SONOMA, Calif. — It was a banner afternoon for Viking Motorsports at Sonoma Raceway on Saturday (June 27), with Anthony Alfredo coming home fourth and Parker Retzlaff a spot behind his teammate in fifth place.
It was the first time the young team had finished with a double top-five finish in the NASCAR O’Reilly Series. It’s been an impressive climb for this group, only in its second full season as an independent program and the first with these drivers at the helm.
“Yeah, I mean, I think it’s all these great people standing around here that did all this hard work throughout the whole year so far,” Retzlaff said of the team’s success. “I’m glad we got a double top five today [for them].”
Alfredo, who started and finished fourth, was delighted with his first top-five run for Viking. It was a steady performance, the type that looked as if the team had been in this position every week.
“Yeah, clean, great execution and did what we needed to do to get a top five,” Alfredo said. “Which was a long time coming this season for our [No.] 96 team but wouldn’t be possible without our partners and the hard work of everyone throughout the beginning of the season where we just had growing pains, learning new people, new cars, controlling what we can control.
“Maybe [we] shot ourselves in the foot a couple times, but we never gave up. We kept going back to the drawing board and building on it, and it showed the last few weeks.”
It’s been a long haul for Alfredo, whose new, second program started off the year failing to qualify for the season opener at Daytona. The team then fought through a handful of crashes and poor performances, only to come alive this month.
This fourth for the No. 96 team adds to the success of a sixth-place finish at Pocono Raceway earlier in June. It’s clear Alfredo’s program is now working in lockstep with a teammate, Retzlaff, whose data and experience helped elevate the program.
“This [No.] 96 team didn’t have cars, a truck, a trailer or people in December,” Alfredo explained. “Whereas the [No.] 99 team was established. This team was growing throughout the first half of the season from scratch. And thankfully, we had a teammate we could lean on and learn from to get to where we need to be.”
In an encouraging sign for the team from an overall perspective, Retzlaff felt he could have had an even better day and was quick to diagnose what he saw as the issue.
“Overall, I think that we just missed it a little bit,” Retzlaff said. “I think I led the team down a little bit of a wrong path in practice and qualifying, which is some stuff that I needed to change.
“I feel like we can still use this as a building week and go on to next week and try and keep doing it again.”
Alfredo agreed that from here, there is still plenty of room to grow.
“Both cars running up front is a huge reward for all of our efforts, and obviously this opportunity is the best I’ve ever had,” Alfredo said. “So it feels good to be making the most of it, and I wouldn’t be able to without Don and Suzanne [Sackett] believing in me, obviously our partners.
“I feel like we have excellent momentum heading through the summer and into the second half of the season, which is when it matters most.”
Leaving Sonoma, Retzlaff sits in ninth place in the standings, while Alfredo sits 16th, 112 points out of Chase position. But Alfredo remains optimistic the team’s recent momentum, there remains a window for him to charge back and make the postseason.
Saturday was one giant step in the right direction.
Danny Peters has written for Frontstretch since 2006. An English transplant living in San Francisco, by way of New York City, he’s had an award-winning marketing career with some of the biggest companies sponsoring sports. Working with racers all over the country, his freelance writing has even reached outside the world of racing to include movie screenplays.
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