Tuesday, March 8, 2016

AJ Allmendinger's Las Vegas Motor Speedway Post #NASCAR Race Report


AJ Allmendinger and the No. 47 Smith's/Kingsford Chevrolet SS team overcame a pit road speeding penalty to finish 14th at Las Vegas Motor Speedway Sunday afternoon. The finish gained Allmendinger five spots in the driver points standings (25th), only 18 points out of 16th

“We fought hard all day," Allmendinger said. "I’ve been working on getting on pit road. I thought I got on pit road really good and I will be interested to see the number, but just sped a little bit and got a penalty. That got us behind, but we worked the strategy to keep trying to get back on the lead lap. The pit crew was really good today. Randall (Burnett, crew chief) did a good job. I couldn’t figure out exactly, but I knew I needed the front to turn better. We were just a little free in. From there, we just made small adjustments all day and made it better each run. At the end, I thought we were the best we had been all day. I just had nowhere to go. We took what could have been a really bad day and salvaged a decent day out of it. We are making gains. The car has speed in it, but just a little bit off. I give Randall and the guys most of the credit. I just got us behind. I didn’t want to get us behind early in the race. We weren’t great, but we had gotten the gap to kind of get in that safe zone where we could make our own day out of it and I put us behind. Randall kept me calm. Some of those runs weren’t very fun, but he kept his head in it and made me better.”

“It was an eventful day for us,” crew chief Randall Burnett said. "We got a penalty early on pit road and got behind the eight ball on that. It went green for a long time today and we finally had some breaks go our way towards the end and we were able to get back on the lead lap. AJ hung in there all day long and did a great job. We started off and the car wasn’t great, but we made some really good adjustments and the engineers came up with some good stuff to help. All and all, it was a good day and we were glad to get a top-15 finish out of it.”

"Our goal has to been to run in the top 15 and we proved today that we can do it," competition director Ernie Cope said. "We got ourselves a little behind and worked hard to get back in it. I feel we are a solid top 15 team. The first two races we didn’t get the finishes we deserved and this week I feel like we got the finish we deserved. I believe if we had more time, we would have got more. We are making gains and it is execution right now. Our cars have speed. We have just got to execute on Sunday and this is a step in the right direction.

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