And thus begins the second act for Aric Almirola in NASCAR.
Starting this weekend, at Las Vegas Motor Speedway, the Cup Series veteran will begin a part-time Xfinity Series campaign in the No. 20 for Joe Gibbs Racing. For now, these 15 to 16 starts are all the 39-year-old has scheduled across any motorsport category.
That was also his choice, making a decision last year to scale back so he could spend more time at home, but also offer mentorship services to anyone interested in having a NASCAR veteran with over two decades of experience.
That team turned out to be Joe Gibbs Racing, a full circle moment as this is also where Almirola began his NASCAR journey, and having always maintained a close relationship with the Gibbs family with their shared faith and values.
Those are values that were appealing to JGR as Almirola will also be part of team meetings while also being available to any driver in the organization who might value his perspective.
“It has been really rewarding to take that transition from the last several years of serving myself as a professional athlete and a competitor in NASCAR and trying to get to the top, and once I got to the top, trying to stay there and establish myself,” Almirola said. “It was very self-serving, everything about what I did was about how do I make myself better, how do I advance my career, everything revolved around me.
“To come to this next chapter, this next season of life where I have the opportunity to invest in others and serve others and try and help them achieve their goals and dreams, while helping Coach (Joe Gibbs) and the entire race team has been very rewarding.”
Almirola said it was Coach that reached out to Almirola in the first place.
While Almirola said he wanted to race part-time this season, and said that could take any shape or form from Xfinity, Trucks or Late Models, he was surprised but also not really that Gibbs made the phone call.
“When Coach called me and asked me to come back home to Joe Gibbs Racing, and that is exactly how he phrased it, it was kind of a no brainer for me that this felt right,” Almirola said. “I’m excited about that and being able to finish out my chapter at where it started. Not a lot of people get that opportunity, so I think that is really special to have that opportunity to do that.”
By now, most everyone knows how the first stint Almirola had at JGR ended, the driver deciding to leave the organization for two reasons — a lack of conviction that there was room for him at the Cup Series program and what happened at the Milwaukee Mile in 2007.
Almirola was a part-time driver for Gibbs and practiced and qualified in the place of Denny Hamlin, who was flying back to Wisconsin after Cup practice at Sonoma. Hamlin was delayed and Almirola started the race but was forced out of the car upon Hamlin’s arrival.
Hamlin went onto win the race, but Almirola was scored the winner since he started the race, and it was his first national touring win. It left a bitter taste in his mouth for quite awhile and so much of this reunion is about ending that story on a more positive note as well.
“I was hurt,” Almirola said. “I was deeply hurt at Milwaukee when I had to get out of the race car. Looking back on it, I understand. I still don’t like it, but I understand. It was in Milwaukee. The CEO of Rockwell Automation was there. He didn’t really understand racing, and all he knew that Denny Hamlin was their driver, and he was sitting on the pit box and wanted him in the car.”
Almirola also had a Cup Series opportunity to split a ride at MB2 Motorsports with Mark Martin and Gibbs actually allowed him out of his contract so he could pursue it.
They left on positive terms and the late J.D. Gibbs always expressed a desire that Almirola would come back someday.
“He said, ‘When I hired you here, I wanted what was best for you and I hoped it would be at Joe Gibbs Racing for your entire career, but I’m not going to hold you back from an opportunity like this (but) the only thing I will tell you, is that I hope you come back,’ and here I am 16 years from that time, back.
“I think that is just a testament to the Gibbs family.”
Almirola recounted all the family gatherings that included both Coach and J.D. He shared a picture over his social media channels over J.D. giving him a hug on pit road.
“I wasn’t driving for Joe Gibbs Racing anymore,” Almirola said. “I got married in 2010, and J.D. was at my wedding. I just always had a great relationship with the Gibbs family, and on a professional side, Milwaukee hurt, but from a personal side, they have meant a lot to me.”
Almirola expects to be competitive in this part-time role, but probably not immediately because he is so far removed from the traditional NASCAR platform after two seasons racing the radically different NextGen car.
He says the JGR cars are amongst the best in the garage, which they are, but he will be racing drivers who have done this full-time or will be full-time when he straps in every couple of weeks.
“It’s going to be really hard, because you take Cup guys like William Bryon and all these guys who run Super Late Model races a couple of time a year against the guys who do it every week and it’s challenging for them,” Almirola said. “Same here.
“It’s really challenging to go and compete against anybody when they are at the top of their game and they are doing it every week, so I realize that is going to be a challenge. It is not a shoo-in that I’m going to win every time that I climb in a Joe Gibbs Racing Xfinity car, there is a lot of good teams, there is a lot of good young drivers and talented guys that are coming up through that series and they do it every week. Every week when they get in the car and fire off for practice, they know exactly what to expect out of the race car, where I’m going to kind of be feeling it out.
“I haven’t driven a Xfinity car on an oval in a long, long time. I think for me, it will come, but I might be a little slower to get up to speed in practice. I probably won’t qualify as good, and halfway through the race, it will probably all start to click.”
Matt Weaver is a Motorsports Insider for Sportsnaut. Follow him on Twitter.