NASCAR Xfinity Series: The career resurgence of Michael Annett
By Asher Fair
Michael Annett entered the 2019 NASCAR Xfinity Series season almost as an afterthought after several seasons of lackluster performance. But it has proven to be a season of his career resurgence.
JR Motorsports’ Michael Annett entered the 2019 NASCAR season set to compete in the Xfinity Series as a full-time driver for the ninth time. He entered the season having made 229 career starts in the series, including 66 since he joined JR Motorsports ahead of the 2017 season.
In total, the 33-year-old Des Moines, Iowa native had made 344 NASCAR starts ahead of the 2019 season, as he also competed full-time in the Cup Series from the 2014 season through the 2016 and made 106 starts in those three seasons. He also competed in nine Truck Series races, eight in the 2008 season and one in the 2014 season.
Yet after several seasons of struggling, including his first two driving for one of the top teams in NASCAR’s second highest national series, Annett entered the season almost as an afterthought. After finishing in ninth place in the 2017 championship standings, he didn’t even make last year’s playoffs and ended up finishing in 14th in the standings.
But the 2019 season has proven to be the turning point for Annett, and it began on day one.
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In career Xfinity Series start #230 and career NASCAR start #345, Annett was finally victorious. He opened up the 2019 season by winning at Daytona International Speedway, holding off teammate Justin Allgaier in second place by 0.116 seconds to do so.
But that was a restrictor plate win, and anybody who knows anything about NASCAR knows that many drivers throughout the history of the sport have won restrictor plate races without winning much else, if anything else.
However, while he hasn’t won a race in 18 starts since then, Annett has continued to prove his doubters wrong via what has been a career resurgence.
Annett’s average finish through the first 19 races of the 33-race season is a career-best 9.79. When he entered the season, his career-best average finish was 11.18, which he recorded in the 2012 season.
Also in the 2012 season, he set a career-high in top five finishes with six, a career-high in top 10 finishes with 17 and a career-best finish in the championship standings finish with a fifth place finish.
He has already recorded five top five finishes and 13 top 10 finishes this season, including two third place finishes in the races at Michigan International Speedway and Chicagoland Speedway, and there are still 14 races remaining on the schedule.
He sits in eighth place in the championship standings, but he is one of only five full-time Xfinity Series drivers who have won any races this season. As a result, he sits in fourth in the playoff picture with six playoff points behind only the “Big 3”, which puts him in a solid position to potentially advance to the Championship 4 at Homestead-Miami Speedway in mid-November.
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There were many doubts as to whether Michael Annett could actually break through and win any races his NASCAR career ended. He cast those doubts aside by earning the first victory of his Xfinity Series career to open up the 2019 season, and he has since proven that this win was no fluke. He could very well get back to victory lane before long, as he is in the midst of a career resurgence.