There are no shortage of reasons to start buying into Legacy Motor Club as a bonafide future NASCAR Cup Series contender and much of it has to do the recent switch from Chevrolet to Toyota Racing Development.
The team, which traces its roots back to Richard Petty Motorsports, briefly had a run as Petty GMS Motorsports when Allegiant Airlines CEO and GMS Racing team owner Maurice Gallagher merged with the team owned by the seven-time NASCAR Cup Series champion.
The organization enjoyed moderate success in the first season racing under the NextGen platform with Erik Jones winning the Southern 500 in 2022 and ending with another seven-time Cup Series champion in Jimmie Johnson joining as a co-owner.
In May 2023, the decision was made by Johnson and Gallagher to leave Chevrolet for Toyota, joining Joe Gibbs Racing and 23XI Racing under the marque.
There were growing pains. For one, Chevrolet immediately switched off access to its facility for both Legacy Motor Club and GMS Racing employees. A pair of drivers told Sportsnaut that they were immediately closed out of the building when they were going to facility to work out the day the announcement was made.
Their access cards were no longer valid.
Additionally, any time Legacy or GMS employees needed access to the Chevrolet facility to use the simulator, it required an escort that wasn’t necessary before.
Even the simulator itself was a bare bones perks with Legacy unable to use anything other than a baseline set-up, something Legacy crew members articulated as a generic Richard Childress Racing set-up.
As one employee put it:
“I’m not saying they sabotaged us or anything like that, but they could have and we wouldn’t have known because there wasn’t anything we could adjust. We had to use what we were given.”
So Jones struggled at times, exaggerated by the penalty for a greenhouse violation in June that eliminated the No. 43 team from the mix before they could even make something out of it. Noah Gragson was suspended in August and replaced by Carson Hocevar for most of remaining races.
There were some high points in the second half of the season, another Southern 500 top-10 and a podium the next week at Kansas. Hocevar challenged for a top-10 in the Bristol night race.
Jones will be joined at Legacy M.C. by John Hunter Nemechek in 2024 and Cal Wells III was installed as team CEO over the summer in advance of the switch to Toyota.
Speaking on December 1 as part of the EPARTRADE’s Race Industry Week, Wells issued the main reason to buy into the future of the organization. He said the team is on the same data tier as Gibbs and 23XI. He said Legacy was on the third tier of the Chevrolet pipeline the past two seasons.
“One of the things that Jimmie (Johnson) and Maury (Gallagher) realized very early, is that they needed to be what is termed in NASCAR vernacular as tier one—a team being supported as a tier one member of Chevrolet, Ford, or Toyota. And those are very sought after and coveted positions within NASCAR.
“Penske (Racing) and Roush Fenway Keselowski, and Stewart Haas are tier one for Ford. And Chevy, there’s Mr. (Rick) Hendrick—which is tier one-plus—and then the Trackhouses of the world, and Richard Childress Racing and others.
“And so when you when you look at that ecosystem, it was tough for Jimmie—even though he had won seven championships for General Motors. This will always surprise me (that) there wasn’t (more of ) a focus on (LMC). And Maury winning multiple trucks championships for Chevrolet, you would just think that General Motors would say, ‘Jimmie, Maury, look at what we can do. Let’s move them up to be more independent and call them a true tier one.’
“Unfortunately (GM) just didn’t feel that way. And they left (LMC) at what I would consider a tier three, where the information was very limited and intentional. I mean, this isn’t to say that (Vice President, GM Performance and Motorsports) Jim Campbell and (Executive Director GM Motorsports) Eric Warren didn’t pay a lot of attention to Gallagher Motorsports and then Jimmie and then Richard Petty, and then how it continued to evolve into Legacy, because they did. But they had tier one teams that they had made huge investments in and they were wanting to appropriately support their other true key partner teams.
“If you take technology. As you expand that circle of trust, you inadvertently share incremental technologies and you can lose the tight reign around it that you want. So, as you add another team and another team or another team, NDAs are great, but it becomes a real challenge for folks like Chevrolet that are already oversubscribed. In other words, they have a plethora of tier one teams. So just from their seat on the bus, it really didn’t make any sense.
“Toyota on the other hand, it did make sense. And so through a series of meetings—at that time I had my TRD hat firmly on—Jimmie filled the voids that weren’t had in his operation as it related to sponsorship development, as it related to certain other relationships that Jimmie could bring, and it ended up the view was it would be the perfect marriage. You’ve got individuals that are really, really good in their own swim lane, and now you could build a crossover. That’s that’s how it came about.”
Cal Wells III
The move to Toyota did lead to the closure of GMS Racing, which has operated in the Truck Series since 2011. While Toyota made room for a third Cup Series organization, it did not have room for another manufacturer affiliated Truck Series team.
In addition to the two full-time Cup Series entries for Jones and Nemechek, Johnson will also compete in a part-time schedule in 2024. It will be the first time he has driven a car at the Cup Series level that was not Chevrolet powered.
Matt Weaver is a Motorsports Insider for Sportsnaut. Follow him on Twitter.