It was a year ago. People were writing headlines about Spire Motorsports about whether the team is primed enough to compete. And NASCAR, 11 months ago, made a video about how Jeff Dickerson built Spire Motorsports because people thought this team was going places. Now, a couple of near wins by Hocevar have papered over pretty big cracks.
Red Flags at Spire Motorsports
There have been a couple of big red flags at Spire Motorsports that have gone ignored. Rumors are that they’re selling off their truck team for an Xfinity team, and now Justin Haley’s job is under threat after less than a year at the Chevy team. Reminder, after Haley’s crew chief, the highly respected and championship-winning CC Rodney Childers, left Spire due to “not working well together,”
It’s speculated that there was a fallout after they kept swapping out Haley’s crew with other drivers. Despite Spire Motorsports’ two runner-up finishes from Hocevar, NASCAR’s biggest rising star, and stealing Daytona 500 winner and FRM franchise guy Michael McDowell, they are currently 22nd and 23rd in the points, scrapping at playoff contention.
Failure or Success?
McDowell was supposed to be upgrading from FRM when he went to Spire, but 23rd is the same place he finished in points in 2024, his last year with FRM. And 22nd would be one spot worse for Hocevar, who is coming off a rookie year but isn’t having a sophomore slump.
And Haley, after impressing many fans last season with some impressive races at RWR, is currently 27th in points, way off his teammates, with only a single top ten so far this season. For the record, last season, which again was at RWR, by this time last season, he had 2 top tens. Yeah, Haley is not the problem. It’s the team that’s the problem.
How Rapid Expansion Could Be the Problem
There are a couple of red flags people missed that have come to bite them. First off, they expanded too fast. At the start, Spire Motorsports had two cars, and only one, the Corey Lajoie-driven 7, was competitive. It was even well known that Spire put all of their good resources into the seven car.
This worked because Lajoie was a pretty good driver and could outdrive his equipment on the right day, and the second driver usually brought sponsorship, a model that lots of teams have used to build themselves up. But before they could figure out how to make both cars competitive, they didn’t only expand into a 3-car team! But a truck series team with multiple entries. Yes, it brings more sponsorship and winnings for Spire Motorsports, but it also means a lot more employees and logistics, drivers, and crew to manage.
Adding a third car in the 71 on top of that is adding a lot of balls to juggle at once, and it’s clear it was too much for this brand-new Spire Motorsports team to handle. And this also means Spire Motorsports is in such a complicated mess that it’ll be hard to untangle. Selling the truck team is a start, but starting an Xfinity may produce similar issues unless they downsize to 1 car.
Final Thoughts
Even Haley is already at risk of losing his job, so selling the charter is the smartest thing to do since Spire Motorsports has never been able to have more than two competitive cars. It’s better to pool all your resources into Hocevar and make him competitive. The 71 would be an easy sell because it’s a new team. This puts them in a position to pull an FRR and use one car to rise through the ranks and win a cup title. Thanks a bunch for reading!
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