March 7, 2022 | By Lee Spencer

Fun, freedom and finality characterize Aric Almirola's last season in Cup racing

If you picked Aric Almirola to be leading the charge for Stewart-Haas Racing, take a bow.

If you chose Almirola to be the top driver for Ford Performance after the first three races in 2022, bravo. 

And if you chose the No. 10 SHR team to be the only squad on the NASCAR Cup tour to finish every race inside the top 10, then it’s probably time to go buy a lottery ticket, because, honestly, the best prognosticators in motorsports would not have bet on the 37-year-old driver in his swan-song season.

Almirola is an affable guy. The father of two decided during the offseason that devoting 15 years to racing was enough. It was time to put family first. Who could blame him? The pandemic—as unpredictable as it seemed at times—provided an eye-opening view of normalcy from the nomadic life of NASCAR. 
 
Almirola, who enjoyed a journeyman's Cup career at best, amassed more than $25 million earned in his first eight seasons of Cup racing before the sanctioning body elected to stop revealing prize money in 2016. In 391 starts, he tallied three wins, 27 top fives and 87 top 10s. A horrific wreck that ended with a compression fracture of his T5 vertebra at Kansas in the spring of 2017 sidelined Almirola for seven weeks. 

Certainly, he could skip the current grind and never look back. But in his 16th and final season, Almirola refuses to mail it in.

“We fight,” said Almirola after finishing sixth and tying his career-best result at Las Vegas Motor Speedway on Sunday. “That’s the beauty of this race team. 

“We’re still learning this car. There’s a lot to learn about it, and we’re still trying to figure a lot of things out. Practice is great, but we’ve got to make adjustments throughout the race, and I feel like every race we’re learning more and more and more, and we’re building a notebook.  We’re making adjustments throughout the race and trying to figure it out.”

Almirola’s reunion with former crew chief Drew Blickensderfer is paying off. While the challenge exists for every team to acclimate to the new car, having the opportunity to have worked with Blickensderfer at Richard Petty Motorsports put the driver at ease.

“Drew has been doing a great job of making good adjustments throughout the race and just getting the car better and better,” Almirola said. “We take the first half of the race and it’s really about learning. We make adjustments. If they’re no good, we go back on them and just keep fine-tuning on the car to get it to where we need to get it.

“And, usually, the last few weeks, we’ve gotten the car where we needed to have it at the end of the race.”

Seventeen drivers have been running at the finish of the first three races. But only Almirola and Kyle Busch have single-digit average finishes. Busch’s average finish is eighth. Almirola leads the Cup tour with an average finish of 5.7. Not bad for a guy whose career average result is 19th. 

“Our previous relationship helped,” Blickensderfer told RacinBoys.com. “He trusted me. I trusted him. We kind of set off on a game plan to be there at the end of the races. We don’t have to try and get stage points. We don’t have to try and win the war on Lap 20 to make speed if we don't have to—and you’ve seen that. 

“During the races, our cars have been top-10 speed cars, even better than that at Fontana. But we didn’t show it until the end because that’s when it mattered—and we wanted to be there at the end.”

Although Almirola hasn’t led a lap and only gained stage points in the second stage at Auto Club Speedway, consistency has the No. 10 team sitting sixth in the Cup standings. Without the stress of having to achieve, Almirola has nothing to prove.

“Just that mind-set has helped,” Blickensderfer added. “And Aric, he’s a little freer now that he knows what he’s doing next year. He cannot stress about a lot of things that drivers have to stress about—new contracts, what’s going to happen, having to perform. He can go out there and do his deal with a lot of confidence. 

“A lot of guys don’t have the opportunity to go out there and win every week like Denny Hamlin, Kyle Busch, Martin Truex (Jr.) or Kevin Harvick. Those guys are pretty confident because they write their own destiny. Guys like Aric, who had to fight for everything every week, it’s just kind of a freeing moment for him. 

“He’s confident in his career. He’s confident in what he’s done and he knows the reality of it. He’s satisfied. We ran into Mark Martin at Fontana. Aric kind of laughed at Mark and said, ‘I’m not going to retire like you did. I’m gone.’ And nothing’s going to hold him back.”

Almirola was the only driver under the Stewart-Haas roof to visit Victory Lane in 2021. At the end of the year, the organization decided to promote his former crew chief, Mike Bugarewicz. to the newly created role of director of performance. The move has helped all four teams—including the No. 10 squad. 

Whether or not Almirola goes out on top, make no mistake. This will be his last hurrah. But why not enjoy the ride on the way out?

“This team has so much fight in it and so much grit that it’s a lot of fun to race with these guys,” Almirola said. “We’ll keep digging and try and keep this streak alive of all these top-10 finishes.  It’s a lot of fun when you run up front.”