I Didn’t Have The Money Or Skill To Be A Pro Race Car Driver So I Did The Next Best Thing

As far back as I can remember, I always wanted to do something with racecars. My first words were the various brands of cars, which I would point out incessantly from my car seat while we drove around town.

For my ninth birthday, my parents and Uncle Mike took me to see my first NASCAR race at Pennsylvania’s Pocono Raceway on June 13, 2004. Jimmie Johnson won the race after leading 126 of 200 laps. I was hooked. That was the coolest thing I had ever seen. The sensory overload was a core memory for little me; the noise, the smells, the hustle and bustle of it all. I was given a copy of NASCAR Racing 2002 season by a friend of my dad’s and I played it on our home PC until the number pad was worn out on the keyboard.

For my thirteenth birthday, my mom got me a Logitech Driving Force GT wheel and pedals set. iRacing was still a bit out of my price range, but I would obsessively play Colin McRae’s Dirt 2 and NASCAR ’09 on my PlayStation 3. Alone in my room, I raced and raced and raced, convincing myself that I was the next coming of Ayrton Senna or Dale Earnhardt Sr. I just needed a way to show people how fast I was.

By 2009, I had finally convinced my mom to let me use some of my savings from my landscaping and fast-food jobs to go to a karting school at Allsports Grand Prix indoor karting in Sterling, VA. Even though it was just an entry-level go kart, the feel of driving something at speed was immediately overpowering. The acceleration, the cornering force, the feeling of the kart pitching sideways under braking, and knowing that I had the ability to control the slide. I was just a kid in a kart, but I felt like Superman as I slid back and forth between the barriers. Every corner successfully navigated confirmed for me that I was indeed a superhero. An addiction was quickly forming and I would do anything to feed it.

As much as I loved karting, at 14 years old I was already too old to make a career as a race car driver. To be a real pro this sport usually demands a serious effort that begins when your age is in the single digits and your family can write checks that start in the five digits.

I Loved Racing But I Didn’t Know Anything About Anything

In July of 2010, through the father of a friend of mine in our church youth group, I was introduced to Wes Alleman and the rest of his family. Wes was a local racer competing in the 358 Late Model division at Williams Grove Speedway. At this point in life, I barely knew “righty tighty lefty loosey” but for some reason they let me keep hanging around the shop, trying to help with whatever I could figure out that wouldn’t mess something up to the point where it couldn’t be fixed. The first time I walked into their shop I remember being blown away. I had no idea what anything was and it filled me with a burning desire to figure it all out.

It bothered me that I was so clueless, and I was determined to wrap my head around everything that was going on. It wasn’t long before I started spending every free moment I could find hanging around the shop looking for something to work on. Years later I got to introduce Wes and his son Preston to Dale Earnhardt Jr at an Xfinity Series race (more on this in a sec), and Wes couldn’t resist telling Dale that the first time he met me I didn’t even know what an oil filter was.

Things quickly fell into a rhythm with my after-school activities. Monday and Wednesday nights were for working at Wendy’s. Tuesday and Thursday I would cut a couple of lawns and then head to the Alleman Racing shop. Friday evenings were for shooting trackside photography at Williams Grove or Lincoln Speedways. That left Saturdays wide open to do landscaping or Wendy’s in the morning before heading to the Alleman Racing shop to load up our late model to go to the track. Sunday was probably my favorite day of the week, however. We would get up early and drive two hours down to Summit Point Raceway in West Virginia where I would race in their adult karting league as well as in various endurance racing events.

There was so much about this sport that I still didn’t understand. It felt like I had just started a video game and most of the map was not yet unlocked. I would do anything to gain more access to the sport, to try and learn just one more thing. In 2011, I even lied about my age to serve as a marshal for the inaugural Baltimore Grand Prix IndyCar race.

The 2010’s hair was certainly a choice, but man we were having a blast. I graduated high school in 2013, and later that summer the Alleman Racing team won the Williams Grove Speedway track championship for the 358 Late Model Division.

It All Seemed So Easy At First

The University of North Carolina at Charlotte was the only school I applied to, much to my parents’ chagrin. I knew if I wanted to make a life out of this sport I needed an engineering degree, but more importantly, I needed to be in and around racing. Growing up you hear all kinds of stories about people like Steve Letarte that start out sweeping floors and before you know it, they’re a Cup Series crew chief. At eighteen years old I couldn’t help but think “why not me?” Surely, I could move to North Carolina and find someone to let me push a broom. Once they saw what a hard worker I was, they would give me a real job and teach me to be the best at it. Boom. Done. Super simple. With that mindset, I packed up my life and moved to Charlotte, North Carolina in August of 2013 after a sendoff party with the racers who had taught me everything I knew to that point.

