Aric Almirola is ready to put last week’s New Hampshire disappointment behind him and focus on Sunday’s Gander Outdoors 400 at Pocono Raceway.
Almirola led 42 laps in last week’s Foxwoods Resort Casino 301 and was in the lead when a series of late race pit stops broke out. Unfortunately a slight bobble by his crew, along with him spinning the tires on a restart, cost Almirola the top spot and despite having one of the strongest cars of the day he was forced to settle for second.
“I’m disappointed,” Almirola said after the New Hampshire race. “You would think I’d be really excited to run top-five, and I’m not. We had the best car, hands down. I’m really proud of everybody at Stewart-Haas Racing. They’re giving me incredible racecars, and we showed up with cars capable of running in the top-five and challenging to win races these last seven weeks.”
His next chance comes Sunday in the 21st race of the Monster Energy NASCAR Cup Series season and a return to the 2.5-mile Pocono Raceway. Almirola started 34th after a qualifying issue in the series first Pocono visit back in June and charged to a seventh place finish. In Almirola’s six starts this season at tracks 2 miles or longer, he hasn’t finished outside the top-12, with the exception of the July event at Daytona International Speedway, where he was involved in an accident.
Almirola believes heading back to tracks in his first year with SHR will be a benefit, including this weekend at Pocono.
“I think so, I really do,” he said. “I feel like going back to some of these tracks that we’ll now have notes at – a lot of these tracks all year long we’ve shown up kind of blind. We have no real notebook. We’ve shown up and just kind of guessed at where we needed to unload, then throughout the weekend made a lot of changes to dial our car in and get it better. Now we’re going to go back to these races where we have a notebook. We changed these things in practice, we’ll start already with that in our car. We’ll be able to fine-tune on that and make that better.
“We’ve learned what not to do. We’ve gone to some racetracks earlier this year, made some changes and it was the wrong way. We know now not to venture down that path. It’s as much learning what to do as it is what not to do. It’s just building a foundation and a notebook.”
Almirola enters Pocono 11th in the standings and squarely in the playoff berth fight. A win over the last six races of the regular season automatically advances Almirola into the playoff grid and he remains optimistic that trip to Victory Lane will come as his team continues to perform.
“We’re going to win,” he said. “We’re running too good. We’re too competitive to not win, it’s just a matter of when. ‘When’ are we going to win? I firmly believe that. I think that is the mentality that we all have on this team. That’s what has us fired up and we keep working hard every week.
“We don’t worry about anybody else. We’re just focused on our team, our car, doing the things we need to do to make our car go fast. We’re on the brink of getting there. Hopefully it happens soon. If not, I’ll take it in the first round of the playoffs, too.”
