The NASCAR Xfinity Series, as it did every weekend over the past 36 weeks, delivered.
This time, on Championship Saturday at Phoenix Raceway, the final four contenders drove into Turn 1 on the final restart practically four-wide and came out the other end unscathed. Cole Custer won not because he wiped out his peers, or benefited from the retaliation of another, but simply because he outdrove Justin Allgaier, John Hunter Nemechek and Sam Mayer.
It was a team effort too, of course, from crew chief Jonathan Toney and his engineers to the over-the-wall crew but Creed executed in every way on Saturday in the desert.
This is an important element to spotlight, because Custer was de facto demoted from the Cup Series back to Xfinity over the winter, and it could have completely broken his confidence. It was intended to do the opposite, but you never really know how someone will respond to the adversity.
In three seasons at the Cup Series level, Custer won just once and averaged a 20.6 average finish and was placed back in Xfinity where he won seven times in his last full seasons in 2019 but fell short of the championship in the final four that year.
He won three times this time around, really coming into his own in the second half of the season, and this time emerged victorious in the final four at Phoenix. He got his mojo back over the course of this entire campaign.
“This means the world,” Custer said. “You get kind of knocked down a little bit. When you go to the Cup level, it’s so competitive. Things can just not go right for a few years. It’s just how it is, how tight it is. I worked with a great group of guys up there, but how it all works out, sometimes it just doesn’t work.”
His boss, three-time Cup Series champion Tony Stewart, said the decision to move him back to Xfinity was met with the right attitude, the right approach and then commensurate results.
“It was a calculated decision to move him back, and it was for him to gain confidence,” Stewart said. “Like (Toney) said, his leadership is growing through this year and as his confidence has grown, the leadership side is coming into play, as well.
“It’s a valid question to ask about why we did it, when a driver makes it to the big show but has to step back one series, there are a lot of things that could go wrong.
“But it’s character-building. I told him tonight before we came into the media center, I said, this is why we did what we did, and this is what you’re doing, the steps that you’re making and the progress you’ve made this year is exactly what we were hoping for.”
Stewart said he has no doubt Custer will be back in the Cup Series but this past year and next is part of a big picture process.
It’s been a similar process for fellow final four contender John Hunter Nemechek, who reached the Cup Series with Front Row Motorsports in 2020 but went back to Trucks and then the Xfinity Series the past three years and winning a lot of races in the process.
So much of success in NASCAR is timing and preparation for the right moments, and after earning this spot in the final four, Custer capitalized on all the lessons from his journey and is now a champion at the second-highest level.
“When you’re younger, you’re just trying to figure it all out,” Custer said. “But once you get older, it’s trying to figure out those little areas where you’re missing it a little bit. I think having this year where you get knocked down a little bit and you’re able to sit back and really realize what you need to do better.
“I think I tried to improve all those things this year, trying to work with my team and really get what we needed in the cars, and you’ve just got to keep working at it.
“I don’t know if I’ve been the guy who always has the most talent really. I think I can drive a car but I feel like if you just work at it enough, you can go out and if you have a good group around you, you can go out and make some stuff happen.”
A lesson for the truckers
No one within the sport had anything particularly nice to say about how the Truck Series championship race was decided on Friday night.
“I was not impressed,” Martin Truex Jr. said on Saturday morning. “That is not professional auto racing. It’s a joke, they need to fix it.”
Kyle Busch said ‘there is no respect whatsoever,’ while also expressing gratitude that he sold his team to Spire Motorsports back in September and will no longer have to worry about the financial responsibilities of fielding a team at that level anymore.
“It was a s-show,” Stewart said in the media center on Saturday night alongside Custer.
Fortunately for the industry, the second-tier division responded to the problem with what the solution should look like with all four contenders racing hard but respectively over the final series of restarts in the valley.
In fact, the final restart featured all four championship finalists occupying the first four positions and racing four-wide into the dogleg without wiping each other out.
It was a technical clinic, and one that at least inspired hope for the future of the sport, with Custer, Nemechek and Mayer representing the future of the sport. For his part, this is the way that Allgaier as always raced.
So, really, the only drama on Saturday was who was going emerge as the winner and champion on the final restart.
Allgaier says this one will keep him the next several nights.
“I’m probably going to second-guess the amount of space that I gave Cole on that last restart, getting into 3,” Allgaier said. “But on the other side of it, Cole’s car was so good on the short run. It was so hard to hold him off. Even when we got three wide down the back, I’m like, man, it’s everything I’ve got. I was blown away that he even got to my left rear off of 2.”
Nemechek seemingly cut a right front.
Mayer said this was the most fun he’s had in a race car all year.
“It’s probably the most hectic on the schedule other than Pocono or something like that,” Mayer said. “It feels like you’re boxed in, very much so. But you almost kind of just bring that intensity level where I’m just taking this track position and you can get out of the way.
Being a (final four) car, you almost have to bully everyone else and take what you can, and those last couple restarts I took as much as I could. It’s just like you can only take so much when you’re in that spot.
“We were in a tough spot. Obviously second in line bottom was probably the worst spot to be in overall. Still to finish in the top 5 and get third in the final four feels good.”
And they all did it the right way.
“Last night, I’m sorry, we were sitting at dinner, and I wanted to turn it off because it didn’t show what I know that our sport is capable of,” Allgaier said of the Truck Series race.
“Now, those moments, they’re going to learn from them. Carson (Hocevar) last night was highly critical of himself when he walked out of there. That’s fine. The next opportunity is how do you fix it. I think that he got a really difficult life lesson, but something that I think a lot more people need to learn. I think the more guys learn it, the better it is.”
Nemechek believes that he, Custer and Allgaier having several seasons of Cup experience is part of their mindsets too.
It would not feel right wrecking someone on the last lap to win the championship.
“You want to race fair and square,” Nemechek said. “You want to race hard. If you door each other or whatever it may be, it’s still racing hard, but you’re not going to go out and wreck everyone. It’s just a respect factor in my opinion.
“As you grow up and you gain experience and you run in different series, you tend to learn that really fast. Cole, myself and Justin all have Cup experience. We’ve all been humbled from the Cup Series pretty quickly I would say. As you move up in the ranks, there’s just a different respect factor between race car drivers.
“One of it is experience in my opinion, and some of it is getting a butt whipping after doing something stupid or learning from doing something stupid through the years. You live and you learn. You can’t beat experience. It’s super valuable.”