Turns out it wasn’t quite that simple. I can’t even count how many resumes I dropped off, how many doors I knocked on, how many phone calls I made. No one cared. There were 10,000 other kids out there with the same dream doing the same thing I was doing and as far as anyone in the sport was concerned there was nothing that set me apart from any of those other kids other than I’d stolen Zac Efron’s haircut. It was a harsh wake-up call.

After returning home to Pennsylvania to spend the summer of 2014 working and racing, I headed back to North Carolina determined to make something happen. Unfortunately, after three semesters of out-of-state tuition, the money was starting to dry up. There was absolutely zero percent chance that I would be attending school full-time in the spring. At best, I could come up with the money to take one class.

So, in early January 2015, I found myself sitting in the apartment that I had leased for another eight months knowing that I wasn’t really going to be a college student that semester. I also knew that I needed to find a job quickly but didn’t want to go back to working in another restaurant, so I got out my laptop and began posting on various racing classified websites. Most of the posts were something along the lines of “engineering student looking for work willing to travel.” Just like most of the applications I turned in, I didn’t hear much back. After a couple of days, I finally got an email from a man named Brandon McKenzie who told me he was about to make his first ARCA start for Carter 2 Motorsports, owned by Roger Carter.

Brandon told me that he needed some sponsorship and he would give me 20% of anything I could sell and that Roger would likely be needing some help up at the shop. I didn’t know much about the ARCA series but I didn’t have any other prospects either so I said sure let’s do it. I was given a schedule for the races he planned to run and began pouring through Yellowpages looking for businesses near the tracks that I could call about sponsoring the car. It took hours, and dozens of calls, to find a couple hundred dollars at a time, but 20% of a little bit was better than nothing and the bills weren’t going to pay themselves.

Roger Carter’s race shop was about an hour away from my apartment in the middle of nowhere outside of Asheboro, NC. It seemed a bit remote for a race shop but I was excited to have a job so I would drive up there two or three times a week to help get the cars ready. The first time I went there it appeared to be nothing more than a low-budget late-model shop. In my head, I thought something along the lines of “well this is ARCA and they’re a small team I bet they’re all like this.” He had an eclectic band of alcoholics and other degenerates in the shop and they kept the bay doors open so that we could chain smoke while we worked all day and night.

Before our first race together, Roger pulled me aside to say he was in a bit of a pinch and asked if I could drive their hauler to the track for them as he had business to attend to and his other driver was unavailable. He said he would give me an extra $100 when we got there and that he was counting on me. Now, mind you, I had never pulled a trailer before but I was nineteen and this was my first racing “job” so I didn’t want to let Roger down. In my young imagination, he saw that I was a hard worker and trusted me to get his precious racecars to the track safely.

Plot twist, that was apparently not the case at all. Members of the team later told me that the truck, trailer, and most of the things inside of it were stolen. Maybe Roger trusted me, or, maybe Roger needed someone to drive tens of thousands of dollars of stolen goods across multiple state lines and I was just the sucker for the job. All said and done I pulled that trailer through nine states before I was done working for Roger.

When we got to the track it was an all-hands-on-deck effort to survive each weekend. I would often serve as the spotter for practice and then change rear tires during the race. Roger always reminded me to keep the sleeves of my fire suit down as I was on a wristband pit pass and not technically allowed over the wall, nor was I insured for it. A bit sobering considering our tire carrier had just gotten his middle finger sliced off when a car fell off the jack at Mobile International Speedway in Alabama. Everyone did a bit of everything and we usually finished multiple laps down at best.

Going to Talladega, I had an image in my head of the draft being this great equalizer and that we would finally be able to compete. When the track opened for first practice, all three of our cars lined up to go out and draft together. Austin Wayne Self, out on a single-car run, caught our drafting train, pulled to the high side, and left us in his dust. Racing lesson learned. The draft is not enough to overcome a rust bucket racecar assembled by idiots.

In the years since, Roger has had more run-ins with the law, including an arrest in 2018 involving a stolen motorhome and a fake RV business. He was recently wanted in relation to another stolen racecar.

