s on top of each other. It\u2019s on. This makes it fun. We are all going to bring our best stuff to St. Louis. We are going to go there with the mentality of execute and try to get out of there and take what it gives us. The 00 has always been special at our shop, as well as the 41, but they expect to win championships.\u201d
-Joe Custer<\/p>\n
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