The Wide World of Dirt

I know the iron on this situation isn’t as hot as it was a couple of weeks ago, but it hasn’t really left my mind how unexpected this decision was.

Stewart-Haas Racing announced that Ryan Preece will replace third-year driver Cole Custer in the #41 Ford Mustang in 2023.

In addition, Custer will return to the Xfinity Series where he will pilot a second SHR entry, slapping his familiar #00 on the side of his Ford.

Toward the end of the 2022 season, co-owners Tony Stewart and Gene Haas entered intense discussions about the state of their driver lineup.

Most notably, Stewart made the push to move Preece back up to the Cup Series, and with the left-field re-signing of Aric Almirola who previously claimed he’d retire, there weren’t any readily available seats with the team.

Enter Cole Custer.

Since the departure of Kurt Busch at the conclusion of the 2018 season, the #41 SHR car saw JGR castoff Daniel Suarez hop behind the wheel for 2019.

Though he showed more promise in his stint with the team than he did at SHR, Suarez fell four points short of a playoff berth, finishing 17th in points.

Rather than build on the momentum (and funding) Suarez brought, Stewart and Haas switched their attention to their development driver, Cole Custer.

Custer exploded onto the national scene as a teenager in 2014, winning at Loudon in his 7th career Truck Series start at the young age of 16.

He returned for more partial work the following year, scoring another win at Gateway which was the site of his first pole in his debut season.

Though his first full-time Truck campaign didn’t prove as fruitful as expected, he narrowly missed out on a win at MoSport when he and John Hunter Nemechek collided coming to the checkers.

Custer also got in some laps in an Xfinity car in 2016, nabbing two top-10s and a top-5 in his five starts with JR Motorsports.

If I had to guess, SHR’s truck effort in 2016 was somewhat affected by their pending move to Ford for 2017, so I doubt they were getting the Chevy support necessary to compete compared to other teams who weren’t switching after the season.

SHR saw enough in Custer’s performance in 2016 to put the 19-year-old Californian in the #00 Ford Mustang in the Xfinity full-time for 2017.

Custer turned in a solid performance for the entire season, falling just short of a Championship Four appearance at Homestead.

Rather than sulk and have a bad performance in the season’s final event, Custer played the ultimate spoiler, dominating the day by leading 182 of 200 laps on the way to becoming the first non-Championship Four driver in the Playoff era to win the race in the Xfinity Series.

Custer returned to the #00 in 2018, and he built off of the previous year’s playoff performance, maintaining a top-5 spot in the points for much of the regular season.

In his second straight playoff season, the sophomore driver only had two finishes outside the top-10, culminating in a clutch, overtime victory over title rival Tyler Reddick at Texas to punch his ticket to the championship race.

Since Custer dominated the Homestead race in 2018, he walked into the Championship Weekend as the presumptive favorite to claim his first title, even though Christopher Bell led the series in wins.

Custer claimed the pole, but after another dominating performance, Reddick exacted revenge from Texas, sneaking by Custer against the wall in the final stage and pulling away to win the title while Custer finished a disappointing second.

The stinging loss galvanized Custer and the crew for 2019 where the #00 became a weekly winner, triumphing at Fontana, Richmond, Pocono, Chicago, Kentucky, and Darlington, firmly cementing themselves in the race for the chip.

Custer proceeded to have an impressive playoff run, not finishing worse than 11th in all seven races, and after tacking on a 7th victory on the year at Dover, Custer racked up enough playoff points to send him to another Championship Four.

Despite leading 15 laps, Custer watched as Reddick rode the wall again to a second straight title, but the 21-year-old had greener pastures ahead.

Late in the 2019 season, SHR decided to move on from Suarez to bring in Custer to drive the #41 Haas Automation Ford Mustang in the Cup Series in 2020.

In his first five starts, Custer didn’t exactly light the world on fire, but that was to be expected. He did notch his first career top-10 at Phoenix, finishing 9th.

As we all know, that’s when the world changed.