I Go Legitimate And Finally Become A Paid Driver

Needless to say, I didn’t work for him very long. After six races, a friend of mine, Matt Cerbin, got connected with an engineer, Neil Lewis, who said that Cunningham Motorsports needed some help.

Cunningham Motorsports was one of the best teams in the ARCA series at the time and the contrast with Carter 2 Motorsports was shocking, to say the least. The team was run by Paul Andrews, who served as Alan Kulwicki’s crew chief when they won the 1992 Winston Cup Series championship. Paul asked what I wanted to be paid and in my naivete, and twenty-year-old overconfidence, I told him to let me work for a couple days and then pay me what he thought I was worth. After a week, Paul told me in slightly less kind words that I wasn’t worth a dime and he wouldn’t spend his own money to teach me. They were, however, happy to have me hang around the shop to help where I could and they would give me $100 per test day, $125 per race day and $25 per diem on the road, but nothing for the hours at the shop.

In those days, there were no limits on testing in the ARCA series, and we would test fifteen to twenty times over the course of a twenty-race season. The aforementioned Neil was a contracted engineer that Cunningham had hired to help with all of this testing. My first job at Cunningham was to help Neil install and remove all the data systems pre- and post-test as well keep them operational and help him sort through data at the tests themselves. I didn’t have the faintest clue what I was doing, but you’ll eventually figure it out if for no other reason than to stop getting cussed at.

My first race with Cunningham was at Pocono Raceway on June 6, 2015, one week shy of the eleven-year anniversary of attending my first race at the same track. Trevor Bayne won the race in our #22 Ford Fusion.

Image: Author

By the end of the 2015 summer, I had gone about as far as I could on the scraps I was making from racing jobs. Eventually, I got to the point where I canceled my car insurance so that I could buy groceries. I figured it was easier to drive carefully than it was to drive starving. That evening my friend Eric showed up at my apartment and gave me $300. He told me to keep my car insurance, buy some food, and pay him back when I got a job. That type of friend is a rare breed.

In a strange twist of fate, my roommate at the time, Jordan, was a pizza delivery driver at Mama’s Pizza Express, and about a week later he got a DUI at the beach. Knowing that I needed a job, he worked out a deal with his boss. where I could work his delivery shifts if I would give him a ride to work and he could work in the kitchen. Just like that, we were back in business and I was getting paid to drive, which was always my dream. Or, well, close enough. I could go to Cunningham during the day to work and learn as much as I could and then at night I could sling pizza pies to make ends meet. I guess the restaurant life wasn’t quite done with me.

This arrangement did come with one challenge, however. Because ARCA teams drive to most races, the team would travel on Thursdays each week. Weekends were the most profitable night to deliver pizzas. I could usually make around $150 on Thursday night alone and Alex needed all the help he could get those nights. We struck a deal where he would let me have Friday and Saturday night off if I would work Thursday night and then open to close all day on Sunday.

On Thursday nights he would let me leave at 10:30 pm sharp. This allowed me to make it to most any track before the garage opened on Friday morning. So, every Thursday I would take some leftover pizza and a case of Red Bull and drive through the night to wherever the ARCA series was racing that weekend. If I was lucky, I could grab an hour or two of sleep in the back seat of my car before the garage opened to start work for the day. Saturday post-race I would leave the track and head to the closest Planet Fitness for a quick shower and then proceed on with my overnight drive back to Huntersville, NC. Mama’s Pizza Express opened at 10 am on Sunday and I would usually be able to make it home sometime between 4 and 8 o’clock in the morning. There was a shady tree beside the restaurant that I would park under and Alex would let me sleep until the orders started coming in and then he would knock on my window and tell me to get my ass inside and get to work.

By 2016, I had gotten my finances semi-stabilized enough that I could return to school on a part-time basis. I had a new routine now. Class in the morning, Cunningham in the afternoon, pizzas in the evening. Pulling two all-nighters a week wasn’t ideal but my bills were paid and I was going racing. I had been promoted from just a helping hand to a tire specialist for the season and things were looking up.

The house of cards I had built almost came tumbling down in July of 2016. I left a day early for a Pocono test to stop at home and see some family and friends, but halfway there I got caught up in a multi-car accident on I-81 during a rainstorm.

