{"id":8024,"date":"2013-06-08T15:09:34","date_gmt":"2013-06-08T19:09:34","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/tireball.com\/nascar\/?p=8024"},"modified":"2013-06-08T15:12:20","modified_gmt":"2013-06-08T19:12:20","slug":"a-j-allmendinger-to-replace-bobby-labonte-in-no-47-at-michigan","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/tireball.com\/nascar\/2013\/06\/08\/a-j-allmendinger-to-replace-bobby-labonte-in-no-47-at-michigan\/","title":{"rendered":"A.J. Allmendinger to replace Bobby Labonte in No. 47 at Michigan"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"aligncenter size-full wp-image-8025\" alt=\"ajallmendinger\" src=\"http:\/\/tireball.com\/nascar\/files\/2013\/06\/ajallmendinger.jpg\" width=\"677\" height=\"453\" srcset=\"https:\/\/tireball.com\/nascar\/files\/2013\/06\/ajallmendinger.jpg 1024w, https:\/\/tireball.com\/nascar\/files\/2013\/06\/ajallmendinger-300x200.jpg 300w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 677px) 100vw, 677px\" \/><\/p>\n<p>A.J. Allmendinger will drive the No. 47 Toyota of JTG Racing at Michigan International Speedway next weekend. Allmendinger will take over the seat which has been occupied by Bobby Labonte since 2011 season.<\/p>\n<p>Currently JTG plans to return Labonte to the drivers seat at Sonoma the following week.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cWe\u2019re not replacing Bobby \u2013 he\u2019s still our driver,\u201d co-owner Tad Geschickter said. \u201cBut we have a few races that we don\u2019t have any sponsor activation and it was pretty easy to do (a change and) some benchmarking.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>Labonte has not recorded a top-five since the 2011 Daytona 500.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cWe just felt like the people that could, without blowing up their race team, give us a good benchmark, AJ is a guy that has been pretty fast,\u201d Geschickter said.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cBobby has given his opinion what we need to work on next,\u201d Geschickter said. \u201cFor this race, we can put AJ in the car and see what his opinion is. He has driven Penske-based stuff and Hendrick-based stuff at Phoenix (Racing).\u201d<\/p>\n<p>Allmendinger will drive the No. 51 Chevrolet of Phoenix Racing this weekend at Pocono. It is unknown if Labonte will have a car to drive at Michigan but one option could be the Phoenix Racing machine.<\/p>\n<p>The 31-year-old Allmendinger has made 177 career starts in the Sprint Cup Series with a career best of secon<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>A.J. Allmendinger will drive the No. 47 Toyota of JTG Racing at Michigan International Speedway next weekend. Allmendinger will take over the seat which has been occupied by Bobby Labonte since 2011 season. Currently JTG plans to return Labonte to the drivers seat at Sonoma the following week. \u201cWe\u2019re not replacing Bobby \u2013 he\u2019s still [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":8025,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[788],"tags":[],"coauthors":[675],"class_list":{"0":"post-8024","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-news"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/tireball.com\/nascar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8024","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/tireball.com\/nascar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/tireball.com\/nascar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tireball.com\/nascar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tireball.com\/nascar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=8024"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/tireball.com\/nascar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8024\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tireball.com\/nascar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/8025"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/tireball.com\/nascar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=8024"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tireball.com\/nascar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=8024"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tireball.com\/nascar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=8024"},{"taxonomy":"author","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tireball.com\/nascar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/coauthors?post=8024"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}