WATKINS GLEN, N.Y. — Parker Kligerman “couldn’t see a thing.”
The driver of Big Machine Racing’s No. 48 Chevrolet was basically blinded in the midst of a “chaotic” overtime run to the finish in Saturday’s (Sept. 14) NASCAR Xfinity Series race at Watkins Glen International.
“On that last run there, the sun’s so low (and) the windshield is covered in oil from [Matt DiBenedetto‘s car] and speedy dry, ” Kligerman said.
On top of that, Kligerman had been without fourth gear since Lap 10.
“That was making it harder down the backstretch to hold people off,” Kligerman said. “So I had to be super defensive … and really overdrive the corner to hold them off.”
He wasn’t the only one throwing defensive elbows over the last two circuits of the 2.45-mile road course.
Kligerman, Shane van Gisbergen, AJ Allmendinger, Sheldon Creed and Chandler Smith were part of a swarm of cars chasing after eventual race winner Connor Zilisch.
Kligerman ran into the back of Creed. Somebody shoved him into the wall.
“It was just chaos,” without which Kligerman thought he could have made it into the top three. Instead, he finished seventh and all but clinched a spot in the playoffs.
van Gisbergen, who finished fifth and is tied for the series lead with three wins this season, looked like a human pinball as his No. 97 Chevrolet bounced off cars jockeying to be the driver that would give a challenge to Zilisch.
“It’s awkward with a teammate, you never want to race too hard like that” van Gisbergen said of Allmendinger, his Kaulig Racing colleague. “But it’s a green-white-checkered, and everybody loses their shit here.
“I’ll join them.”
Allmendinger, who finished third, called the wild final run “stupid, honestly.
“But if the fans love, we gotta keep doing it.”
Allmendinger then estimated that $3 to $4 million in damage was done over the race’s multiple overtime finishes, which extended the race by eight laps to 90 — the same length as Sunday’s (Sept. 15) NASCAR Cup Series race.
While Allmendinger thought the battle between the frontrunners was “aggressive,” it was never anything over the line.
“At any point one of us could have gone ‘Eff it,’ and just turned into each other,” Allmendinger said. “We leaned on each other … but it was never over the top malicious.
“That’s what you kind of hope for on those. … I think everybody did a good job of not taking each other out.
The driver who eventually broke free from the storm was Creed, who wound up with yet another second-place finish. It was his fifth runner-up finish of the year and his 12th over the last two seasons. The latter extended his Xfinity Series record of runner-ups without a win.
However, the Joe Gibbs Racing driver wasn’t as disappointed in Saturday’s result as he has been for others.
“I’ve been mad at the last couple of seconds because we had winning racecars and were in position,” Creed said. “Today, I’m happy because I feel running second overachieved for kind of our pace all day.”
Creed felt he was a fifth- to eighth-place car for much of the race.
“It’s always good if you can finish better than you ran all day,” Creed said.
Daniel McFadin is a 10-year veteran of the NASCAR media corp. He wrote for NBC Sports from 2015 to October 2020. He currently works full time for the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette and is lead reporter and an editor for Frontstretch. He is also host of the NASCAR podcast "Dropping the Hammer with Daniel McFadin" presented by Democrat-Gazette.
You can email him at danielmcfadin@gmail.com.