Being both four hours from home and four hours from where I was going, I didn’t have very many choices in front of me. I left the car at a salvage lot and had the tow truck driver drop me off at a local bar while I figured out what to do. Having just turned twenty-one, I had not yet gotten a new ID and still had my vertical, underage ID. I so desperately just wanted a beer and despite my pleas with the manager, they would not serve me one. A couple seated nearby overheard the commotion and bought me a drink when the manager wasn’t looking. We struck up a conversation and it turned out they owned a garden supply store near where I lived, White House Garden Center in Cornelius, NC. You should check them out if you’re in the area. Anyway, they bought me a six-pack of beer and gave me a ride to a highway interchange where I caught a ride from the AM Racing truck series hauler the rest of the way to Pocono.

I knew I couldn’t afford to fix the car, and definitely not replace it, so I planned to drop out of school again for the fall semester and use the tuition refund to get myself mobile again so that I could work. Myatt Snider, son of NBC’s Marty Snider, was driving one of our cars at the time and I had been tutoring Myatt in physics on the side. When Marty caught wind of my plan, he left me with a blank check and told me to fix my car and stay in school. Eric Nichols and I drove up to Virginia to retrieve the mangled car and over the course of a few late nights we managed to get it drivable again.

By the end of the season, we had won eleven of twenty races and my hotel roommate Chase Briscoe secured the championship. Briscoe now drives for Joe Gibbs Racing in the Cup series.

 This Is Almost Too Hard

The system wasn’t terrible but it really was beginning to take a toll on my body by the middle of the 2017 season. Coupled with the fact that I was watching all of my friends that I started school with graduate and get real jobs I knew something had to change. The final straw for me was failing an Intro to Electrical Engineering exam. We were testing at Kentucky Speedway that week. On Tuesday evening after work, I drove through the night to the track and caught about three hours of sleep in my car. We tested all day Wednesday and then I went back to the hotel to look at some notes and sleep a little bit. I caught a 5 am flight from Cincinnati to Charlotte on Thursday morning, took my exam at 8 am and then flew straight back and was at the track working again by 2 pm.

In retrospect, this was probably stupid

I think I got like a 27% on that exam and I was absolutely running myself ragged. I made the decision then and there to finish out the season and then go back to focusing on school for 2018.

Unsurprisingly, this did not last long. Being away from the racetrack killed me in ways that I can’t describe. During the spring semester I found myself taking a materials science lab as one of my classes. In this class was another student, Mitch, who was an intern at Hendrick Motorsports. Most of the labs were fairly long and tedious, something along the lines of “heat this sample for an hour, let it cool off, and then test its properties.” During the downtime, Mitch and I would sit in the shade out back to smoke a couple of cigarettes and talk about racing. On one of these shade tree smoke breaks, Mitch told me that Hendrick was hiring another intern and that I should put my name in (Mitch is now a senior aerodynamicist for General Motors on the IndyCar side).

I didn’t think much of it, but I applied nonetheless and shockingly got a call back a few days later to come in and interview. The position I was hired for was a shock room intern and my job was to assist the third engineers for all four cars. I quit my pizza job the next day, determined to make ends meet with just this internship.

Hendrick paid me $15 an hour for this role and allowed me to work 25 hours per week. On Monday morning, or whenever the haulers returned, I would go to the teardown bay and remove the shocks, springs, and sway bars from all four cars. I would then dyno the shocks and rate the springs before tearing everything apart to be cleaned and put back on the haulers. It was a bit difficult to manage with my class schedule, and the tight deadlines at the shop, but I adjusted and made sure to be at work early enough to get everything completed before it was time for class. There were a lot of mornings when it was just me and Ron Malec in the shop at 5 am turning on the lights.

The End (I Hope) Of My Career In The Food Services Industry

Spring 2019 was to be my last semester of college, finally. I had my senior design Baja SAE project to complete and just one other class. The internship I was working on was supposed to last a year so I knew I would have a lot of time on my hands with the reduced school workload. I had taken a job as a bartender at TGI Fridays to make some extra money since I was only going to be working part-time and was completely f’ing broke. I guess Ron had noticed all the early mornings though, because he pulled me aside in December of 2018 and asked me if I wanted a full-time position on the #48 car driven by 7-time champion Jimmie Johnson. I was floored, honestly and I couldn’t say yes fast enough. That was finally the end of my restaurant days.

I was to work in a non-travelling role as a setup plate mechanic under a man named Brad Eichenlaub and they were going to pay me $30 an hour. Brad was a 48 car OG, and a mechanical savant. After Chad Knaus left the #48 to crew chief William Byron, Brad and Jimmie were the only remaining members of the original 2002 Lowe’s team. Despite now being a setup plate mechanic, Brad was one of the most respected people at Hendrick Motorsports. Ron Malec once said, “He gave his entire life to this team and these cars, we would do anything for him.” One quick aside here, in racing we don’t get real overtime. Our overtime rate is half-time, not time-and-a-half, so my overtime pay was back to $15 an hour. Keep that in mind later.

