State of the NASCAR O'Reilly Chase after Darlington

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.

There was always a universe in which Creed’s No. 00 team could take the fight to the likes of Justin Allgaier and Carson Kvapil. It’s 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.

“The start of tonight looked like that too,” said Creed. “They qualified in the front row and they kind of controlled the race between them until the end of Stage 2 so it’s tough to judge it.

“I 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.”

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 and limited the damage to their overall days with the fourth and seventh most points scored respectively.

But Creed showed, just as he has somewhat the radar all year, that he can hang with them. It’s a point of company pride for Haas Factory Team president Joe Custer too.

“I think we have earned the reputation we have,” Custer told Motorsport.com after the race. “We haven’t led a lot of laps and we haven’t been dominant. I think JRM has earned that. We’re 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.

“The 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.”

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’Reilly Series race earlier this year.

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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.

“It’s very hard to win these races,” Custer said. “Oftentimes, 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.

“We encourage him to bring home clean cars and avoid confrontations — just execute, execute, execute — and he’s doing that.

“I 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.

“And 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.”

Mixed bag for JRM

Allgaier was already struggling with the handling of his car when he drilled the wall pretty hard just short of 20 laps to go.

He was fifth at the time and faded hard.

“Around the second stage, we found out we were not quite as good as we wanted to be,” Allgaier said. “Andrew (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.

“I 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.

“I’m sure we’ll get back and find all kinds of stuff, but we obviously don’t want to have a Darlington Stripe like that, and we didn’t want to bleed the way we did. I was just doing everything I could not to wreck with guys catching me left and right.”

Kvapil didn’t get into the wall but he faded pretty hard too.

“I’d say the first stage we started kind of free,” Kvapil said. “We 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.

“I 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.

“So, it’s hard to say what we really needed. I feel like it’s a combination of a few things.”

Childers didn’t have a lot of answers either.

“This place works just like Myrtle Beach used to,” said Childers to Motorsport.com of his short track racing days. “If 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.”

Like Allgaier, Kvapil and Childers didn’t have a good feel for what adjustment to make either.

“I feel like with these temps and maybe this new right side tire, it was giving them a weird feel,” Childers said. “That’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.

“But 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.”

Meanwhile, Sammy Smith finished fourth and gained on Allgaier too, and it was his best finish since Talladega in April.

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’s championship since he split it with several Cup drivers this season.

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.

“I 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,” Caruth said. “And I was trying to save under caution in case it came back and it did. Bummer.”

Could he manage it behind the wheel at all?

“No, I was trying to shake it and keep fueling the pickup, but it just was dying,” Caruth said. “I couldn’t let the engine die because then it would’ve made it longer to get it refired and filled back up.

“It was unfortunate. I’ve had it happen one time. I had it in a truck at Nashville when I was leading. So, it’s 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.”

Updated standings

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

Quotables

“If 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’s tough because you’re battling the same guys over the course of nine weeks … 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.”
-Justin Allgaier

“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

“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

“We came in 48 and left 48, and that’s really what has me frustrated the most, because this was a real opportunity to make up ground of the races they had too.”
-Jesse Love

“We gained five on the leaders, gained a (point) position and just kind of slowly chipped away at it. That’s kind of what it’s going to take. Hopefully, we can go get another good run. It’s a little bit of a reset now.”
-Sammy Smith

“I 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’s 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.”
-Joe Custer

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