LMC Crew Chief Shares Reasons Behind Jimmie Johnson’s Uncharacteristic Overhaul After Yet Another Disappointing Season

Undoubtedly, the 2024 season wasn’t ideal for the fairly young Legacy Motor Club. Yes, it’s run by 7-time Cup Series champion Jimmie Johnson, but it’s only been three seasons and the team is still trying to find its footing. Amid this they made a manufacturer change in 2023 from Chevy to Toyota, literally starting from scratch to gather data on the Camry. While in an ideal scenario, getting the data from JGR, Toyota’s biggest team would have made more sense, Johnson opted out of it.

As a result, the team did not see the same success as its Toyota colleagues. The team, which fields Erik Jones and John Hunter Nemechek as full-time entries and Johnson himself as a part-timer, could combine to bag only one top-5 and six top-10s among the three. This disappointing season has Johnson making an enormous amount of changes, from crew chiefs to internal role changes to hiring top industry talent. What’s the reason behind this?

Ben Beshore shares LMC’s grand plan for 2025

The team’s most recent hire was Travis Mack, who will serve as the crew chief for the #42 car of Nemechek. Mack for the 2024 season was the crew chief of the #16 team at Kaulig Racing and has a fair amount of experience backing him – After many years and many roles at Hendrick Motorsports, then he also became Daniel Suarez’s crew chief in 2021. Overall, Mack has one win, 11 top-fives, and 31 top-10 finishes in the Cup. And just before bringing in Mack, LMC hired Chad Johnston as the organization’s manager of race engineering. Johnston is a 7-time Cup Series race winner and was Ryan Preece’s crew chief for the ’24 season.

These are just two of the massive amount of changes LMC has made. Be it letting go of Joey Cohen and bringing in Jacob Canter, a long-time JGR race engineer, as the competition director. Or bringing in Brian Campe as a technical director. LMC also parted ways with Dave Ellenz, leading to a reshuffle, this had Beshore taking over the #43 team for the season’s end, while Campe assumed the role of interim crew chief for the #42 team. With Mack coming, the crew-chief lineup is sorted as Campe can go back to the technical director’s role. All this has been done in the hope of a better 2025 season for the team.

Recently, Beshore, in an interview with SiriusXM NASCAR radio dwelled on this when he said, “It took us a while to get up to speed with the manufacturer change there maybe longer than we wanted it to. But I think we’ve got a lot of pieces in place now, where we can start the year off strong. Brought on a lot of new people with our technical director and adding Chad Johnson and Travis Mack from Kaulig. So getting some different viewpoints from different teams and hopefully trying to mesh those together and put together a good package for Erik to compete with. “

Well, hopefully, Jimmie Johnson’s team has gathered enough data in 2024 on the Toyota car for there to be a significant change in the next season. This season, Jones finished 28th and Nemechek finished 38th. While LMC would love to straight off compete for wins, first finishing above the top 20 would be a more realistic and doable goal. And both the drivers have the capability! Jones so far has won three Cup races and we know how dominant John Hunter Nemechek can be, his 2023 Xfinity season with 7 wins is proof enough.

The relationship between Jones and Beshore was one that seems to have blossomed recently. When Beshore was appointed for the last 5 races of the 2024 season, Erik Jones described the hire as a ‘trial period’, saying, “I would say that it is a trial period currently.” Well, just over a month later, trial period talks were squashed, as on 19th November Beshore was announced as full-time for 2025, so clearly the trial period was a success! Despite the races not yielding any significant results with just one top-20 finish, it seems like Jones and Beshore found some hope.

However, despite LMC gathering the dream team for the 2025 season, there are still challenges, especially because of the parity in the Next-gen car.

Ben Beshore dwells on the nuances of racing in modern NASCAR

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Well, it’s no secret that NASCAR has massively changed over the last few years, especially with the next-gen car coming in. And that has brought in a lot of parity in the sport with the cars being more or less the same. And with NASCAR mandating teams to buy parts from only their approved vendor has brought parity there too. Earlier that was enough to find an edge among the competition, but now it’s become massively difficult.

Ben Beshore on this said, “The Cup Series used to be more of an engineering juggernaut to just come out with new parts and pieces and lighter stuff. Constantly developing clips and suspensions. And now that’s all the same across the board. So now it’s more of a QC (Quality Control) process. The level of refinement is so small that one guy does something, 1% or 2% better than the next guy and that’s the kind of the difference these days.”

And LMC for 2025 is looking to capitalize on those 1% gains as well, which is also one of the reasons behind them making all the changes. “It’s stacking up those one percent gains that you can get here and there either through organizing your parts or coming up with the best way to put that package together there. So it’s just about the fine details now. And like you said that takes good quality people to refine that,” Beshore added.

Do you think LMC can bounce back in 2025? Share your thoughts with us in the comments below.