The Covid-19 pandemic halted NASCAR for 10 weeks in the middle of the 2020 season, and to me, this affected the rookie drivers the most.

Custer, Bell, Reddick, and John Hunter Nemechek all rose to the Cup Series for 2020, and in order to limit the spread of the virus, NASCAR officials cancelled practice and qualifying for all subsequent events in all three national series.

When the series returned, Custer and the 41 crew struggled to find their footing.

Six finishes outside the top-20 in the first 12 races back made one raise an eyebrow, but every driver at SHR not named Kevin Harvick failed to find consistent speed.

A few late-race restarts helped Custer move toward the front at the Brickyard to earn his first career top-5 in Cup, but the highlight of his career came the following week in the Bluegrass State.

Custer started 29th at Kentucky, and he methodically picked his way through the field, working his way up to 3rd by the end of the second stage.

During a chaotic third stage, Custer again found himself toward the front as the competition around him came undone.

Starting 6th on the final restart, Custer advanced to fourth by the time the field entered turn 3, and he rode the top line while the top-3 drivers jostled ahead.

Exiting turn 4 with the white flag in the air, the leaders went three-wide with Harvick and Blaney on the apron while Truex remained on the racing surface.

Custer got a hell of a run off the high side of turn 4, and with the top-3 slowing each other down, Custer took that run to the very top of the tri-oval nearly passing all of them going into turn 1 for the final time.

Blaney and Harvick stifled each other’s chances by making contact, leaving Truex as the lone challenger to Custer. Truex attempted to pull the 41 back using side draft through 1&2, but he lost the battle down the back.

Custer pulled away by two car lengths through 3&4 and threw his arm out the window as he crossed the line for his maiden Cup Series win.

The win locked the 41 team into the playoffs and practically guaranteed that Custer would also come home with the Rookie of the Year title at season’s end.

In the nine races leading up to the playoffs, Custer turned in three finishes of 25th or worse but also added four finishes of 11th or better.

The Playoffs weren’t too kind to Custer.

He didn’t perform poorly by any stretch, but he didn’t do enough to outperform his competition to remain in contention, being the last one out after a meager 23rd-place result at Bristol.

Custer notched another top-10 at the Roval before season’s end, placing a solid 16th in the final points standings.

Coming into the 2021 season, qualifying and practice were largely cancelled yet again due to the ongoing pandemic, continuing to hinder the development of Custer and the other young drivers.

SHR won nine races in 2020 outside of Custer’s Kentucky victory, all with Kevin Harvick. Their teammates (Aric Almirola and Clint Bowyer) also made the Playoffs on points but failed to reach winner’s circle.

Bowyer’s retirement at the end of 2020 brought in rookie Chase Briscoe from the Xfinity Series, who was Custer’s teammate in 2018 and 2019 in the lower series.

Briscoe’s mercurial 9-win performance in 2020 made him hard to ignore as an option to replace Bowyer, and after a potential deal with free agent Kyle Larson fell through, Briscoe assumed the the role as driver of the SHR #14.

As a collective, SHR struggled mightily in 2021.

Though Harvick won a series-leading nine races in 2020, he went winless while still managing a 5th-place finish in points.

Briscoe was largely irrelevant, only grabbing three top-10s on the year and finishing a mediocre 23rd in points.

Almirola brought home the team’s only win of 2021 in a slightly darkness-shortened race in Loudon, his first win on a true oval.

Before that race, Almirola was having one of the worst seasons of his career, sitting 27th in points with only a few races before the postseason.

He punched his ticket to the Playoffs with the victory, but he ended the year as a first-round exit, much like Custer the previous year.

Then, there was Custer.

The #41 team failed to capitalize on their performance from their rookie season. While only owning three DNFs on the season, Custer had an average finish of 21.3, a two-spot regression.

He only scrounged up two top-10s on the year as well, a pair of 10th-place finishes at Talladega and Dover. Both races were before the halfway point of the regular season.

Custer and SHR as a whole struggled for speed the entire year, and there wasn’t much that the team could point to as a cause.

