Parker Kligerman is in for a busy Saturday at Circuit of the Americas. In addition to running the NASCAR Camping World Truck Series race for Henderson Motorsports, he will make his first Xfinity Series start since 2017 later in the day. The latter will come with Emerling-Gase Motorsports in the #35 Toyota GR Supra.
“Yesterday @JoeyGaseRacing & @PatrickEmerling gave me a call asking if I’d be interested in giving the @NASCAR_Xfinity series a go again,” Kligerman tweeted on Wednesday. “Very humbled they thought of me for this & I hope we can get them a great result!”
After sporadic competition from 2009 to 2012, Kligerman ran his lone full season in the Xfinity Series in 2013, finishing ninth in points for Kyle Busch Motorsports. KBM, a current Truck team, shuttered its Xfinity programme at season’s end, and Kligerman has since run just two Xfinity races: a twenty-first at Darlington in 2015 for Obaika Racing and tenth at Road America two years later with Precision Performance Motorsports. In fifty-three career Xfinity starts, he has three top fives, nineteen top tens, a pole in his series début, and a best finish of third at Road America in 2013.
Upon KBM’s Xfinity exit and an aborted Cup Series rookie campaign, he has mainly focused on the Trucks with part-time schedules since 2016 with some Cup starts sprinkled in. He joined Henderson in 2017 and won his second career Truck race with the team at that year’s Talladega event (his maiden series victory also came at the superspeedway as a full-timer in 2012). Kligerman finished fifth in the 2022 season opener at Daytona, and will run twelve more races with the team including all three road courses at COTA, Sonoma, and Mid-Ohio.
Although he had not made an Xfinity start for nearly five years, the 31-year-old is a reasonable pick as a road course ringer. He is an IMSA pit reporter for NBC Sports and owns a minority stake in Lime Rock Park, an IMSA road circuit that he commented in a Reddit AMA earlier in the week as one that he has been “working on” getting the Trucks to visit. Kligerman also has a Silver FIA licence, though he had spent the last six years in the Gold category.
Emerling-Gase Motorsports, a joint venture between drivers Joey Gase and Patrick Emerling, is in its maiden Xfinity season. Shane Lee and Gase have two starts apiece in the #35 while Jeffrey Earnhardt raced at Phoenix, with Lee holding the team’s best finish so far of seventeenth at Atlanta last Saturday. The team also fields a part-time #53 that Gase drove at Daytona. The #35 is currently thirty-first in owner points.
