Spire Motorsports’ Extreme Money Splurge to Gain Competitive Edge in NASCAR Doesn’t Guarantee a Win in 2024

Over the past few weeks, Spire Motorsports has been very busy in NASCAR. Earlier, the team decided to buy Kyle Busch Motorsports and compete in the Truck Series. Since then, the team has been on a roll, making several organizational changes within the team. Additionally, they have expanded to a 3-car operation from two. This was after they bought a charter from BJ McLeod’s Live Fast Motorsports for approximately $40 million.

For 2024, Corey LaJoie returns to the team but will have two rookie teammates, Carson Hocevar and Zane Smith. Ty Dillon has vacated his seat and Hocevar takes his place. Meanwhile, Smith will drive the #71 Chevrolet for Spire. Furthermore, in preparation for the upcoming campaign, the Cup Series team has deep-dived into the market. They recruited personnel from NASCAR teams, like Stewart-Haas Racing and Team Penske. And those personnel have all been given crucial engineering roles in the team. Spire Motorsports driver Corey LaJoie admitted that he is a little concerned, but the new hires have given him a lot of hope.

What has Spire Motorsports been up to so far?

Among the recruits are eminent names like Stephen Doran and Luke Lambert. Those two names are significant, purely because both have a ton of experience in NASCAR. Naturally, their knowledge and expertise will be massive boons to the team, and LaJoie knows that. Both Doran and Lambert will ply their trade in the Cup Series, as Zane Smith’s and Carson Hocevar’s crew chiefs, respectively.

Of course, all of this sounds very impressive on paper. But it is a different thing to get everything to gel together and turn things around. It takes a lot of hard work for a team to move from being in the mid-pack to being competitive for wins. To put things into perspective, despite being one of the lead drivers of the team, LaJoie has never tasted victory in the NASCAR Cup series, so he will be keen to challenge for race wins.

READ MORE: Corey LaJoie Unravels His Spire Motorsports Skepticism Despite Commending “Recent Hires”

What can be expected of the NASCAR Truck Series operation?

On the bright side for Spire Motorsports, the Kyle Busch Motorsports acquisition is the best thing they could have done. KBM is a championship-winning caliber team, and Spire Motorsports is inheriting it. As a result, the team’s new base of operations is KBM’s 77,000-square-foot shop. Busch himself confessed that it was hard to let go, but knew from the bottom of his heart that it was the right call.

The Kyle Busch Motorsports team was the 2-time Cup champion’s pride and joy. He established the team back in 2010, and they have since gone on to clinch two Truck titles and 100 race wins. This makes them the most successful team in Truck Series history, and Busch won 48% of those races. Meanwhile, Erik Jones and Christopher Bell clinched the Truck Series title in 2015 and 2017, respectively, for KBM. For a long time, the team allied with Toyota, but since Busch’s switch to Chevrolet, the team made the jump too.

With all of this pre-season shopping done and dusted, is it enough for Spire Motorsports? It might still be difficult for them to challenge for wins, especially considering that there are teams like Hendrick Motorsports, Richard Childress Racing, and Trackhouse Racing. As Legacy Motor Club’s CEO Cal Wells put it, the above three teams are ‘tier one’, meanwhile the other Chevy teams are lower on the priority scale. Sure, the likes of LaJoie and his rookie teammates will try their hardest, but guaranteed wins will be hard to come by.

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