Allgaier goes back to victory lane at Martinsville

MARTINSVILLE, Va. — Justin Allgaier survives the late race carnage to win his third NASCAR O’Reilly Auto Parts Series race this season at Martinsville Speedway.

His 31st career series win comes directly off the back of his 30th and gives JR Motorsports their fifth straight victory dating back to COTA.

A rain-shortened qualifying session handed the lineup decisions to the NASCAR metric, which put Allgaier on pole.

He made the most of it, leading wire-to-wire through the first stage to collect his third stage win of the young season and eclipse 100 stage points in the process.

Mixed pit strategy left Allgaier mired in traffic for the majority of the second stage but, when the strategy flipped back their way he pounced. He took advantage of the track position found himself among the drivers deciding the outcome.

With 26 laps to go, he cleared new teammate Lee Pulliam for the lead, survived a late restart, and came home under yellow to complete back-to-back wins.

He also added a fastest lap bonus point on the final run to the checkered for good measure.

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Corey Day finished second and continues to show vast improvement every weekend. He held the outside of Allgaier in the closing laps but ultimately ran side-by-side with the third place finisher Sammy Smith who has now finished in the top five at Martinsville in the previous five races.

Sheldon Creed came home fourth but the heartwarming story of the day, Lee Pulliam, came home fifth in his first start.

While Pulliam is a veteran racer, he showed some rookie mistakes in his first O’Reilly Series outing. Coming to the restart with 16 laps remaining, he missed a shift while leading the outside lane causing the largest incident of the day to bring out a 27 minute red flag.

Still, he led 40 laps, good for the second most on the day, and delivered a top five finish that any short-track faithful would take without hesitation.

Austin Hill battled up to finish sixth from his poor starting position handed to him. Then, Dean Thompson snuck through the Jesse Love and Rajah Caruth mess to finish a much needed seventh for Sam Hunt Racing as a whole.

Ross Chastain somehow came home eighth after spinning midway through the final stage after starting at the tail end of the field. Finally, Ryan Sieg and Brent Crews rounded out the top ten.

Carson Kvapil suffered his first DNF of the season and other Chase contenders suffered damage in the same incident which included Sam Mayer, Taylor Gray, and Brandon Jones.

The other two debutants both DNF’d. Luke Baldwin unfortunately only lasted 31 laps while Andrew Patterson was another casualty of the Lap 233 incident.

The full results of the NFPA 250 at Martinsville Speedway is below.

Race Results