NORTH LAS VEGAS, Nev. — When Wood Brothers Racing had just two top-five finishes in three years, few people linked the organization with Team Penske.
After all, Penske won the championship in all three of those seasons while the Wood Brothers’ No. 21 car was mostly noncompetitive despite being in an alliance together.
Except here’s the thing: For years now, that No. 21 car has been built and assembled right next to the ones driven by Joey Logano and Ryan Blaney, the ones capable of running up front and leading laps. So why wouldn’t the Wood Brothers be able to do the same thing?
Well, team president Jon Wood told The Athletic last August there was “absolutely nothing” preventing it.
“If we could open our books and show what we spend on motors and on a pit crew, it is top-level,” he said. “There’s no reason we can’t run as good as those other three cars.”
Fast forward to Sunday, when a triumphant Josh Berry celebrated his first career NASCAR Cup Series win and returned the Wood Brothers to victory lane at a 1.5-mile track for the first time since 1993.
It was also the team’s second top-five finish in as many weeks (Berry finished fourth at Phoenix), quickly matching that total from the last three years combined with former driver Harrison Burton. Suddenly, it’s trendy to link the Wood Brothers with Penske (“that’s the fourth Penske car, after all!”) — which is accurate, but also diminishes what the Wood family has put together.
“When we suck, it’s our fault. But when we do good, we had nothing to do with it. It’s 100 percent Penske or something,” Jon Wood said Sunday of the perception. “That’s a frustrating part. These are our guys who are doing this. We sat in a room and debated who our next driver would be for 2025. It’s Josh Berry. Those are decisions that we made collectively. It’s our race team and our decision.”
In addition to Berry, the Woods also chose former Penske engineer Miles Stanley as crew chief in the offseason — and Stanley has quickly shown he’s a great fit for the role (not that his championship pedigree was in doubt after contributing to three straight).
“My goal for this team and where we want to go and what we want to accomplish this season — this (winning) is it,” Stanley said. “We want to win a race, we want to make the playoffs, we want to advance in the playoffs. We’re marching down the path to do that.
“I strongly believe we can be a contender week in and week out.”
Berry may have been a surprise victor because he had never won a Cup race and the first intermediate track event of the season would typically be won by a Hendrick Motorsports or Joe Gibbs Racing driver. But Sunday was a message the Wood Brothers’ internal expectations are to run with their Penske alliance teammates and, in this case, beat them.
Two years after getting a big opportunity at the same track, Josh Berry won in Las Vegas to make his first trip to victory lane in NASCAR’s Cup Series. (Jonathan Bachman / Getty Images)
Berry good
At this spring Las Vegas race two years ago, Berry was thrust into an unusual situation that also represented the chance of a lifetime: Substituting for Hendrick driver Chase Elliott after Elliott broke his leg in a snowboarding accident.
But Berry finished 29th in that Vegas race and recalled flying home that night thinking his Cup Series career was over. As it turned out, that wasn’t the case; Hendrick asked him to drive the No. 9 car again at Phoenix, where he finished in the top 10 and parlayed that into more starts until Elliott returned.
“They believed in me and they gave me another week,” Berry said. “It’s amazing the things that have (had) to happen to get to this point.”
The same could be said for Berry’s entire career story. He went to the same suburban Nashville high school as Taylor Swift, and can recall her performing in the school talent show. But dreams of NASCAR glory felt elusive; the closest he got to it was racing online with Dale Earnhardt Jr. while working as a bank teller in his hometown.
Earnhardt, a believer in Berry’s talent, gave him a chance to race Late Models and Berry moved to North Carolina to pursue a short-track racing career. But even then, he only wished to make a living in grassroots series rather than NASCAR’s highest level.
One domino after another continued to fall, and Berry last year became a Cup Series rookie at age 33 — unusually old for today’s incoming drivers. Even then, his former team (Stewart-Haas Racing) folded and he spent months with his future in doubt.
Now Berry has found a true home with the Woods, and he has an opportunity to put real roots down with a contending team. It’s a refreshing story in the sense of its rarity in modern-day Cup racing, which has pipelines full of development drivers backed with millions in funding.
“Five years ago, I felt like I was going to be a career short track racer,” he said. “… I look back now and I miss those days tremendously with driving with my buddies to all these racetracks, working on my own car. Those people made me who I am, the way I think, the way I approach racing. I wouldn’t change anything about it.”
Bubba’s new approach
In 2023, Bubba Wallace had five top-five finishes — all on intermediate tracks. Those seemed to be his No. 23 car’s strength after he won the 2022 fall Kansas race and also finished second at Michigan that summer.
But although Wallace achieved a new career high in top-fives last season (six), none of them came on intermediate tracks. He has felt the different Goodyear tire made it tougher to get a handle on his cars, and it resulted in chasing some speed ghosts last year as he pushed his team to make adjustments that didn’t end up working.
So this time, Wallace purposefully declined to ask for any big changes after his car was fast — but loose — in practice. He and the No. 23 team called it quits after 23 practice laps, which was tied for the eighth-fewest in the field.
“I had some big moments (in practice) and I just stopped,” Wallace said. “I got out of the car and was like, ‘I’m done. I’m not going to go down this rabbit hole of where you guys are telling me how to drive and do all this stuff and create bad habits.”
The alternative, Wallace said, would have been to try several changes that would have sat in his mind overnight and into the race on Sunday. His lap averages would have been wildly different, whereas instead Wallace left practice knowing he was third-quickest in five- and 10-lap averages and sixth-fastest in 15-lap average.
