Cole Custer wins NASCAR Xfinity championship in thrilling overtime finish at Phoenix
Cole Custer has won the NASCAR Xfinity Series championship.
The No. 00 Ford Mustang led for 92 of the 202 laps in a race dominated by the Championship 4 drivers. Custer was holding a significant lead when the race’s eighth caution prompted overtime with three laps left. He fell back to third place and emerged victorious in the final lap.
“I thought it was over,” Custer told NBC Sports in his post-race interview. “I can’t believe we won that thing after going back to third on that restart.”
Custer, John Hunter Nemechek and Justin Allgaier were three-wide for the race lead coming around Turn 1 of the final lap.
Stewart-Haas Racing owner Tony Stewart said he watched the replay on the videoboard four different times and wasn’t entirely sure how Custer pulled away from the bunch. But Custer cut to the inside lane and bolted past Allgaier.
“It was a pretty proud moment for all of us,” Custer said in the Phoenix Raceway media center. “The Championship 4 in this field raced so well. ... We were able to make moves and race our tails off and not wreck each other. Hats off to everybody. Everybody in that Championship 4 deserves to be a champion.”
For much of the final 30 laps, it was the Championship 4 cars (the aforementioned trio, plus Sam Mayer) that held the top four positions. The race restarted a handful of times as the race wound down, but the four finalists kept themselves toward the front of the pack.
Sheldon Creed finished second, Allgaier third, Riley Herbst fourth and Mayer fifth.
Nemechek, who led the Xfinity field with seven wins and 17 Top 5 finishes this year, won Stage 1 and ran in the top two for a significant portion of the race. But his car slipped backward in the field after that final restart, all the way to an unofficial 28th-place finish.
He said in his press conference that he didn’t know exactly what happened to his car. He felt he got a strong jump off the bottom and was trying to go straight.
“Kind of ruined our shot,” Nemechek said. “It sucks that it comes down to one race and that this is the way that it has to end in 2023. Nothing to hang our head on. We were there all day. We led laps, battled with Cole and Justin and Sam.”
Mayer, the 20-year-old driver who dominated at the Charlotte Roval, said he feels he’s “finally figured it out” and is encouraged by a fifth-place finish.
The JR Motorsports driver, who tallied 18 Top 10 finishes this season, earned his first of four wins in July.
“The competition level this year was so high, and it helped me try and keep up,” Mayer said. “Throughout the whole year, I was just trying to figure it out. I had good runs but was inconsistent. Finally, when we got into the summer, something clicked. I finally had speed each and every week, I was contending with these guys. ... The floodgates opened from there and I finally found success in the Series.”
It’s the first Xfinity title for Custer, who raced at the Cup level for the last three years and struggled. He was the runner-up in this series in both 2018 and 2019. Stewart-Haas Racing dropped him back to the Xfinity Series before this season.
Thinking about that final restart in which he pulled away for his championship, Custer said that every restart is a toss-up. Once he was running in the middle — a tough position, he said — he exited by downshifting and then dashed away from the field.
“I don’t think it would happen again,” Custer said. “It was just an unbelievable restart that worked out right.”
This story was originally published November 4, 2023 at 10:23 PM.