Allmendinger has 'no ill feelings' after drama-filled 2022 COTA finish
The start of the 2023 NASCAR Cup Series season hasn’t quite gone exactly the way AJ Allmendinger was hoping. Neither did the end of last year’s race at Circuit of The Americas, when eventual race winner Ross Chastain dumped him into Alex Bowman’s No. 48 Chevrolet on the final lap to take command of the lead and ride to the checkered.
The No. 16 Kaulig Racing Chevrolet driver is determined to turn the tide on both, even if he isn’t dwelling on either.
All eyes will be on NASCAR’s resident road-course expert this weekend as he makes his 400th career Cup Series start Sunday at COTA, site of the EchoPark Automotive Grand Prix (3:30 p.m. ET, FOX, PRN, Sirius XM NASCAR). Though he did go back and watch the finish “just once,” Allmendinger himself has his sights set on the road ahead, not necessarily lamenting over a missed opportunity to collect his first series win since 2021 last spring.
“Of course, it’d have been great to win the race, but it wouldn’t have changed anything if we did or we didn’t,” Allmendinger told reporters via video conference Wednesday afternoon. “You know, it’s a cool memory to have to go win the race and have that in the memory bank. But at the end of the day, it doesn’t change how I feel about this year. It would just be that I’d have three Cup wins instead of two, right? … It’s kind of in the memory bank of OK, what can we do different if we’re in that same position, but honestly, I don’t even think about last year.”
MORE: Full COTA weekend schedule | Projected Cup race results | Odds to win
While he may not have last year on the mind, we sure do. The 2022 COTA finish was one of the more drama-filled laps in recent NASCAR memory, with a palpable sense of tension building and building and building until finally — BAM! — Allmendinger drills the driver’s side of Bowman’s car after getting shoved by Chastain, sending the Nos. 16 and 48 careening off track.
Chastain rode to his first career Cup victory from there, issuing an unspoken statement from that point forward that he was willing to do whatever it took to take home a trophy, respected former teammate in his way or not.
The topic of Chastain and his aggressive driving style only grew over the course of the season that followed — a dialogue we’re still wading through to this day — but it left no room for Allmendinger to be upset with his past Kaulig compadre in the Xfinity Series.
“I mean, we all know how hard he can race but at the same time, we all race that hard at times, you know?” the 41-year-old explained. “I think he’s always to the extreme end of it, but I’m sure if you polled the drivers about trying to pass me it’s just a pain in the ass, right? Like, it’s part of it. So I don’t have a problem with Ross. I think it’s one of those things. … we know what he’ll do to go win the race and if the roles were reversed and that happens, then you should be OK with it. Which, honestly, I always feel like he is. So, for me, there’s no ill feelings or anything like that to Ross or anybody out there. We’re all hard racers and things like that happen and we know where we stand.
RELATED: Active Cup Series road-course winners | All-time road-course winners
Ross Chastain, AJ Allmendinger and Justin Haley celebrate a 2020 win at Talladega. | Getty Images
“Ross, you know, he went all for it and it was OK. … We talked about it. I said OK, if the roles were reversed and that happens, then you have no room to say anything. He said ‘I completely agree.’ … I was over it after we left the race track.”
Even if Allmendinger isn’t able to make right and win Sunday’s race this time around — he finished 33rd after all of last year’s fracas — he and his Kaulig crew would settle for a solid race from flag to flag.
After landing a top-six run in the season-opening Daytona 500 in February, Allmendinger and Co. have no top 10s with a 22.5 average finish in the last four races.
A big part of why the road-course specialist elected to return to Cup full-time in 2023 was due to having so many of them — six — on the schedule.
Sunday is his time to strike and quiet any doubters.
“I mean, of course, the start of the year I wish it would be a little bit better,” said Allmendinger, currently 17th in points. ” … what I love about our race team and working with Squid (crew chief Matt Swiderski) and everybody in our organization, on the 31 (of teammate Justin Haley) and the 16, we know that we’re not where we want to be, speed-wise. But we’re all kind of head down working together to move forward and try to get better. So it’d be no different if it were Xfinity and it’s not going the way you want. It’s the way I am. I want to win races for our race team. They deserve it.”
Regardless of what happens on the results sheet Sunday, Allmendinger has echoed the sentiment emanating throughout the Kaulig franchise — they’re just here to have fun and win trophies. The former sometimes outweighs the latter, and there’s absolutely nothing wrong with that. Life’s short.
“It’s just, to me, all this … what I’m trying to do, for me in racing, you’re just trying to make great memories out of it,” Allmendinger said. “This sport is so hard sometimes and you get so down and you just hope that you have some really good memories to go with all the heartaches and defeats that go with that. So it’s just part of it.
“And that’s the way it goes.”