When a build sheet is sent out for a racecar, the engineers use something called “design parts” to create the initial sim model. These design parts are the CAD model of that type of part and they’re used because it’s hard to know which exact upper control arm etc. you will get based on inventory, mileage, or parts being crashed. That being said, the design parts are all perfectly to spec with zero tolerances.

Each car is assembled according to the build sheet and then delivered to the setup mechanics. Our first job is to take the racecar and essentially account for all the tolerances. Using design parts, the sim might say that you need 1/2″ of camber shim, but once all the real parts with tolerances are assembled it may require 7/16” to hit the desired camber. Apply that logic to everything; camber, caster, toe, bump steer, wheel centers and so on. We were there to get the real car matched up to the virtual targets and document all of these offsets for the sim. We would then perform all of the Romer arm measurements, Hawkeye scans and ride-rate or seven-post testing of the car. We would also mock up planned practice changes. If the team wanted to try a different right front spindle in practice, for example, we would install it on the car and mock up all the slugs and shims to go along with it. If we did our job correctly, the car would be handed over to the road crew on Monday morning of race week about 90% complete.

The setup plate mechanics also got to handle all of the wind tunnel and pit stop practice cars for the company. Pre-Covid, teams like Hendrick would go to the wind tunnel on a weekly basis. To properly test them in the tunnel, the suspension would have to be set statically to the position it would find itself in dynamically. We would look at the sim lap for the car and adjust wheel centers, cambers, frame heights etc. so that the car could be tested with its wheels and suspension in their on-track position.

The pit stop cars were adjusted every week. Differences in wedge and nose weight change how the car reacts on the jack. Different camber settings change how difficult it is to get the wheels in and out of the fender opening. Springs and shocks change how the wheels droop out once the car is jacked up. It was my job to take the pit stop cars and match them up to roughly what their team would be pitting that weekend so that they could practice more effectively.

Jimmie Johnson won the Advance Auto Parts Clash at Daytona on February 10, 2019. 5,355 days after I watched him win the first race I saw in person, I got to see him drive the first Cup Series car I had built to victory lane.

During the semester, I would work from 6 am to 5 pm and then deal with school in the evenings from about 6 pm to 10 pm. Once I graduated, I was finally free to devote my entire existence to building Cup Series cars. It was truly a dream come true. Monday through Wednesday we worked from 6 am to 10 or 11 pm, Thursday and Friday 7 am to 6 pm with Saturday off and then Sunday I would be in the engineering war room from two hours before Green Flag until one hour after.

Load day was always a long one, but dinner was provided for anyone working past 7 pm

Late in the season, it was announced that Kevin Meandering would no longer be serving as crew chief for Jimmie Johnson. He was to be replaced by lead engineer Cliff Daniels. Second engineer Adam Wall would be moving up to lead engineer and third engineer Chais Eliason would be moving up to second engineer. To fill Chais’ role, Hendrick was taking Cal Stewart, second engineer on the JR Motorsports #9 Xfinity series car. Knowing that I wanted to get back to a traveling role, they offered me this second engineer position which I quickly accepted. Currently, Adam Wall is crew chief for Brandon Jones on the JR Motorsports #9, Chais Eliason is lead engineer for Zane Smith on the Spire Motorsports #71 and Cal Stewart is lead engineer for Kyle Larson on the Hendrick Motorsports #5.

Upon arriving at JR Motorsports, I was introduced to crew chief Dave Elenz and lead engineer Phillip Bell. Bell is currently the crew chief of the JR Motorsports #8 driven by Sammy Smith. As the second engineer, I was primarily responsible for the shock and bump stop package each week as well as maintaining the database, assisting with any pull-down work on the car, and serving as the tire specialist at track. There was only one problem. I didn’t really know a damn thing about shock tuning. Elenz was not exactly the nicest guy in the world either. Don’t take this the wrong way, I love Dave to death, but he ran a tight ship and expected results. Coming off of back-to-back championships with William Byron and Tyler Reddick, the #9 car was struggling to find success with rookie Noah Gragson and it was Elenz’s personal mission to fix that.

