Nobody in the NASCAR O'Reilly Auto Parts Series has won more races this season than Justin Allgaier, who has six. Nobody has won more stages, the two segments of each race that pay bonus points before the finish: he has 11. And with four races left in the Chase, the series playoff, he is fourth in the standings, 15 points behind Sheldon Creed.
Creed, the leader, has three wins and no stage wins, with 20 top-10 finishes in 29 races. Allgaier has the most stage wins in the series and has still lost ground in the Chase: he has fallen from first to fourth since it began.
Saturday's Timberland PRO 200 at Phoenix Raceway is the track his team has circled. He won there in March.
The numbers at Phoenix
Allgaier started 17th in the GOVX 200 on March 7 and won it, his 29th career series win. He has three Phoenix wins and 22 top-10 finishes in 32 starts there.
Jesse Love finished second, Carson Kvapil, Allgaier's JR Motorsports teammate, third and Creed fourth. Corey Day was ninth.
Day has won the last two races, at Las Vegas and Charlotte, and made up 85 points on Creed doing it. Phoenix has given him trouble. "Phoenix hasn't been my strongest track in the past, and I've struggled there in my last two starts," he said this week.
Allgaier sounds like the opposite. "This has been a really strong track for us, and I know that we will have what it takes to continue to gain ground in the points," he said. Allgaier said his crew chief, Andrew Overstreet, "has had this place circled on our calendar since the Chase started."
Where the points went at Charlotte
Charlotte showed both sides of the No. 7. Allgaier won the second stage and led from a restart on Lap 164 through Lap 182. Then his car tightened up on its last set of tires, he scraped the outside wall in Turn 4 with 17 laps left, and Love and Day both went by. On the last restart, Day went three wide under Love and Allgaier for the lead. Creed, who had hit the wall early and needed a long repair under caution, passed Allgaier on the final lap for third.
Allgaier still finished fourth and cut his deficit from 30 points to 15. In his column this week, Dylan "Mamba" Smith named Phoenix as the track where Allgaier has to max out his day.
What Saturday decides
After Phoenix the series goes to Talladega on Oct. 24, Martinsville on Oct. 31 and Homestead-Miami on Nov. 7.
The race starts at 7:30 p.m. ET Saturday on The CW and MRN radio: 200 laps, with stages ending on laps 45 and 90.
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