Last year, Justin Allgaier was sure his racing career was over. He had bought a house in Illinois, his home state, and was making plans for life after it.
"I don't think the general public will know how close I was to really walking away," he said Thursday.
Dale Earnhardt Jr. and Kelley Earnhardt Miller, co-owners of JR Motorsports, talked him into a contract extension instead. On Saturday at 5 p.m. ET on The CW, at Homestead-Miami Speedway, Allgaier, 40, starts the last race of the NASCAR O'Reilly Auto Parts Series season with the points lead and a second championship in reach.
He has led this season before, by a lot. He won six of the first 21 races, a career best, and finished the regular season 229 points ahead of everyone. Then the Chase, the nine-race playoff that decides the title, reset the standings, and his lead became 25 points. He has not won a race since. All four drivers who can still beat him have won at least one.
What kept him close was consistency. No one in the Chase has scored more stage points, the bonus points paid to the leaders at two breaks in every race. Even so, by the time the series reached Phoenix in October, he had slipped to fourth.
He got the lead back last Saturday at Martinsville Speedway, and not by winning. He lined up beside his teammate, Carson Kvapil, for the final restart with 22 laps to go, could not get past him and finished second. Jesse Love, the defending series champion, had come to Martinsville leading by 19. He lost his brakes, crashed and finished 30th.
Allgaier said he went over to Love afterward. "I think at first he thought I was messing with him," he said, "but I really was genuine in the fact that I hated it for him."
Love is now 22 points behind him. Corey Day is 23 back, Kvapil 31 and Sheldon Creed 42. Nobody else can win. If Allgaier scores 54 points on Saturday, the title is his no matter what the others do. Love and Day can clinch it on their own only with 76, the most a driver can score in a race. Kvapil and Creed need help.
Each of the four has a case. Love, 21, is the only driver who has finished in the top 10 in every race this season on a 1.5-mile track like Homestead. It is his last race for Richard Childress Racing before he moves up to the Cup Series, NASCAR's top level. Asked Thursday whether a day like Martinsville would once have broken him, he said, "Two or three years ago I would've freaked the hell out, but not now."
Day, 20, has scored more points in the Chase than anyone and won the last two races on 1.5-mile tracks, at Las Vegas and Charlotte. He has never run an O'Reilly Series race at Homestead. "I think I just need to win points in the first two stages and win the race. Pretty simple," the Hendrick Motorsports driver said. "Doing it is not simple."
Kvapil, 23, is the teammate who beat Allgaier at Martinsville. No driver has scored more points since JR Motorsports put him back in its No. 1 car in July.
Creed, 29, of Haas Factory Team, is furthest back in points, and he starts first. He won the pole, the first starting spot, in qualifying Saturday afternoon. Even if he wins, he figures, he would also need Allgaier to finish around 15th or worse, depending on the stages. "I'm just going to try to go win the stages and win the race," he said. "If I can't do that, I'm going to knock the fence down trying." The fence is the outside wall. At Homestead, as the tires wear, the fast way around runs right against it.
Kvapil starts third, Love fourth and Day seventh. Allgaier starts 11th, his lowest starting spot at Homestead since 2022. He is also the only one of the five who has won an O'Reilly Series race there. In March 2025, the leader, Austin Hill, slid up the track on the last lap, and Allgaier drove past him.
He said what happened to Love at Martinsville could happen to any of them on Saturday. "It could easily be the same for us," he said, "or any one of the top five."