It was less than two months ago, after two of Alpha Prime Racing’s entries failed to qualify for the NASCAR Xfinity Series event at Circuit of The Americas, that team co-owner Tommy Joe Martins recognized the worst day in company history.
That was seven weeks ago, and the same organization that Martins says “dropped the ball” in Austin, Texas, earlier this season, is completely unrecognizable, in a good way.
Saturday’s North Carolina Education Lottery 250 saw Alpha Prime Racing have two drivers finish inside the top-five for the first time in a NASCAR Xfinity Series event.
Parker Retzlaff and Brennan Poole crossed the line in third and fifth, respectively, but were promoted to second and fourth after Jesse Love failed post-race technical inspection and was disqualified.
These finishes didn’t come out of nowhere, though…
Since failing to make the Xfinity Series event at Circuit of The Americas in March, Retzlaff hasn’t finished worse than 21st-place, while Poole has only had one finish worse than 22nd.
In recent weeks, things have continued to ramp up for the team co-owned by Tommy Joe Martins and Caesar Bacarella, which started with an impressive top-five result at Martinsville amid the chaos.
That qualified Poole and the No. 44 Chevrolet for a chance at the Dash4Cash bonus at Bristol, but a massive crash early in the race derailed those chances pretty quickly. On that same weekend, Retzlaff scored the team’s first-ever top-10 start.
Saturday at the iconic Rockingham Speedway, the stars perfectly aligned for the organization. Both Retzlaff and Poole took part in a pre-season test at the racetrack in January and showed significant speed.
So, when the No. 4 and No. 44 showed up at the racetrack this past weekend, the pace on their side wasn’t necessarily a surprise.
Retzlaff took advantage and qualified in second place, coming one-thousandth of a second short of winning his third career pole — and what would have been the first for Alpha Prime Racing.
During the race, while Poole was lying in the weeds throughout the early portions of the event, the No. 4 was mixing it up inside the top-10, finishing second in the race’s opening stage.
If not for a lucky caution for Patrick Emerling, a flat tire in the second half of Saturday’s event would have totally derailed any chance at a solid finish for the third-year Xfinity Series driver.
With veteran crew chief Joe Williams on his side, Retzlaff was quickly cycled back to the front of the pack, on a strategy that would require him to dramatically stretch the fuel.
But a late-race caution allowed the No. 4 to hit pit road and lose track position. Although the chaos on the subsequent restarts would ultimately help him gain those spots back.
In NASCAR Overtime, Retzlaff got to third place, and the Rhineland, Wisconsin-native was left to hope that the two leaders ahead would run out of gas, allowing him to secure his first victory.
That didn’t end up happening, though, and instead the No. 4 Scentsy Chevrolet crossed the start-finish line in third, and after being promoted one spot, catapulted to a career-best finish in the second-tier series.
“Yeah, I would say it’s probably the best race of my career, just the best overall throughout the whole day of just running up front,” said Retzlaff. “We were probably top-five to top-seven all day on speed, no matter what happened, and I think that it just kept staying in the fight all day to finish top-three.”
Possibly the bigger surprise, though, was just two spots behind Retzalff, where his teammate Brennan Poole finished fifth (fourth), scoring his second top-five result in the last three NASCAR Xfinity Series events.
“All day it was just about track position, and Frank [Kerr] nailed it on the strategy,” said Poole. “I wasn’t so sure when I pitted back there deep towards the end of the race, but it played out perfectly and we got a couple of key restarts at the end of the race we needed, we kept moving ourselves forward and found ourselves in the perfect position.”
It’s an unprecedented performance for a smaller organization in the NASCAR Xfinity Series, like Alpha Prime Racing, to place two entries inside the top five, especially at a non-superspeedway like Rockingham.
“I’m in a weird place with it right now, because I’m so excited, I’m so happy for all of those guys,” said Martins. “It’s so rare you get to have two teams that have success. I’m also kind of bummed for Parker [Retzlaff], he was so close twice in the same day, missing the pole by one thousandth of a second and gosh he was in the perfect position there at the end of the race.”
Despite the emotional whiplash that the organization has been through this year, having its best and worst days in a matter of seven weeks, Martins gives props to his driver for not getting down in the dumps and discouraged.
“Parker’s confidence is always pretty high,” Martins said of driver Parker Retzlaff. “I think he is really hard on himself, but days like this, he lives for this shit, flat out. I mean, this is a short track, this is a place where a driver can make a difference in qualifying. Track position was at a premium today, and he just started the weekend being really fast and had a great qualifying run.”
Martins also notes that already in the first 10 weeks of the NASCAR Xfinity Series campaign, Retzlaff and the No. 4 Chevrolet have had two solid opportunities to park it in Victory Lane.
“For the No. 44 team, I mean two top-fives in the last couple of races, this is a team that doesn’t have leased motors, doesn’t have everything that the No. 4 car has, right, just the runs they are having is so much credit to Brennan [Poole] and his whole group,” the former driver praised. “That group is so tight-knit, they’re so well gelled after the year they had last year, have an awesome race car driver, and I’m just lucky to have awesome race car drivers.”
Next up for the NASCAR Xfinity Series is a trip to Talladega Superspeedway, often viewed as an opportunity race for smaller teams in the second-tier series to capture a victory.
