INDIANAPOLIS — Saturday morning started off great for Kaulig Racing’s AJ Allmendinger. He was quickest in the NASCAR Xfinity Series practice session from the Indianapolis Motor Speedway then turned that into a pole a little bit later.

However, his mood quickly turned when he traded the keys from his No. 10 Chevrolet in the NASCAR Xfinity Series for the starter in his No. 16 Chevrolet in the NASCAR Cup Series.

Allmendinger lacked pace and qualified a disappointing 26th.

“I got to be better for us and lead us in a better direction,” Allmendinger quipped. “And you know, I’m kind of kind of lost a little bit on how to make us any faster. I feel like I’m kind of tapped out right now.”

It was an honest assessment on how they have to work together to find a solution for Sunday’s Verizon 200 (2:30 p.m. ET, NBC, IMS Radio Network) or he could fallen even further behind the cutline in a race that he was expected to be in the running for a win int.

“You know, it’s everybody’s trying. It’s not like effort, you know?” he continued. “it’s everybody’s tough in this field.”

He’s not wrong. This Cup race is full of road racing aces as well as other full-time drivers who’ve found improvement on these tracks as well. No longer does someone like Allmendinger run away from these races on talent alone. Everyone has become good.

“It’s not like coming to a road course and may be able to just to kind of fight us into the top five, top 10,” he said. “You know, I mean, everybody’s so strong. And obviously, when you got you know, like SPG and Brody and Kobayashi and those guys, Jensen and those guys coming over, you know, it just makes the field even tougher, so I just got to be better for us and figure out how to up my game. I’m just I’m not really sure how to right now.”

Allmendinger was given an out when asked if he felt like he was being overly tough on himself. He doubled down.

“I always got to look at me first to improve and make us better,” he responded. “You know, that’s about trying to be a leader. It’s frustrating, you know, it’s not, we’re all trying. But yeah, it’s, you know, at some point you just try to look in the mirror and figure out how to get better trying to do the homework and figure it all out.”

He said the car is just not fast enough to do anything with it. When asked if there’s anyone on standby as his wife is expecting their first child any time now, he said that with how he qualified, they might want to put somebody else in the car anyways.

“You just got to be faster,” he says. “You know, I got to figure out which way we need to go to get some speed out of the race car and if we got speed, I can make passes. But like I said, it starts with me just trying to make us better and figure out what direction we need to go. Unfortunate I don’t I don’t have that answer for you guys right now.”

With this race not featuring any stages breaks, does it allow for strategy plays to help shorten that speed gap?

“I mean, I think at the end of the day, you still got to be fast enough to run up front,” he told me. “It does you no good to get up front and not be fast enough and get past by everybody anyway, so you know, it’s people are still going to pit when they think it’s right. But you know, right now, when I’m this far off, it’s it talks about playoffs and stuff like that doesn’t mean anything. It’s about just trying to be better. And I got to figure out how to do that.”

He thought he did in the Xfinity Series race but was disappointed that despite sweeping both stages, he didn’t win.

Allmendinger, the pole winner, parlayed pit strategy into a pair of stage wins, but Gibbs charged ahead after a restart with 16 of 62 laps left and beat Sam Mayer to the finish line by 7.959 seconds at the 2.439, 14-turn circuit. Mayer passed a disappointed Allmendinger for the runner-up spot on the penultimate lap.

Allmendinger started from the pole but surrendered the lead to Ty Gibbs on Lap 3. Gibbs remained out front until lightning in the area forced NASCAR to red-flag the race at 6:04 p.m.

During the delay, rain soaked the track, but the skies began to clear before the cars restarted. A strategic call by Allmendinger put the driver of the No. 10 Kaulig Racing Chevrolet back in the lead.

Before the field took the green flag after the resumption of the race, Allmendinger and Mayer pitted for slick tires, while the vast majority of the field stayed on slower treaded rain tires.

Allmendinger rapidly gained ground from the back of the field, and after Gibbs pitted for slicks on lap 14, Allmendinger held a lead of more than 16 seconds in the exchange. He lost just over one second of that advantage before the Brad Perez’s Chevrolet stopped on the track on Lap 27 to cause the second caution of the afternoon.

“We were never fast enough to win the race,” Allmendinger said. “I thought Ty was the class of the field… We got in a good rhythm there, maybe if it would’ve stayed green. We just needed a 52-lap green run there to win today.”

In short order after a restart on Lap 31, Allmendinger regained the lead from Mayer, who had stayed out on older tires during the caution.

Gibbs restarted three positions deeper in the field than Allmendinger and began to close the gap to the leader. After Gibbs out braked Mayer into Turn 7 and took the second spot on Lap 38, he trailed Allmendinger by 3.049 seconds.

When both Allmendinger and Gibbs pitted for tires and fuel on Lap 43, however, Gibbs won the race off pit road, right before NASCAR called the third caution when Andre Castro stopped on the track.

On the subsequent restart on Lap 47, Gibbs, who led a race-high 28 laps, pulled out to an immediate advantage, and expanded it the rest of the way.

Still, Allmendinger has a top 7 finish in all six road course starts here with finishes of 4th, 2nd, 1st, 3rd in Xfinity and 1st and 7th in Cup. If anyone can figure it out on this short notice, it’s him.