Five hundred.
Go ahead and sit with that number for a second. Five hundred NASCAR Cup Series starts. That is not a typo, and it is not nothing.
This Sunday at Sonoma Raceway, AJ Allmendinger climbs into the No. 16 Kaulig Racing Chevrolet and makes start number 500. And he's doing it at home. Allmendinger was born in Los Gatos, California, and Sunday he races a Cup car in front of his home-state crowd.
Look. Careers like this one don't happen by accident, and they don't happen fast. Allmendinger showed up to NASCAR as an open-wheel kid, the 2004 Champ Car World Series Rookie of the Year, the guy everybody figured was just passing through on his way back to Indy cars. He made his first Cup start at Bristol on March 25, 2007. He didn't win his first Cup race until August 10, 2014, at Watkins Glen. Seven years of showing up before the payoff.
But the man can wheel a road course, and everybody in the garage knows it. Three Cup victories, all on the twisty stuff: Watkins Glen in 2014, the Indianapolis Road Course in 2021, the Charlotte ROVAL in 2023. Twenty-three top-five finishes. Ninety top-10s. Five poles. A career-best 13th in the 2014 standings that delivered JTG Daugherty Racing its first-ever playoff berth.
And that's just the Cup side. Down in the NASCAR O'Reilly Auto Parts Series, Allmendinger has been a flat-out monster: 18 wins, a career-best third in the 2024 championship, and back-to-back Regular Season titles in 2021 and 2022. He is the ONLY driver to win that regular-season crown more than once. Across all three of NASCAR's national divisions, he's stacked up 500 Cup starts, 131 O'Reilly Series starts and 16 Truck starts, going back to his series debut at New Hampshire in 2006.
The people who know him best did not hold back this week.
"Reaching 500 Cup Series starts is something I never could have imagined when I first got behind the wheel," Allmendinger said in a Kaulig Racing release. "To do it at Sonoma, in my home state of California, with the men and women at Kaulig Racing makes it even more special."
Kaulig Racing CEO Chris Rice got closer to the bone. "To think about 500 starts is something you never hear of in any sport," Rice said. "For a guy to make it as long as he has, it's pretty special."
And crew chief Trent Owens, the man who has to make the No. 16 fast, gave him the racer's compliment: "I've never worked with a driver who has won in everything he's ever competed in, no matter the series."
The capper tells you everything about where Allmendinger is in his career. He's not just racing this weekend. On Saturday, he's putting on a headset and calling the O'Reilly Series race from the CW broadcast booth alongside Adam Alexander and Parker Kligerman. Then on Sunday, he climbs out of the booth and into the race car for start number 500. Broadcaster and driver, same weekend, same racetrack. Who does that?
A guy having fun, that's who. And a guy with momentum: Allmendinger rolled into this milestone week off a season-best fifth-place finish at the San Diego street course, the wild new venue at Naval Base Coronado.
Five hundred starts. A CW headset on Saturday. The No. 16 on Sunday. All of it back home in California. Some careers you don't script. You just make sure you're tuned in when they happen.