Sheldon Creed is betting on himself next season with a move within the NASCAR Xfinity Series from Richard Childress Racing to Joe Gibbs Racing.
It’s no secret in all the ways the Creed and Richard Childress Racing relationship started to devolve over the summer once the playoffs began.
Creed and teammate Austin Hill got into it at Bristol in September and that seemed to smooth itself out but then came the penultimate race of the season at Martinsville where they took each other out of the race and a chance to race for the championship.
Since being paired together at RCR in 2022, Hill has won six times and Creed has yet to reach victory lane. Creed did not make the playoffs in his first season at RCR and a sort of tension started to develop once Hill chose to sign an extension with the team.
Some of that was evidenced by how competition director Andy Petree publicly addressed Creed on pit road in the aftermath of the incident at Martinsville. It later resulted in both a public and private apology.
Creed has said that Hill gets preferential treatment at the team and started to look elsewhere for an opportunity in 2024 leading to an agreement with Joe Gibbs Racing.
“If you would have asked me in August, and even September, if I was going back to RCR and do the same deal, again, I don’t know …,” Creed said over the weekend on SiriusXM NASCAR Radio. “I’ve been frustrated the past two years, just not running well. It gets irritating because you feel like you’re putting in a lot of work, and I don’t want to say I’m better than the car, but I felt like it was what was holding me back a lot of the time.
“That frustration got to me and I felt like, talking to people, I was considering even going back Truck (Series) racing again because I was over how I was running and just wanted to be winning races again.”
Creed won eight times in three full Truck Series seasons and captured the 2020 championship at GMS Racing.
“I started talking to (other teams and) Stewart Haas and Gibbs were the last two options I had to choose from, and ended up at JGR,” Creed said.
It’s all a bold statement to make because RCR’s Xfinity Series program has been very strong over the past decade with numerous wins and championships for Austin Dillon and Tyler Reddick.
That’s why this is a prove it season upcoming for Creed.
“I knew I wanted to have a shot to win races and not just fall into a win here or there,” Creed said. “I wanted to go into a place where I felt like I had a shot at winning every week. Yeah, I don’t know. I just felt like it was time to move on and JGR was a place I could do that at.”
Matt Weaver is a Motorsports Insider for Sportsnaut. Follow him on Twitter.