Unretired Almirola unpacks decision to continue NASCAR career ahead of Kansas race: 'We're having it all'

KANSAS CITY, Mo. — Before the 2022 season, Aric Almirola announced that it would be his last as a full-time NASCAR Cup Series driver.

By August, he’d signed a multi-year agreement to stay with Stewart-Haas Racing as the driver of the No. 10 Smithfield Ford.

“I was confident that I was done racing — not because I didn’t love racing anymore, not because I felt like I had passed my prime,” Almirola, who will race Sunday at Kansas Speedway in the AdventHealth 400, said in a recent interview with KSHB 41. “I was done racing, because my family was making a huge sacrifice for dad to race.”

Almirola, 39, said his racing schedule had made his wife, Janice, “practically a single mom, and she’s raising two kids.”

The Almirolas have two elementary-aged children, Alex and Abby.

“It was getting really challenging and really difficult for dad to keep chasing his dream and the kids to start navigating their dreams and my wife to handle it all on her own and juggle everybody’s schedule,” Almirola said.

No sooner had Almirola, who has raced full-time in the Cup Series since 2012 and has won three races, made the decision to retire when fate intervened.

His son, who had been driving a go-kart and playing flag football on weekends, decided to play baseball and the little league moved its games to weeknights due to field congestion.

Almirola hasn’t missed a single pitch this year.

The school district also went to “satellite days” on Fridays, giving the Almirola family more flexibility to join Aric on the road.

It also didn’t hurt that Stewart-Haas and Smithfield asked Almirola to reconsider.

“I feel like God started orchestrating things in my life to make it allowable to keep racing,” he said. “... So, as a family, we’re having it all, so to speak.”

It’s a blessing for Almriola, who — in a vacuum — wasn’t ready to drive off into the sunset.

“I wasn’t 100% ready to give it up,” he said. “I still enjoyed driving a race car. That’s still something that I loved to do. I love to compete at a high level. I love to race. I love the adrenaline rush of taking a race car, running it at 200 mph and taking it to the limit of its capability. But at some point, for me and my value system, I needed to make a decision on what was best for my family.”

It came down to a central question: When he's in his 50s, will he value the time with his family or time on the racetrack more?

“Well, the answer is easy for me,” Almirola said. “I’d much rather sit around a table with family, and all that other stuff is secondary.”

Now, he gets to have it all for at least another few years, though he wouldn’t mind a few better results in 2023.

Almirola currently sits 25th in the Cup Series standings with only one top-10 finish through the season’s first 11 races.

“We’ve had cars capable of winning and just haven’t put all the pieces of the puzzle together,” he said. “We’ve had some bad luck, at Talladega got wrecked running up front and battling for the win at the end of the race. We’re certainly in position. We’re doing all the things right. We’re up front. We’re leading laps. We’re relevant. If you keep doing that enough, eventually you’ll capitalize on that opportunity. So, that’s what we’re most excited about as we look forward to these next few weeks.”

Almirola broke his back in a multi-car crash at Kansas Speedway six years ago. He had to be life-flighted to the hospital, but it’s not something he thinks about before the 1 1/2-mile track in Kansas City, Kansas, pops up on the calendar.

Sean Gardner

“For me, it was a racing accident,” Almirola said. “It could have happened at any racetrack. It happened at Kansas, but it wasn’t specifically because of Kansas. It was a racetrack that has a wall, has a catch fence and two cars in front of me crashed. That could happen anywhere, so I don’t view that as, ‘Oh, boy, this racetrack bit me and I got hurt here.’”

In fact, he enjoys the track, which is unique among mile-and-a-halfs for its progressive banking and multiple-groove racing. Almirola has seven top-10 finishes in 22 career Cup Series races at Kansas and also owns a top 10 in the Craftsman Truck Series.

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