“While I didn’t get the seat time, I didn’t create something I know is going to play in my mind for (Sunday),” he said.
It seemed to pay off, because Wallace finished fourth in both stages at Las Vegas and led 20 laps — his most on a 1.5-mile track since Texas in 2023. His day got messed up due to being part of the four-wide wreck with 72 laps to go (Wallace finished 28th after that), but the speed was still a positive sign.
Bubba Wallace led 20 laps in Sunday’s race, but a late wreck cost him a shot at an elusive strong result on an intermediate track. (Chris Graythen / Getty Images)
Hocevar’s Homestead line
Carson Hocevar isn’t going to be happy if he reads this.
“Dammit, you m—f—,” he said with a smile when he heard a question about Homestead. “Don’t bring this up. You can talk about it after Homestead.”
The reason is a comment he made to The Athletic in December, when we recapped his Rookie of the Year campaign. At the time, Hocevar said he was particularly proud of running the most creative and weird racing lines possible, like when he discovered a different way to run the Homestead track in the Truck Series race (which he won) and waited a full year to try it in Cup.
It not only worked for him — he was top 10 in both stages and finished ninth — but he felt validated by other drivers and spotters copying his line. He was just hoping the garage wouldn’t remember it heading into next weekend’s race there, and thus this column calling attention to it could be bad for Hocevar — not that it would take the field long to figure it out.
After all, Tyler Reddick was the first to pull off the wall and run Hocevar’s unconventional line last year.
“If the 77 is hauling ass and drives by, it’s a bit of a sign that line is obviously pretty good,” Hocevar said. “Because (people think) ‘His car isn’t the best’ or ‘He’s not the greatest race car driver of all time.’ … They’re probably like, ‘Oh s—, my car can definitely do that.’”
But Hocevar has had success running it, which could be a boost for a Spire Motorsports organization that already showed speed at Vegas by having Michael McDowell win the first pole position in company history.
Rajah trusting the process
It’s now been more than a year since Rajah Caruth won a Truck Series race, with the 22-year-old unable to back up his Vegas victory last season.
But Caruth doesn’t seem worried and said, “It’s not a question about winning a race this year, just a matter of when.”
Drivers often press when they go through a winless drought and expect to see victory lane more often. Even Kyle Busch spoke this weekend about how he pushed too hard last year at times, which cost him a chance to continue his record-breaking streak of consecutive seasons with a win.
“Kansas last fall, I felt rushed,” Busch said. “I felt hurried. I felt like I needed to get through the traffic as fast as I could and I put myself in a bad spot; we hit the wall and lost the race.”
How does Caruth avoid trying to force it, especially with the expectations on him and the opportunity to become a future star if he succeeds?
“It’s really not that deep,” he said.
Why? Because Caruth said he’s focused on process over results. If he does the work and operates on instinct rather than emotion, it becomes more about being happy with execution rather than getting twisted over the outcome.
“You just have to execute and do your best and if it works out, great,” he said. “If not, you just adjust and go from there. And I don’t mean that from a nonchalant perspective, but just from not putting the world on my shoulders.
“At the end of the day, I’m going to do my best and I feel good about our chances, and our trucks are fast. I’ll put myself against any of those guys in the truck. Everybody’s really good, but I’m confident in myself, too.”
High Limit jackpot?
You may have heard a thing or two lately about NASCAR’s charter system, since it’s at the center of an antitrust lawsuit brought by 23XI Racing and Front Row Motorsports.
Now Kyle Larson’s High Limit Racing sprint car series, which he co-owns with six-time sprint car national champion (and brother-in-law) Brad Sweet, is implementing its own version of a charter system.
Except in this case, there are a few key differences. For one thing, High Limit is calling its charters “franchises,” since Sweet said that’s basically what they are anyway. And they’re permanent, unlike in NASCAR.
They also don’t come with guaranteed starting spots in the A-Main features, since sprint car tradition calls for all spots to be earned.
High Limit released the payout plan for the first four years of the franchise system, which starts next year, and it will award a total of $18 million to its teams.
That’s a ton in the dirt racing world, which Larson said is important to him — especially after he and Sweet began a rival series to the well-established World of Outlaws and convinced teams to take a chance on them.
“It’s professionalizing our sport to be less of a hobby,” Larson said. “We want the teams to feel that, we want our fans to feel that at our events. This definitely takes the sport to another level.”
Tim Clauson, co-owner of the Clauson Marshall Racing team, said this is the first time after being around dirt racing in four decades he’s felt there was a financial light at the end of the tunnel.
Clauson said he ran the numbers and believes there could be a 40 to 50 percent increase financially for the teams, which all lose money on an annual basis.
Former NASCAR driver Kasey Kahne said despite owning Sweet’s six-time championship winning Kasey Kahne Racing team, he’s “still putting a lot of money in” each year.
“Now we have something to look forward to the next year before the season even starts,” he said.
Are the High Limit owners worried there could be some sort of legal issues at some point down the road, based on what happens with the NASCAR lawsuit?
Larson said he’s “just a driver” in NASCAR and has never seen a NASCAR charter agreement, while Sweet said it’s not the actual system that is the problem with the NASCAR lawsuit.
“They’re just having issues with the inside of the system,” Sweet said. “We think we’ll be perfectly fine and successful, and there was really no hesitation for what’s going on with them. We don’t really see it the same as what we’re trying to do over here.”
(Top photo of the Wood Brothers team celebrating Josh Berry’s win Sunday in Las Vegas: Jonathan Bachman / Getty Images)