There was a reduction of rear downforce in the highly-derided 550hp high downforce intermediate package, and Harvick’s crew chief even admitted that they had trouble recovering from the new regulations.

With the 2021 season chalked up as a loss, SHR tried to settle back in for the 2022 season and the NextGen car to return to prominence.

The 2022 results were mixed to say the least.

Briscoe punched his playoff ticket early, winning at Harvick’s kingdom at Phoenix in March while the rest of the team scraped by through the spring.

Harvick and Childers struggled to find speed in the #4 car until an extended practice session at Nashville helped them find their rhythm, culminating in two consecutive victories at Michigan and Richmond as the Playoffs loomed.

Though the Cup Series field featured 19 different winners for only the second time in the modern era, Custer and Almirola were not among them.

Almirola scored four of his seven top-10s on the year in the first eight races, ending the year 20th in points in what was supposed to be his final season.

Custer again lacked the performances that inspire confidence in car owners, only adding three more top-10s to his resume over the 36-race schedule.

The 24-year-old did claim his first career pole at the Bristol Dirt race, but poor track preparation foiled his day, mud covering his grill and forcing an unscheduled stop that relegated him to a 13th-place finish.

A great run at the World 600 was undone by late-race shenanigans that saw his Chicken Cock Whiskey Mustang involved in a crash not of his making.

Custer added two 9th-place finishes at the second Atlanta superspeedway race and the hectic Indianapolis Grand Prix, but by that point in the season, he needed to park the car in victory lane if he had any hope of making the Playoff field.

Needless to say, that didn’t happen.

Custer did manage another top-10 after a race of attrition at Bristol, but his Playoffs were marred with rumors swirling about his future with the team and a scandal involving the final lap at the Roval.

On the last trip down the backstretch, Custer’s teammate Briscoe needed two more spots to advance into the Round of 8, so Custer’s crew chief Mike Shiplett radioed to his driver that he had a tire going down.

Custer slowed dramatically, slamming on the brakes and impeding the progress of Austin Dillon and Erik Jones who were battling Briscoe.

Briscoe sent it into the backstretch chicane and made it stick, passing all three drivers while Custer was still being urged to slow down as much as possible.

Briscoe stole the spots necessary to advance, but Custer and crew were immediately under the ire of NASCAR for race manipulation.

NASCAR levied an indefinite suspension for Shiplett and a loss of 100 owner points for the #41 team, but the team was barely clinging to a top-25 spot in points. It really couldn’t get much worse.

Custer meandered through the remainder of the season, picking up one more spot in driver points to finish 24th for the 2022 season.

Not long after, SHR announced that Custer would lose his ride to Preece for 2023 and would once again return to the Xfinity Series and the #00 car.

Ryan Preece’s journey to NASCAR has been a unique one for the current slate of driver’s at the top level.

Preece performed well in NASCAR’s modified division in the early 2010s before making the move to Tommy Baldwin Racing in the Xfinity Series for 2013.

The Connecticut native spent three seasons with the team running spot gigs for their Xfinity and Cup programs before jumping over to JD Motorsports for a full-time Xfinity ride in 2016.

With a full season in the books, Preece decided to take a bet on himself, securing just enough sponsorship for a four-race slate with Joe Gibbs Racing’s Xfinity team.

Piloting the #20 Toyota Camry, the 26-year-old sat on the pole for the first time at Iowa, and after leading a race-high 141 laps, Preece held off a hard-charging Kyle Benjamin on an overtime to restart to claim his first national series victory.

Preece continued to impress in his other three starts with the powerhouse, finishing no worse than 5th.

He did spark some controversy at the season finale in Homestead, affecting the drivers’ championship by racing veteran Elliott Sadler hard for a top-5 spot late in the race. This allowed William Byron to pass Sadler and win the title, leading Sadler to almost come to blows with Preece on pit road afterward.

His 2017 performance led to Gibbs giving him a longer leash in 2018, letting the 27-year-old New Englander run 15 races in the #20 car.

