[media-credit name=”Brad Keppel” align=”alignright” width=”254″]
[/media-credit]A hopeful weekend for Richard Petty Motorsports (RPM) turned bad by a lousy finish for the No.9 and a disappointing finish for the No.43 at Charlotte Motor Speedway.
Aric Almirola started the weekend off by capturing his first career Sprint Cup Series pole and to make things even sweeter for RPM, Marcos Ambrose qualified second.
Both drivers started off strong and exchanged the lead back and forth. Eventually Greg Biffle would pass Ambrose for the lead. Ambrose would go on to lead more laps later in the race but never seemed to recover after falling back through the field during the first 112-lap green-flag run.
With the pole, Almirola choose the number one pit stall for easy access in and out of the pits. That never seemed to come into play for the No.43 team.
Ambrose’s night turned bad when his car started experiencing brake issues. His front brake was severely locked up and was difficult to drive. After Ambrose’s team made repairs, he was able to continue but was multiple laps down due to the time spent behind the wall.
Later A.J Allmendinger experienced similar issues to what Ambrose was experiencing. That comes as a shocker to most people because Allmendinger drives a Dodge, Ambrose drives a Ford and Penske and Richard Petty Motorsports aren’t partnered with each other. This was just one of those coincidences that happens with stock cars driving at speeds near 200 MPH.
After all the trouble Ambrose experienced, he ended up finishing 32nd, 33 laps down. Ambrose commented on how the problems he experienced today are like the issues that the RPM organization is experiencing this season by saying “this is just how are season is going.”
Almirola ended up having one of his best Sprint Cup career finishes, 16th. Almirola is continuing to make strides in the right direction for his future in the Sprint Cup Series.
“I think the guys on pit road did a great job. We’ll take it. It’s 16th. It’s not great, but it’s improvement and that’s the one thing we’ve been talking about and working on is we’ve normally been running 23rd, so now we’re running 16th, so that’s improvement. If we can just keep doing that all year and I think if we can start building a notebook, when we come back to this place, now I’ve got a whole race in a Cup car here under my belt.” Almirola said.
RPM looks to have a better race at Dover International Speedway. Dover is historically a good track for all of RPM.