I quickly learned that Elenz’ least favorite words were “uhm” and “I don’t know.” I was reminded on multiple occasions that my job was to have answers and if I didn’t have them, I would be replaced with someone that did. Harsh, I know, but very effective. Before long I was spending hours before each meeting with Dave creating a cheat sheet of sorts. I would keep a document open on my computer, out of his sight, that had an answer already written out to any question I thought he might ask. I would include what shocks each of our cars had run at the last three races at that track and where they finished. For each shock that I ran in sim (usually around 150 or so by the time we got through all four corners) I would have a note about what was different in the shock. How the compression and rebound curves were different, what the piston and shim stacks were, what the adjustment range was, and where that shock had been raced before. Somehow, Dave still managed to ask a question that I hadn’t thought of before despite how prepared I thought I might be. At times I think he turned it into a game trying to stump me with a question I hadn’t considered. I learned to question everything down to the finest details and not to make a decision without considering 110% of the facts. The fear of disappointing Dave, combined with hundreds of hours of studying, quickly turned me into an expert at shock tuning.

The hours were about the same as at Hendrick, often arriving at the shop before 6 am and working well past 8 or 9 pm on the average night, but now with added travel every weekend. The second engineer position was also salary-based instead of hourly like at Hendrick. In the first season, I was paid $55,000 plus a 1% bonus for each JRM win and a 0.3% bonus for top 5’s as well as some championship incentives. All in all, it worked out to an average bonus of roughly 14% on any given year.

The 2019 season ended winless and we were eliminated from the playoffs in the round of eight. In 2020, we found victory lane twice at Daytona and Bristol, but still missed the final four by ten points. 2021 brought more success with three wins and spot in the final four thanks to our win at Martinsville Speedway.

After the 2021 season, Elenz left JR Motorsports to serve as crew chief for Erik Jones on the Legacy Motor Club #43 car in the Cup Series. He was replaced by longtime Cup Series crew chief Luke Lambert and the two of them couldn’t have been more polar opposite. Lambert was the golden retriever to Elenz’s black cat energy.

The 2022 Xfinity series season was some of the best days of my life. We won eight races with twenty-one top 5 finishes and led 20% of the laps for the entire season. Everything was falling right into place. My salary had increased to $72,000 and it felt like nothing could go wrong. We walked into the 2022 season finale at Phoenix Raceway feeling as though the championship was our birthright. Unfortunately, a slow final pit stop derailed those plans and we were relegated to a second-place finish behind rival Ty Gibbs.

Following the 2022 season, the vast majority of the team left JR Motorsports to follow Noah Gragson to Legacy Motor Club. Crew chief Luke Lambert, lead engineer Phillip Bell, front-end mechanic Josh Chaney, and underneath mechanic Ryan Dextraze all left while engine tuner Jereme Jackson decided to finally come off of the road. That was that. The #9 team was no more.

I elected to stay behind at JR Motorsports to take a promotion to lead engineer for then-winless driver Sam Mayer. The new team consisted of crew chief Mardy Lindley, car chief Pat Martin, and second engineer Josh Lewis all of whom were new to the Xfinity Series My job would be as lead engineer. Starting the 2023 season, the only person who had done their job before was underneath mechanic Gregg “Big Guy” Buchanan.

As lead engineer, I was now responsible for the setup of the entire vehicle as well as preparing race strategy information and going through driver data. I spent the winter of 2022-23 pouring through hours of race footage and driver data to try and understand why Sam couldn’t find the level of success that his teammates could. There was a steep learning curve in the beginning, but it all started to click by the time summer rolled around. On July 29, 2023 we finally broke through and scored our first win together at Road America in Elkhart Lake, WI.

We won three more times that season and managed to secure a spot in the final four for the championship at Phoenix Raceway. Elenz and Lambert were always among the first to send a congratulatory text after each of these wins.

Legendary Cup Series crew chief Michael “Fatback” McSwain once said, “Racing is sacred, it’s a way of life. It’s who you are, not just what you do.” If this story sounds insane to you, that’s probably because it is, but I wouldn’t trade a single day of it for the world. I’ve dedicated my entire life to making cars go fast in a circle. It seems so silly when you simplify it down to that level. All the sleepless nights, the thousands of hours of work just to chase a stopwatch round and round in a circle. The 2024 season came with a lot of low moments for the #1 team, but it also blessed me with the most beautiful little girl that the world has ever seen. The next chapters are unwritten, but at the end of the day, I am a racer through and through. I hope that one day she will be proud of me too.