Anytime Kaulig Racing enters a road course race with AJ Allmendinger behind the wheel of one of its cars, the team knows it has a fighting chance to go trophy hunting. In this past weekend’s EchoPark Automotive Grand Prix at Circuit of the Americas, Allmendinger led two laps, and was in the mix near the front all race long.
However, the driver, who had the fifth-best average running position (6.2) throughout the 95-lap race, and his No. 16 Kaulig Racing team would fade through the field on the final run of the race, and by the end of the free-fall, Allmendinger would be credited with a 30th-place finish.
According to Chris Rice, President of Kaulig Racing, what sunk Allmendinger in the final laps of Sunday’s event at COTA was an issue with the right front wheel. Following the team’s final pit stop, Allmendinger noticed a horrible vibration from inside of the car, which hampered his car. While the driver and team initially assumed that it was simply a bad tire, they discovered this week that the 30th-place finish wasn’t the fault of Goodyear.
“The right front tire, and we haven’t dug into why it was, it was just a little bit loose,” Rice explained in an interview with SiriusXM NASCAR Radio. “It ended up being a little bit loose, which made it vibrate, harmonic, and it felt like a really bad set of tires. [AJ] couldn’t turn left like he needed to turn left. And it really hurt him.”
While the wheel was left loose, somehow, Rice insists that front changer Austin Holland didn’t appear to make a mistake according to all of the data presented to the team. The team now suspects the issue was with the air gun that Holland used, or that the parts that secure the wheel to the car became worn out, causing the vibration.
“Our pit crew is phenomenal. They’ve done a really good job. It was nothing [that they did], all the data, everything we’ve seen, it should have been tight,” Rice said. “We don’t, we haven’t quite figured out why, whether it was a gun malfunction, whether it got weaker or what, but all of the parts and pieces did their job.”
Rice continued, “The nut went back to what they call the lock, and it just sat there and vibrated the last entire run. And AJ felt it as soon as we put him on there, coming into the last stop. He felt it, [and] as soon as he went out, caution came out. He had fallen back the fifth. We hadn’t run that bad all day. And he was like, man, something’s wrong. These tires are horrible. And they had a chance to pit. We didn’t, we elected it not to pit. Don’t know that that would’ve made a difference with what we know now, but we don’t know whether it was a gun or whatever.”
Kaulig Racing, like every other team on pit road, leases their air guns out from NASCAR directly each race weekend. Rice says NASCAR is looking into the air gun used by the No. 16 team in last Sunday’s race to see if there was an issue with the gun, which resulted in the wheel not being fully tight leading into the final green flag run of the race.
“I talked to [NASCAR’s] Elton [Sawyer] about that yesterday,” Rice explained. “They’re gonna check that out also for us because we leased those guns from NASCAR.”
Whatever was at fault, it’s unfortunate because Allmendinger had a really, really good run going on Sunday at COTA prior to the disastrous final run of the race.
Heading into this weekend’s race, the Shriners Children’s 500 at Phoenix Raceway, the 43-year-old racer finds himself 25th in the NASCAR Cup Series championship standings, 28 points outside of the Playoff cutline.
The native of Los Gatos, CA has two top-10 finishes in 23 starts at the 1-mile oval in Avondale, AZ through his NASCAR Cup Series career. He’ll look to add another this weekend as he hopes to work his way into Playoff contention in his return to full-time racing in the NASCAR Cup Series competition following a season as a full-timer in the NASCAR Xfinity Series last year.
