For the past two seasons, the attention of the NASCAR community has shifted to Shane van Gisbergen and Connor Zilisch whenever there’s a road course in the horizon. They’re labeled as the ‘drivers to beat’. Their resumes are dissected, their prospects amplified. But before this wave took hold, AJ Allmendinger’s name carried that weight.
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Allmendinger built his Cup Series record on left and right turns. All three of his career Cup wins came on road layouts. Most of his Xfinity Series wins followed the same path. However, his last road-course win came in 2023, when he won at Circuit of The Americas in the NASCAR O’Reilly Auto Parts Series and later won the Charlotte Roval race in the Cup Series. Since then, he’s struggled.
With the series returning to COTA this weekend, Allmendinger was asked whether the current narrative fuels him or wears on him, with SVG and Zilisch framed as the benchmark and the rest cast as chasers. “I mean, the way we change that narrative is you go beat them, right? But for the most part, we didn’t do that at most of the road courses last year,” Allmendinger said. He stopped short of blaming outside noise.
However, he clarified, “It’s not frustrating to me. I think, for me, the most frustrating thing was just, in general, we didn’t run great at the road courses last year. I put a lot of that on my shoulders.
“I think as Goodyear softens the tire, it gives the advantage to a guy like SVG that really knows how to save the tires. It’s something that, whether it was setup-based or my own doing, I struggled with it last year of trying to be good on long runs,” he continued.
Interestingly, the Kaulig Racing driver refused to obsess over van Gisbergen’s dominance in the way fans or media might. He drew a clear hypothetical line: if he were consistently finishing second to SVG and just couldn’t find a way past him, that would eat at him. That would create the kind of rivalry-driven frustration athletes talk about.
But that’s not what happened. He wasn’t regularly knocking on the door. He was further back. So instead of framing it as ‘I can’t beat that guy,’ he framed it as ‘I wasn’t good enough yet.’ He further addressed that if SVG and Zilisch are that good, then it’s worth studying what makes those standout drivers effective, not resenting them.
Instead of treating top performers as obstacles, Allmendinger chose to treat them like case studies. Watch what they do, understand why it works, then adapt.
That’s a very racer’s way of processing dominance, because one can’t argue with speed; the driver has to dissect it. If there is frustration, it is directed at his own performance.
On Saturday at COTA, Allmendinger qualified in seventh Meanwhile, SVG posted the 13th-fastest time.
