The way Ty Majeski won his first NASCAR national touring championship over the weekend was a reflection of his career on the whole.
Place a figurative barrier in front of him and he will find the crack and kick it down.
For example, Majeski was all but eliminated from the Truck Series playoffs two weeks ago at Martinsville once Taylor Gray took the lead from Christian Eckes. But Eckes, who was locked into the Championship Race regardless, would not be denied and shoved his way back to the lead on the final restart to win the race.
Had Gray won, that final four spot would have come at the expense of Majeski, and the irony wasn’t lost on him.
“I thought (Eckes) made an interesting decision back at Martinsville,” Majeski said. “I feel like we’ve been a strong contender all year and he was in a position to choose who he raced in Phoenix this weekend.”
And then, after a pause:
“Here we are as champions,” he said. “It’s crazy how one little decision by somebody else kind of can control your destiny but I’ve been on the bad end of that stuff. I’m happy to take one.”
To his point, Majeski has been on the ‘bad end,’ when it came to his NASCAR national touring prospects for nearly a decade before joining Thorsport Racing. Majeski is already one of the most decorated short track aces of his generation but the outcome of his various NASCAR opportunities frequently failed to match the hype.
He shared the ill-fated Roush Fenway Racing No. 60 Xfinity Series car with Chase Briscoe and Austin Cindric back in 2018 and they combined to crash or spin it 26 times in 33 races. Everyone in the sport will tell you the drivers, crew chief Mike Kelley, and their engineers were not the problem but that the program was simply cursed.
Briscoe, Cindric and Kelley all made their way to the Cup Series but Majeski languished. He joined Niece Motorsports with highly touted crew chief Phil Gould in 2020 but was fired before the season ended after failing to make the playoffs. He was replaced by Trevor Bayne and Connor Jones, but they struggled too, and the results were more a reflection of rule changes that year and Niece taking chassis construction in house.
The very day he was fired, he asked Briscoe for David Pepper’s cell phone number, planting the seeds for several conversations with the Thorsport Racing general manager. Majeski went on to win the Snowball Derby that year, the biggest Super Late Model race of the year, which certainly didn’t hurt.
But Majeski did a curious thing.
He didn’t immediately sign with Thorsport as a driver but capitalized on a mechanical engineering degree from the University of Wisconsin-Madison and accepted a role as an engineer that only promised a handful of starts behind the wheel in 2021.
“I was scanning parts at the shop, really learning about the race trucks and how they’re built,” Majeski said. “Every single part, every single truck went through me at one point or another, and I was able to learn really how these trucks work and how they operate.”
Majeski bet on himself under the conviction that his various talents would get him where he wanted to be and Thorsport leadership recognized it too.
Allison Thorson is the daughter of team owners Duke and Rhonda Thorson, who also runs the day-to-day business of the organization.
“We love the underdog,” Thorson said after the race. “I won’t say he was an underdog because he has just wonderful talent. He wins all the time in Late Models. Look at his record. Why not piece that together?
“It’s hard for a lot of teams to make that happen, but I say with the experience of the business leadership from my family, we’re able to give guys the option. You know, if you want to further your career in other series, go ahead. We’re right there patting your back. If you want to make a home here, we’ll help you, and we want to win. I think that’s the case with Ty too. He’s a champion day in and day out.”
And then there’s the Joe Shear Jr. element — a crew chief who is the son of a legendary Wisconsin racer who won the Truck Series championship with Johnny Sauter at Thorsport in 2016. Sauter and Shear were also chasing Majeski in Wisconsin Late Model races too.
It was a natural fit for Majeski.
“I remember it vividly,” Majeski said of an early interaction with Shear before they were paired together as driver and crew chief. “I was at my little scanning station early in 2021. He says ‘hey, what are you running for a setup in your Late Model’ and I knew at the time it was probably going to go right to Johnny.
“I told a couple of white lies. It’s just crazy looking back at all the races that Johnny and I have raced against each other. Obviously Joe Shear was a part of Johnny’s Late Model program. Just the timing was right to kind of carry that torch for Wisconsin and team up with Joe Shear.”
And what a team they are.
They’ve won five times over the past three years, made two championship four appearances, and are now the 2024 champions.
And now, it’s a natural question whether Majeski wants to continue moving up, back to Xfinity and towards the Cup Series. The answer is that its going to take a really good offer.
At Thorsport, Majeski gets to continue living in Wisconsin, only has to commute to Sandusky, Ohio to Thorsport a handful of times a month, and still gets to race his Late Models two dozen times a year.
It’s a charmed life and it’s going to take giving him a sure-bet championship opportunity to pry him away from it.
“When I got that opportunity in 2022 to go full-time, we hit the ground running,” Majeski said. “We were competitive right off the bat. Obviously made it to the Championship 4. Didn’t win the championship, but yeah, just looking back at it, you can go back in your life, and you say, wow, there’s different decisions that changed your life and took a different direction, and that’s one of them that we made.
“It was one of the better decision I’ve ever made to go with ThorSport. And Duke, Rhonda Thorson, they’ve built such a great culture up there, and just proud to carry the flag with them.”