Stewart-Haas Racing have had their best NASCAR Cup Series season in team history so far in 2018, and Aric Almirola has been a huge part of that.
Entering the 2018 NASCAR Cup Series season, Stewart-Haas Racing had never won more than six races in a season before since joining the Cup Series in the 2009 season. They won six races each in the 2011, 2014 and 2016 seasons. In the 2011 season, Tony Stewart won the championship for the team, and in the 2014 season, Kevin Harvick did so.
Last season, which was their first season since switching their manufacturer from Chevrolet to Ford, they won just three races. But through 20 of the first 36 races of the 2018 season, they have already earned eight victories, their all-time high.
While a lot of this improvement has to do with the fact that Harvick has already earned a career-high win total of six victories this season and Clint Bowyer has already earned two victories, his first two victories since the 2012 season, quite a large portion of it has to do with the team’s newest driver, Aric Almirola.
Almirola, who replaced Danica Patrick in the #10 Stewart-Haas Racing Ford after spending six seasons from 2012 through 2017 as the full-time driver of the #43 Richard Petty Motorsports Ford, was two turns away from winning this year’s Daytona 500 before Richard Childress Racing’s Austin Dillon spun him out, causing him to finish in 11th place. However, many people wrote off Almirola’s success in that race as a fluke because of the fact that the Daytona 500 is a restrictor plate race.
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The 34-year-old has proved those naysayers wrong since then. In 20 races so far this year, he has racked up a career-high nine top 10 finishes, one top five finish, one podium finish, a career-high average finish of 12.6 and a career-high laps led total of 113. He currently sits in 11th place in the championship standings and 13th in the playoff standings, and he is well above the playoff cut line — 150 points to be exact.
Every single one of those statistics is better than every single one of Patrick’s statistics as a Stewart-Haas Racing driver, and she drove full-time for the team for five whole seasons from 2013 through 2017 before walking away from the team after the 2017 season came to a close.
In 180 Cup Series races as the full-time driver of the #10 Chevrolet/Ford, Patrick racked up seven top 10 finishes. She never finished in the podium or even in the top five, as her career-high finish was a sixth place finish in the race at Atlanta Speedway in the 2014 season.
Patrick’s best average finish in her five seasons as a Stewart-Haas Racing driver was 22.0, which she recorded in the 2016 season. She led just 64 laps in those five seasons, and her best finishes in the championship standings were 24th place finishes in the 2015 and 2016 seasons.
While the improvements made by Harvick and Bowyer have greatly benefited Stewart-Haas Racing this year, the improvement that the team made by replacing Patrick with Almirola in the #10 Ford has arguably been their biggest improvement of the 2018 season.
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Do you believe that Aric Almirola will continue to thrive at Stewart-Haas Racing as Danica Patrick’s replacement? Do you believe that he will win a race before the 2018 NASCAR Cup Series season reaches its conclusion? If so, which track or tracks do you believe that he will win at?