In three seasons with Richard Petty Motorsports, Aric Almirola had never exited a race because of an engine failure-until last week at Chicagoland. The blown engine couldn’t have come at a worse time.
Almirola was running sixth, 30 laps away from making a statement in the Chase for the NASCAR Sprint Cup. Instead, he finished 41st and plummeted from potential Chase surprise to the longest of long shots to survive to first elimination round.
The culprit?
A broken exhaust valve.
“It was the same thing that happened to the #22 (Joey Logano) at Kentucky and the same thing that happened to the 9 car (Marcos Ambrose) at Atlanta,” Almirola told the NASCAR Wire Service.
“They’ve had a couple issues already this year, and they thought they had it fixed. They changed the way the valves were designed and thought that it wasn’t going be an issue any more, and I guess it was again.”