Of those 15 races, Preece planted the car in top-10 in 10 of them while adding another win to his mantle at Bristol in the spring.

This influenced JTG Daugherty Racing to sign Preece to drive their #47 Chevy Camaro with the retirement of veteran AJ Allmendinger.

Preece notched his first career top-10 at the 2019 Daytona 500, but he followed that up with eight straight races with finishes outside the top-15 before contending late for the win at Talladega, ultimately finishing 3rd after a last-lap caution.

His rookie campaign took a serious hit in the next 12 races as he struggled to stay out of the garage area, failing to finish inside the top-20 in that span.

A 7th-place result at the second Michigan race helped stop the bleeding, and he used that momentum to drive his team forward, grabbing six more top-20 finishes in the final 13 races to end 2019 a stunning 26th place in points.

While not an impressive showing by any stretch, JTG Daugherty is an underfunded enterprise, so they weren’t expected to compete right away.

With that said, his teammate Chris Buescher got his car in the top-10 four times and finished 20th in points, so progress was expected for 2020.

Preece got a new teammate to begin the new decade in Ricky Stenhouse Jr as JTG Daugherty and Roush Fenway Racing effectively orchestrated a trade of Stenhouse for Buescher toward the end of 2019 season.

Stenhouse came to the team as more of a proven commodity than Buescher, and JTG Daugherty hoped his veteran presence and experience would aid in Preece’s continued development.

That didn’t quite come to fruition.

As previously stated, the Covid-19 pandemic caused NASCAR to cancel practice and qualifying for every event after the fifth race of the season, and this adversely affected lesser-experienced drivers such as Custer and Preece.

Preece’s average finish dropped by over one spot, and combined with eight DNFs and just two top-10s all year, his 2020 left an even murkier image of Preece’s potential than his rookie season.

Even still, Preece got to ride out 2021 with JTG Daugherty Racing, but with a caveat: he would be running an open car.

With no financial safety net like he previously had when his team was chartered, Preece had added pressure to perform better in the final year of his contract.

The #37 team opened up the year with another Daytona 500 top-10 and followed that up with a surprising 9th-place run at the Daytona Road Course.

Though other runs throughout the first third of the season showed signs of improvement, they were derailed by DNFs at Martinsville and Kansas, putting them outside the top-20 in points.

The crash at Kansas was especially wicked with Preece sliding into the inside safer barrier at a high rate of speed, lifting the car off the ground and almost barrel rolling over before coming to a rest close to turn 3.

The third-year driver proceeded to regress back to the mean after that, racking up only two top-10s the rest of the regular season and not finishing in the top-20 at other point in the summer stretch.

A 12th-place result at Darlington would be his last top-15 with the team as they struggled to stay out of the basement of the full-time teams.

Their final result together would be at Phoenix where they scored a top-20, ending the day on the lead lap.

While Preece went full-time in Cup in 2021, he also moonlighted as a Truck Series driver for the first time for David Gilliland Racing.

After switching management teams in the offseason to DeLana Harvick’s KHI operation, Preece acquired sponsorship from Hunt Brothers Pizza to pilot the #17 Ford F-150 in two events.

Starting 6th, Preece ran up front for most of the day, and on the final restart, he battled with series regulars Todd Gilliland, Zane Smith, and Grant Enfinger.

Preece took the lead with seven laps to go to claim the victory in the Music City, his first Truck Series win in his debut.

Pocono hosted Preece for his second Truck start where he managed to grab another top-10, and this led him to accept a deal to race for DGR again in 2022.

Not only did Preece’s contract expire at the end of 2021, but with the introduction of the NextGen car, JTG Daugherty scaled back their operations to one team, opting to retain Stenhouse as their lone driver.

With his stock low and no good open seats to move to in Cup, Preece was between a rock and a hard place for 2022.

Preece never had much funding to begin with, and leaving his Kroger sponsorship behind at JTG Daugherty didn’t help matters.

Instead, the 31-year-old took the road less traveled in NASCAR circles.

Car owner Tony Stewart took a shine to Preece, and their relationship helped facilitate the DGR Truck Series deal with Hunt Brothers.

