AJ Allmendinger has won twice at Indianapolis Motor Speedway, and neither win happened on the racetrack he will run Sunday.
On August 15, 2021, he took the lead in the final two laps of overtime to win the inaugural Cup Series race on the Speedway's infield road course, his first Cup victory. On July 30, 2022, he came back and led 42 of 62 laps to win the NASCAR O'Reilly Auto Parts Series race on the same layout, the series known as Xfinity until its sponsor changed. NASCAR ran that road course from 2021 through 2023 and then abandoned it. Sunday's Brickyard 400 is 160 laps on the 2.5-mile oval, where the Cup Series has raced since 2024.
The bricks are the same. Very little else is.
Allmendinger arrives 22nd in points, 98 outside the cut line for the Chase, NASCAR's 16-driver playoff. He has lost 82 points to that cut across the two races since Chicagoland, finishing 37th at North Wilkesboro on Sunday night. Five races remain in the regular season. Barring a win, his season is effectively over in July.
None of which has changed what he says about the place.
"I love this racetrack," Allmendinger said. "To me, Indy will always be the pinnacle of motorsports when it comes to racetracks. It's the place I always dreamed about racing at growing up. It's the mecca of racing to me, so I've definitely had some great memories there. I've had some crazy things happen there as well."
"The most special moments of my career will always be kissing the bricks and winning the Cup race there," he said, referring to the Speedway tradition where winners kneel at the start-finish line and kiss the strip of original brick left in the surface. "To me, it's one of the greatest moments of my racing career. Then to follow it up the next year by winning the Xfinity (NASCAR O'Reilly Auto Parts Series) race was really really something else."
His deepest Indianapolis memory is not a NASCAR one at all.
"Just walking down Gasoline Alley with Roger Penske and racing the Indy 500 for him was something I always dreamed about, and it was so special to me," Allmendinger said. "To lead that race and really have a shot at winning it until the seatbelts came undone is something that will stay with me until the day I die."
The nostalgia has a competitive counterweight, and Allmendinger supplied it himself. "We've had speed at Indy in our Cup car in the past and I thought our test went well," he said. He has a top five, three top 10s and five top 15s this season, with a fifth at Naval Base Coronado, the San Diego street course, as his best, and a seventh at Watkins Glen. Grizzly Nicotine Pouches returns as the primary sponsor of his No. 16 for the tenth time this year.
The structural fact underneath all of it is that Kaulig Racing is the only organization in the Cup Series running without technical support or an alliance with another Cup team. Every other team in the garage either has a partner feeding it data or is the partner doing the feeding. Kaulig has neither, which is the context for a two-car operation that has won twice in Cup and finished 22nd and outside the top 20 in points this year.
Ty Dillon carries the other half of the team's Indianapolis history, and his came on the oval. He has six Cup starts there with four top-20 finishes. In 2014 he held off Kyle Busch to win the O'Reilly Series race at the Speedway, leading the final 24 laps through a green-white-checkered restart, the overtime procedure that guarantees a two-lap dash to the finish. It was the first victory of his career. BREZTRI AEROSPHERE, an inhaled COPD treatment, goes on his No. 10 for the first time Sunday.
"Every time I go back to Indy, I have confidence after winning there in the past," Dillon said. "I always love going back to the most historic racetrack in the world, and kissing the bricks is a special memory that I will never forget."
Dillon's own read on his season is that the standings undersell it. "Our points don't really show it because we've had a lot of mechanical issues and mistakes along the way," he said, pointing to a run of finishes between 13th and 18th since Dover, a top-12 at Nashville and a 16th at North Wilkesboro. "We're focusing on the recipe, and the recipe has been really good."
Sunday will probably be decided late. The pass for the win has come inside the final eight laps in five of the last eight Brickyard 400s, six of the last eight went to overtime, and the last six have averaged 11 cars failing to finish.
Allmendinger's best day at this address came on a road course that no longer exists, in a car built to a different rulebook, for a team that has since replaced his crew chief. Sunday he gets the oval, 98 points out, with a test he liked and nothing else to show for July.