Career-best finish still surreal for Gase

A little more than 24 hours after his career-best NASCAR Xfinity Series finish of fifth at Talladega Superspeedway, it still hadn't sunk in for Cedar Rapids native Joey Gase.

The 22-year old driver was even still trying to figure out how it all happened for him and his Jimmy Means Racing team.

'It's still surreal, for sure,” Gase said. 'Like last year at Talladega when we finished 11th, we were really happy with that, and there were a lot of wrecked cars at the end. But this year there were still a lot of really, really good cars we beat at the end. This is so much bigger.

'I don't know how it worked out, to be honest. I just went fast and turned left and drove the heck out of it.”

Not only was the fifth-place finish the best for Gase, but it was also the best finish for Jimmy Means Racing, which has been in existence since the mid-1980s, as well as the first top-10 finish for the team since 1987.

A finish like that certainly isn't the ultimate goal of a driver when they enter the race - they all want to take the checkered flag first - but considering Gase's career average finish of 29.8 and 26.3 this season in the Xfinity Series, to finish that high and beat the likes of Elliott Sadler, Ty Dillon, Regan Smith and fellow Cedar Rapids native Landon Cassill gives an emotional lift that comes as close as it possibly can to actually getting a win.

'It's pretty close,” Gase said. 'I'd obviously rather have won the race (Saturday), and when you get that close, you start getting greedy and you wonder about if you had just a little bit more. But it's definitely huge for us. No one ever thought we'd be able to do that. We had so many people coming up to us and my phone was blowing up. It was insane.

'Just seeing all the top guys congratulate us and all the compliments, it was really cool. And after the race, they took all the numbers down off the scoring pylon beside the 52; they left the 52 up there for another hour, so that was really cool for them to honor us.”

The texts, calls, tweets and Facebook messages easily surpassed 100 in total after the race and into Saturday evening, and Gase said it's going to take days to catch up with everything.

The coolest tweet, he said, came from Sunday's Sprint Cup Series winner at Talladega and the sport's most popular driver, Dale Earnhardt Jr. Earnhardt has long been a huge fan of Gase's team owner, Jimmy Means - once even lending Means' team a backup JR Motorsports car at Daytona so they could make the race. He even clued Gase into a fact he didn't know in that the tires Gase finished the race on were a used set of practice tires Earnhardt had used earlier in the weekend.

'I probably got texts from 75 or 80 different people,” Gase said. 'It took me until about 12:30 (Saturday) night to just get caught up on texts. (Sunday) is Twitter and (Monday) is Facebook.

'I didn't even know about the tires until Junior tweeted at us about it. A lot of people don't realize we basically only have stickers for qualifying, then the rest (for the race) are all scuffs. We do that every weekend.”

Gase nearly didn't even have a chance at the finish Saturday, being forced to take a provisional - the second to last car to make the show - and started 41st after body issues caused his car to be 'really slow” in single-car runs.

The top-five, though, boosted Gase's team into the top-30 in owner points and created a much-needed buffer going forward in that regard, and the team shouldn't have to sweat qualifying as hard for the next several weeks.

That emotional lift for the team and for him is bigger than any payday or recognition from other drivers. Gase still is building a career and finishes like Saturday's make people notice.

'The biggest thing is emotionally and what it did for us in the points,” Gase said. 'Hopefully it'll get us a lot of attention and turn some heads and maybe help us get more support financially with sponsors.

'For me, it shows if you keep at, sooner or later all the work and struggles will pay off.”

Gase will be next be in action when the Sprint Cup Series goes to Kansas Speedway on Saturday night.

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