The NASCAR Xfinity Series arrives at Atlanta Motor Speedway for Saturday’s EchoPark 250 (4:30 p.m. ET on FOX, PRN and SiriusXM NASCAR Radio) fresh off yet another dramatic finish on the season – this time featuring JR Motorsports teammates Noah Gragson and Justin Allgaier.
The second-year Xfinity Series driver and the veteran Allgaier made hard contact in the final laps at Bristol (Tenn.) Motor Speedway last weekend with Gragson making an aggressive pass on Allgaier to claim the victory. It was one of several high profile, high action incidents involving those drivers ranked highest in the Xfinity Series driver standings and certainly raises expectations for a busy Saturday afternoon on the Atlanta 1.5-miler.
Throw in the opening race of the four-stop Dash 4 Cash incentive – Gragson, Chase Briscoe, Brandon Jones and Harrison Burton qualified at Bristol – and the motivation is at a season-high pitch. Whichever of those four drivers finishes best, receives a $100,000 bonus and the chance to raise for another $100,000 on June 13 at Homestead-Miami Speedway.
None of the 2020 series regulars have won at Atlanta previously. The last time a fulltime Xfinity Series driver to win, however, was last year when Christopher Bell dominated the field leading 142 of 163 laps and edging fellow 2020 NASCAR Cup Series rookie Cole Custer by .191-seconds.
Among this year’s championship contenders, Allgaier was tops finishing third just behind Custer. It was his best career finish and his fifth top-10 in the last seven Atlanta races. His teammate Gragson has only one Xfinity Series start at Atlanta finishing ninth last year. He was runner-up in the 2018 NASCAR Gander RV & Outdoors Truck Series race at the track.
While the pair’s JR Motorsports team acknowledged and anticipated a tougher-than-normal post-race team meeting this past week, expectations were they will put the differences aside come green flag.
“Justin [Allgaier], he slipped up in one and two when I was running him down and that allowed me to get inside of him and I wouldn’t have gotten to him if he didn’t slip up,” Gragson said of the Bristol incident. “Got into him the next corner, down in [turns] one and two, just got loose underneath him. We saw that yesterday (in the Bristol NASCAR Cup Series race).
“I don’t make excuses. I take responsibility so I apologize to the seven-car [Allgaier] but I’m here to win races and I’m here for the No. 9 team. They put in way too much effort for me to ride around and finish second. I’ve always been a really aggressive driver and really thankful and fortunate to race in the Xfinity Series.”
Gragson said he did see Allgaier briefly after the race.
“I saw him and he said ‘I’ll talk to you later,’ we are a family over at JR Motorsports,” Gragson said, acknowledging, “He probably owes me one.”
It was an eventful night for most of the series highest-ranked drivers. Other than Briscoe, whose runner-up finish to Gragson maintained his top position in the championship, the next five drivers in the standings changed positions following the Bristol race. Gragson had the biggest gain moving from fifth to second, only nine points behind Briscoe heading to Atlanta.
Austin Cindric, who had been second in points fell to sixth and is now 56 points off Briscoe’s pace after an early race accident also involving Ross Chastain, who fell from third to fifth in the championship, 52 points back. The driver of the No. 22 Team Penske Ford has top-10 finishes in both his previous Atlanta starts. His seventh-place finish in 2018 was his career first top 10 in the series. He has 42 now.
Burton, whose fourth-place finish at Bristol moved him into third place in the championship (26 points back), will be making his Xfinity Series Atlanta debut. The driver of the No. 20 Joe Gibbs Racing Toyota started second and finished eighth in his only NASCAR Gander RV & Outdoors Truck Series race at the track last year. And the Burton family does bring some positive history to Atlanta – Burton’s father Jeff won back-to-back Xfinity Series races in 2006-07 and his uncle Ward Burton won the 1993 Xfinity race at the track.
Joe Nemechek is the only driver entered this week with a previous victory at Atlanta (2001). Briscoe, driver of the No. 98 Stewart-Haas Racing Ford, has finished 15th in both his previous Atlanta starts and has never led a lap.
“I feel like our HighPoint.com Ford Mustang has been really good on the mile-and-a-halfs,” Briscoe said. “You throw in a slick mile-and-a-half like Atlanta, and that’s our bread-and-butter and where our program is the best.
“Both Atlanta and Homestead fall into that category so those are going to be two really good racetracks for us. It would be great to capitalize on that with the extra $100,000 [Dash 4 Cash] that’s up for grabs, but Atlanta is definitely a driver’s track.
“Hopefully, it’s 100 degrees outside and we can move up to the wall and just be slipping and sliding. I feel like that’s when my dirt background comes into play the most, so hopefully that’s what we’ll have and we can just put on another good race,” said Briscoe.
Source: Holly Cain | NASCAR Wire Service
