There is business and then there are friendships but it’s awfully rewarding when the two can blend together in a meaningful way. That is what is happening at CR7 Motorsports with Grant Enfinger rejoining CR7 Motorsports for a full-time NASCAR Truck Series campaign in 2024.
This isn’t the first time that Enfinger has driven for Thomas and Codie Rohrbaugh, driving the No. 9 nine times during the 2021 season when he transitioned to a part-time role at ThorSport Racing. Their relationship goes back even further to when longtime ARCA and Truck Series crew chief Mark Huff was serving as general manager.
Huff connected Enfinger to the Rohrbaughs when they first started CR7 in ARCA and their friendship led to Enfinger driving their trucks when he otherwise just had a part-time schedule.
“They have told me repeatedly, if I needed something, reach out,” Enfinger told Sportsnaut on Wednesday. “I have always stayed in touch with Codie and kept them updated on all the different options I had for next season but I wasn’t sure that they wanted to race the same way I wanted to race.”
What Enfinger means is that he has raced for GMS, Thorsport and GMS again since the 2016 season. He has the partnerships and relationships to race for full-time, factory supported championship caliber organizations and wasn’t sure that the Rohrbaughs wanted to devote the time and resources needed to go all-in.
The Rohrbaughs were adamant they did if Enfinger wanted to do it with them.
With it being known as early as this past spring that GMS Racing would shutter by the end of the season, Enfinger had a long enough runway to make sure his sponsors wanted to do it. He had time to secure continued factory support from Chevrolet and then secured a championship caliber crew chief in J Jeff Stankiewicz.
The crew chief is an important component because he earned the ARCA championship with Enfinger at GMS in 2015 but also an ARCA and Truck Series championship with Sheldon Creed in 2018 and 2020 respectively.
Stankiewicz isn’t the only familiar face to Enfinger as Garrett Lambert has worked with him before at CR7 and longtime friend and crew chief Michael Shelton is too. The team will receive technical support from McAnally-Hilgemann Racing.
Enfinger has all the people and pieces he wanted in building a team around him and that was important given some of the other options he explored over the summer and autumn months.
“I had other options that might have looked better on paper,” Enfinger said. “But I have a lot of say-so here in building the kind of team around me that I wanted. The directions we go. There is a lot of built-in trust that I have with everyone here individually and it’s just a matter of building the chemistry as everyone works together for the first time.”
Enfinger doesn’t know that he expects the team to be at max potential come the season opening weekend at Daytona International Speedway, a race he won in 2020, but he also said he would be ‘disappointed’ if they weren’t come five races into the season.
“I know everyone here but they haven’t worked together,” Enfinger said. “There will be a learning curve there but we already all trust each other and that’s really important when putting a season like this together.
“It’s going to be a lot of work, we’re still working, but we have all the pieces a race winning team needs to have. I feel really confident in that.”
Enfinger nearly won the championship in 2023, was three laps away from winning it when Corey Heim retaliated against Carson Hocevar for a previous incident earlier in the race. He won three races all while under the uncertainty of what the entire team was going to do next season.
Enfinger said he was confident that he would race somewhere in 2024 and viewed his role as keeping his crew motivated. The announcement that GMS would shutter coming so early gave him a lot of time to put the CR7 deal together but he conceded that it weighed on his 2023.
“For my long-term future, it was an advantage,” he said. “As a driver, you try to shield the distractions from your team. We tried to manage it. I thought our guys did a really good job of managing that all summer.
“But it did allow me and Codie a lot of time to sit down early and talk about some of the things I could do or what we could do together.”
It allowed him time to make sure the Rohrbaughs were ‘in 100 percent’ like he was in to build a championship caliber program. They are and now Enfinger gets to race with an all-star cast of some of his favorite crew guys and fellow racers.
Winning with them, he says, would be one of the most rewarding things he’s done yet.
Matt Weaver is a Motorsports Insider for Sportsnaut. Follow him on Twitter.