Photo Credit: Justin McFarland
A.J. Allmendinger started out his 2016 with pretty much everything new. He just signed a new contract, he is working with a new crew chief and he has a new general manager. Allmendinger is contracted for five years and normally contracts are one to two years so this is a huge deal for him.
“New everything. It’s actually been really good,” he said. “I was a little disappointed for (the team). They put a lot of work into the 500 car and to not have the speed that we wanted was disappointing for them. They were planning to get the Atlanta car prepped for two weeks and I think it kind of made them mad and they went back and kind of worked on it a bit harder to make sure it was right, so it’s just fun to have those guys in the shop. I think the stuff we’ve already done has been really good. We have eight brand new cars lined up. We have brand new cars for the first five or six races to start with. The work ethic and the amount of want that they have is pretty cool to see.”
While the first two races didn’t start off as he would’ve hoped, he was able to turn in a solid 14th place finish at Las Vegas Motor Speedway. It’d seem the chemistry is starting to come around well, which is no surprise to Allmendinger via the attitude expressed in the JTG Daughtry shop.
“I’ve been fortunate enough, good and bad, to go to a lot of different race teams,” he said. “What I love about Tad and (wife, co-owner) Jodi is they are caring owners. You look at a guy like (crew chief) Randall Burnett, who was at Ganassi for 10 years, and he comes here and says ‘These people are so genuine and nice.’ Of course, right now you’d love to have all the resources you want at your disposal, but we’re getting there. I want to be here and I think we can make something great out of this.”
While dealing with change within his own organization, there’s been also change on the series front. NASCAR now uses a digital dash inside their race cars. Thus far, it has worked out well for Allmendinger as he states that you can see it clearly and it’s bright, despite having dimmer switch issues during the Sprint Unlimited earlier this year.
The new dash has a couple different safety measures put into place, continuing to expand on what in NASCAR has implemented over the years. The changes continue, with the series working on different roll bars and other things inside of the car, while doing the right testing to make sure that it works.
Safety is a paramount concern in any form of motorsports, something that all drivers recognize. Allmendinger is one of the drivers who has experience in a wide variety of different style cars, ranging from NASCAR to sports car to open-wheel. He admits there’s an extra level of concern when looking at IndyCar due to the open cockpit design.
“Stuff like that has always been more at risk to happen,” he said. “But every form of racing is doing the job to make it safer. NASCAR continually works on the racetracks and inside the cars. The direction with all the testing that they’re doing that they showed in the safety meeting is progress. Will you ever get to the day when you strap in a race car and say, ‘Ah, there’s no chance of something really bad happening?’ Well, no. That’s a part of racing that will always be there, but the best thing we can do is make it as safe as possible. It is way safer than it was 15 years ago. It’s getting better.
“When it comes to the IndyCar side of it, that took a big part of me away right there The grass is one thing for sure. It looks pretty but the grass is one thing that tears many race cars apart. Certain ways when it’s wet (the car) picks up speed. The tracks, they’re doing what they can. You’d like to wake up tomorrow and have SAFER Barriers at every part of the racetrack and things like that, but, in general, they are doing the best job that they can to try to update racetracks.”
Beyond requesting SAFER barriers, Allmendinger said it’d be nice to have all the tracks paved, rather than grass due to how severe some wrecks have been for both series over the years in the grass.
Among the safety concern discussions, he was asked if he would do the Indy 500 again, to which Allmendinger replied that he would never ever do a 500 again until they had a closed cockpit to keep the drivers safe. The reasoning comes virtue of losing his dear friends Justin Wilson, who died this past year in a crash at Pocono. Allmendinger say there isn’t a day that doesn’t go by that he don’t think about Wilson.
“There are good days and bad,” he said. “I thought at the Rolex I had done a pretty good job. We would remember the good times, joke about it. I remember that we played a mini-golf tournament that Barry Waddell the driver coach and spotter and his son, and Stef Wilson. It was a tradition that Justin and Barry and I would do. Even at RuSport we had tournaments with a point system. We played awful that day and said that Justin is up there messing with us.
“So we had the good times and I woke up Saturday and read a tweet that (team owner Michael) Shank had sent out and it killed me inside. It hurt, and it was tough. But you always think about him. We all have to experience stuff of our losses. He always made me a better race car driver and I remember everything about it.”
