NASCAR Camping World Truck Series

Following the race at Kansas, the 25-race 2010 Truck Series season will be just one-fifth of the way through, and Almirola will have the rest of the spring, the entire summer and a good part of the fall to make up those 82 points. It would seem that everything is just as it should be for the 26-year-old from Tampa, Fla.

Well, not exactly.

“To be honest, the last two races really haven’t been what we wanted them to be,” Almirola explains. “As a whole over the first four races, I think it’s right on target to where we want to be. We’re second in the points and we can sniff the point lead and that’s really been our goal. But to run sixth at Martinsville (last month) and to run eighth at Martinsville (on April 2), both of those races were a little disappointing for us.

“At (February’s season opener in) Daytona, we felt like we had one of the very best trucks and got caught up in a wreck and finished 12th, so we haven’t finished exactly the way we want to finish. We ran well, but we haven’t exactly gotten the finishes we want. Yet we’re still second in the points, so that’s encouraging.”

Almirola is most encouraged by the fact that he has become a full-time Truck Series frontrunner with Billy Ballew Motorsports. It’s something of a step back in time for him, as he finished 18th in the season championship as a Truck Series rookie in 2006 with Spears Motorsports before getting on a fast track in which he shared a Sprint Cup Series car with the legendary Mark Martin for two seasons in addition to a part-time Nationwide Series schedule with Joe Gibbs Racing.

On the cusp of what could have been his first full-time Cup ride at the beginning of 2009 with Earnhardt Ganassi Racing, the sluggish economy instead left Almirola on the outside looking in. He quickly landed a part-time truck ride at Billy Ballew Motorsports as kind of a “utility player.” On weekends when Kyle Busch was focusing on his Cup Series efforts, Almirola got the call to drive the No. 51 Toyota.

Other times, when Busch was in the No. 51, Almirola would drive Ballew’s No. 15 Tundra. In total, Almirola made 16 Truck Series starts, earning seven top-five results and 10 top 10s. Probably his signature moment of 2009 came at Talladega, where he more or less sacrificed his own opportunity to win in favor of pushing Busch to the victory and giving Billy Ballew his first 1-2 finish as an owner in the Truck Series.

“I feel like I could have been greedy and tried to win the race myself and possibly won the race, but at the same time, I possibly could have finished 10th,” Almirola recalls. “Talladega is always a tough place to make a move by yourself, especially on that last lap, because everybody kind of gangs up on you.

“I felt like my best opportunity to try to get a good finish was to push Kyle. I felt like I gained a lot of respect from a lot of people within our race team that day. I felt like I already had it, but I felt like I gained that much more.”

The feeling is mutual for Almirola, who has unquestionably now become the team’s lead driver in 2010, as Busch has moved on to field his own pair of Toyota Tundras. He enjoys working with his team and understands the importance of helping the program establish a new identity.

“It’s very important,” Almirola says. “I said this at Atlanta when we ran third right behind Kyle. When I went to the media center, everybody said, ‘It’s the second race of the year and you’ve already got a top three and finished right behind Kyle. Everybody kind of speculated that Billy Ballew Motorsports would go under – sponsorship-wise and competition-wise – when Kyle left.’ They said, ‘After a run like today, are you trying to prove everybody wrong?’

“I said, ‘I’m not trying to prove everybody wrong. We’re just doing what we do. We’ve got great equipment; we’ve got a great sponsor with Graceway Pharmaceuticals, who believes in us as a race team and who believes in me as a driver; and we’ve got a great group of guys.

“That’s the one thing that’s stuck out for me. Kyle was just one guy. He’s a hell of a racecar driver. I give credit where credit is due and he is one hell of a racecar driver. I hope that, as I gain experience and stuff like that, that I will get to his level one day. But at the same time, I feel like our equipment is just as good now as it was then, if not better, and I feel like our race team is just as good.”

That race team is led by veteran crew chief Richie Wauters, with whom Almirola has managed to forge a strong relationship. He credits the environment within the team as one of the secrets to its success.

“Richie Wauters and that whole group of guys that he’s got assembled on our truck, man, they’re a tight-knit group and they’re a lot of fun to work with,” Almirola says. “We have probably as much fun or more fun than anybody at the racetrack. It’s obviously a lot more fun when we run good, but nonetheless, we have a good time. All the guys on the race team are a lot of fun to be with, so it’s a really relaxed environment for me. It makes my job fun, because I show up at the racetrack and it’s not all tense and weird and people pointing fingers at each other. We do this 100 percent as a team.”

And as a team, Almirola hopes that – preferably sooner rather than later – they will be celebrating in Victory Lane.

“We need to have a little luck,” he says. “If the breaks fall our way and we keep putting ourselves in the top five and running consistently there, it’s just the law of odds. I really feel like we’ll win a race. You can’t run that good all the time and put yourself in a position all the time and not win a race.”