Brennan Poole’s run at a championship in the 2017 NASCAR XFINITY Series season ended in the garage after slamming the wall twice in the Ticket Galaxy 200 at Phoenix Raceway.
Poole attempted to drive under the lapped car of Caesar Bacarella entering Turn 1 on Lap 23. Sandwiched between Cole Custer and Poole, and not knowing Poole was passing him, Bacarella turned down into the side of Poole.
The contact cut Poole’s right-front tire and he veered hard into the outside wall.
“I saw the 8 car go in, and we were going to kind of go to the top to go around him, and he slid up….I didn’t know really what was going to happen there,” Poole said. “So I tried to go underneath him, and we made a little contact and cut the right-front tire down. Bad luck, bad circumstances. I guess I could’ve been a little bit more cautious there. But we were just trying to get up there and get stage points and keep moving forward. Our car was actually pretty good. It’s just a bummer. I don’t know what else to say. Sometimes, lapped cars are in your way. You got to navigate around them and we just didn’t make that happen.”
Poole’s team fixed up the car enough to send him back out just before time expired on the five-minute repair clock, but he slammed the wall exiting Turn 4, took his car to the garage and retired from the race with a 38th-place finish.
“You’re just trying to salvage everything that you can, try to hope for the best,” Poole added. “It just cut the right-front tire down again. We put another tire on it and went into the wall again. Our car is pretty torn up and ended our championship hopes.”
He leaves Phoenix sixth in points.
