Aric Almirola Could Win A Championship In NASCAR’s Best Car
Aric Almirola may be racing into the history books.
Almirola retired from full-time Cup Series racing last year and has been sharing the Joe Gibbs Racing No. 20 Toyota Camry car in the Xfinity Series this season with a rotating roster of drivers that has included Christopher Bell, John Hunter Nemechek and Ryan Truex.
He played the spoiler at Kansas Speedway by winning in front of all the full-time Xfinity Series Playoffs contender and denied second-place finisher and defending series champion Cole Custer an automatic spot in the next round.
He also won at Martinsville, his two victories adding to a total of eight No. 20 car this season. That makes it the winningest team in all three of the top NASCAR national series. Kyle Larson’s No. 5 Chevrolet Camaro currently leads the Cup Series with five wins and Corey Heim’s No. 11 Toyota Tundra is the top truck with six.
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The next-best Xfinity Series cars are Austin HIll’s No. 21 Camaro and Shane Van Gisbergen’s No. 97 Camaro, both with three wins. The difference is that Hill and Van Gisbergen are both full-time entrants and currently in the drivers playoffs, which Almirola and his cohorts are not eligible for. But the No. 20 itself is in a playoffs race.
Custer, who drives the No. 00 Ford Mustang and Joe Gibbs Racing’s Chandler Smith, who drives the No. 81 Toyota Tundra are on top of both the regular season and playoffs driver’s standings, but the No. 20 car is ahead of their cars in the owner’s standings.
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Almirola is now set to finish out the last six races in the No. 20 car, which means he has the chance to drive it through the playoffs and be sitting it when it claims the owner’s championship, which would be a first for his career. The next race is on Saturday, Oct. 5 at Talladega.
With the car locked into the next round of the playoffs, Almirola could technically sit out the race without putting the team at much risk, but the plan was to have him in the car for the duration of the playoffs.
“I originally didn’t want to do Talladega, and it just, it just made sense to go for an owner’s championship for me to be in the car every week when the playoffs started,” Almirola said after his Kansas win. “You couldn’t predict that I was going to win Kansas.”
While the drafting-style racing at Talladega makes it very much a wild card race, Almirola has won there before in 2017 … as a part-time Xfinity Series driver for Stewart-Haas Racing.
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