Almirola on 200th Cup start: "I never thought I'd make it to this point"

Almirola, 32, will make his 200th career Cup series start in Sunday’s Pennsylvania 400 at Pocono Raceway, 170 of them coming with Richard Petty Motorsports.

While he admits his NASCAR career has seemingly gone by fast, when he takes some time to reflect on it, he said he realizes “how blessed I am.”

“When I dreamed about driving a race car, I dreamed about racing in NASCAR, but I never really understood what that looked like and I never really thought about long-term and things like that,” Almirola said Saturday.

“You just dream about running a race and you dream about winning a race and things like that, but to actually have had the opportunities that I’ve had along the way that have got me to where I’m at today, when you get to this point and you sort of take the time to reflect back on what all has happened to get to where you’re at today.”

Almirola was plucked from the open-wheel modified and late models ranks in 2003 to become one of the original members of Joe Gibbs Racing’s driver diversity program formed with former NFL great Reggie White.

He ran partial schedules in what is now the Xfinity series with Gibbs, one full season with JR Motorsports and his first opportunity in the Cup series came with partial schedules with Dale Earnhardt Inc.

In 2012, Almirola moved into a fulltime Cup ride with RPM.

“I’ve had a tremendous amount of opportunities with really great race teams along the way and just even the very first phone call I got from Joe and J.D. Gibbs to move to North Carolina to come start driving a Late Model stock car for them, which then led into some Truck races with them and Busch races at the time,” he said.

It’s been a bit of a roller-coaster ride for Almirola at RPM, but he earned his first series victory in 2014 and qualified for the championship Chase for the first time.

So far this season, Almirola is still searching for his first Top 10 finish. The organization made some changes in the offseason to become less reliant on its technical alliance with Roush Fenway Racing, which included hanging the bodies on their cars and hiring some of their own engineers.

“To be honest with you, we knew that going into it, it was going to be a work in progress. We weren’t just going to be able to build from ground zero and come out of the box and be super-successful and ultra-competitive,” he said. “But we did have a lot higher hopes for success than what we’ve seen this year.

“I realize that it is challenging to go out and start a whole program from scratch as far as building your own chassis and bringing on engineers to help develop that, especially now with the limited testing that we get to do.”

Regardless, Almirola remains appreciative of the opportunity he has been given.

“As a kid racing out of Tampa, Florida that just had high hopes and a lot of dreams, I never thought I would make it to this point,” he said, “so I’m just really blessed and fortunate to be where I’m at today and grateful.”