In the 2021 offseason, SHR revealed they had signed Ryan Preece to a test driver contract, which meant he could get vital time in the Ford simulator as well as looking at data of SHR’s current drivers.

It was assumed that Preece would take over for Aric Almirola after he was due to retire at the end of the 2022 season, but as previously discussed, Almirola ended up signing an extension late in 2022.

Regardless, Preece had 15 opportunities over the top three national series to prove his worth.

In 10 Truck Series starts with DGR, he scored 7 top-5s, including a repeat performance at Nashville where he led half the race on the way to his second Truck Series win.

Preece became more notable in the Truck Series for a postrace tirade toward young driver Carson Hocevar after a late-race incident between the two at Charlotte.

Preece also made three starts for BJ McLeod’s Xfinity Series team, powering the team to two top-10s at Charlotte and Nashville.

He took two flyers for Cup rides at SHR-aligned Rick Ware Racing in their #15 Ford Mustang, but he could only manage a best finish of 25th at Dover.

This was enough to convince Tony Stewart that a change needed to be made at the Cup Series level, and he pushed Haas to move Custer in favor of Preece for 2023.

The move shocked me as Custer had one more year on his contract, and considering he is the son of SHR team president Joe Custer, I figured they’d honor the contract.

While I do understand that Custer’s performance was horrendous and wholly unacceptable, I think a lot of it can be justified in context.

As I’ve said twice now, the Covid-19 pandemic adversely affected drivers with lesser experience, especially the rookies of 2019, 2020, and 2021.

This wasn’t just a Custer and Preece issue: Tyler Reddick, Christopher Bell, and Chase Briscoe found immense difficulty in getting a grasp for the Cup Series.

A lot of this had to do with the state of the Cup Series’ aero package at the end of the Gen6 era. From week to week, a car could from the 750hp low downforce package to the 550hp high downforce package that drive very differently.

With no practice and qualifying, this made it even harder for the inexperienced drivers and crews to create chemistry and good setups in the simulator.

It is also no coincidence that Custer’s best season was in 2020 when he had three veteran drivers to feed off of for knowledge and data.

His performance began to dip when Briscoe joined the team, but if you look at the stats, the whole team dipped in performance.

We saw this recently with Hendrick Motorsports.

At the beginning of 2018, Jimmie Johnson became the lone veteran on a team with Chase Elliott (who had yet to win), rookie William Byron, and virtual rookie Alex Bowman taking on his first competitive Cup ride.

The team won just three races that season, all with Chase Elliott breaking through to become a contender while Johnson’s results suffered.

The same has been the case for Harvick the past two seasons, but having faith in those young drivers is instrumental in their progression.

That’s the difference between a good organization and a great organization.

Personally, I haven’t seen enough from Preece at the Cup level to make this move. That’s not an indictment on his talent because clearly he has it in droves, but he isn’t a race winner and hasn’t been competitive.

Conversely, Custer is younger, has won a Cup Series race, and he’s been to the Playoffs. He has more substantive Cup Series experience than Preece.

Custer’s lack of performance has led to me being very critical of him in the past, but the Covid-19 pandemic hampered his ability to get accustomed to the Cup Series.

It would have been wise to give Custer another year to see if he can put it back together, but Tony Stewart is an impatient, angry little man.

Custer returns to the Xfinity Series where his most recent start was at Fontana in early 2022 where he scored a victory for SHR-aligned SS Greenlight Racing.

While I don’t believe this to be the right decision, perhaps Custer will experience a resurgence in confidence by dipping his toes back into the Xfinity waters.

The team could also be using his experience and potential success to develop a second Xfinity team again, so they can hopefully move promising Ford drivers up to their team in the coming years.

And, at the end of the day, Custer has an eternal tie to SHR, so if he performs well, there will absolutely be a seat reserved for him in the Cup Series when he’s ready.

Until then, let’s see if Ryan Preece has what it takes to put the #41 Ford Mustang in victory lane and into the Playoffs.