“If you want to be a race car driver, you better be tough,” Ryan Preece declared after his harrowing crash at Daytona in 2023. As the action heated up on Lap 156, Erik Jones made contact with Preece’s No. 41 SHR Ford, sending him into a wild, violent spin. The No. 41 car veered left across the nose of teammate Chase Briscoe’s car.

The result? A harrowing series of tumbles through the grass on the backstretch, with the No. 41 flipping at least 10 times in mid-air!

The intensity of the crash was hard to grasp, and now, a year later, Preece’s bad luck only seemed to be getting worse. With SHR’s imminent closure, Preece’s future in the Cup Series is hanging by a thread. He finds himself as the odd man out while his teammates—Noah Gragson, Josh Berry, and Chase Briscoe—are settling into new team haulers and fresh sponsors.

While Noah Gragson secured his seat for 2025 with Front Row Motorsports and has a multi-year deal, Josh Berry will pilot the famed No. 21 Ford Mustang for Wood Brothers Racing, and Chase Briscoe will join his friend C. Bell at Joe Gibbs’ garage and pilot the No. 19 Toyota Camry on a multiyear deal to start the 2025 NASCAR Cup Series season.

However, when asked at New Hampshire by NBC Sports’ Kim Coon about his future, Preece did not disclose where he is going next, as nothing’s confirmed for him, but when specifically asked about any plans to drive in the Xfinity Series, he responded, saying, “I just want to win races, so we’re going to do whatever we can to do that.”

His long veteran status would inevitably sustain him as a racecar driver. But the more important question is—where will he go? His Cup Series career has failed to register much progress. Ryan Preece ran 170 races over 6 years, and his best Cup season so far is 23rd in standings, which he achieved in 2023. This year, he ran dismally mostly—except for a 9th-place finish in Martinsville and a 4th-place run in Nashville. Recently, his Indianapolis ambition ended in a smoking wreck.

Given that Preece races in the No. 41 Ford Mustang that Haas has helped fund since the car was added in 2014, it was certainly possible that Preece could have jumped into the new Haas Factory Team Cup Series car, but that is also going to Cole Custer. Another Ford car open for Preece in the Cup Series is Rick Ware Racing. The team only has one full-time driver this season, Justin Haley. While they have shown some solid improvement with Haley, having a second full-time driver could help the team.

However, Preece would need to bring a lot of funding to the team. Does he have enough to fill a Rick Ware Racing seat? That’s what Preece and RWR have to consider if he joins.

The incredibly middling performance somewhat rivals Ryan Preece’s achievements elsewhere. For example, he notched two wins in the Xfinity Series: the 2017 U.S. Cellular 250 in Iowa and the 2018 Fitzgerald Glider Kits 300 in Bristol. He also owns 21 top-tens and one pole in Xfinity. During the 2022 season, Preece also achieved in the Craftsman Truck Series, fetching a win at Nashville Superspeedway besides six top-four finishes. So maybe the current No. 41 driver would scale down to a Tier 2 series?

Preece in an Xfinity Series car could definitely compete for wins and championships or stay in the Cup Series. Either way, it depends on whether or not Gene Haas wants him back. Additionally, this is only possible if the Hailie Deegan joining Haas rumor won’t prove right. But this could give Preece some much-needed continuity.

Despite speculative thoughts, his overall scenario looks very bleak. Ryan Preece is a far cry from his Whelen Modified Tour achievements. He has been the 2013 NASCAR Whelen Modified Tour champion and has won over 25 times there. However, given his present 26th place in the Cup Series point standings, Ryan Preece may face potential heartbreak in his career.

Unlike Preece’s jittery future, some SHR employees took steps even before the team announced its exit.

Some even foresaw the SHR misery

Of course, Tony Stewart and Gene Haas’ debacle was on the rumor mills for a long time. Several NASCAR experts kind of predicted a dark cloud was hovering over the SHR team. But people did not expect it to become reality—until Stewart announced it in May.

16 years of incredible racing achievements came to a sputtering end with this notice: “The commitment needed to extract maximum performance while providing sustainability is incredibly demanding, and we’ve reached a point in our respective personal and business lives where it’s time to pass the torch.”

But even as drivers and other employees struggled to find their footing, some of their peers had already found escape routes. The official notice was pinned on the wall before Stewart actually announced. And some of the more observant top engineers and pit crew members wasted no time. They jumped ship to other teams ahead of the confirmation of the spine-chilling news. Although SHR was offering financial incentives to employees to stick through till the end of the season, clearly some of them were simply not satisfied.

This rivals the utterly unpredictable situation that Ryan Preece finds himself in. The lone black sheep of SHR looks at a terribly bleak future, as his team’s demise and his faltering race performance make a deadly combo.