This was a big win for what is now JTG Daugherty Racing.
The tense is operative because it’s no secret that the team is going through a transition in that will formally undergo an ownership shuffle during the off-season and is expected to lose its Kroger sponsorship to RFK Racing.
Team owners Tad and Jodi Geschickter, the JTG portion, have moved into a formal role with Joe Gibbs Racing. Brad Daugherty, the former NBA star and television analyst, also co-owns the team and wasn’t at the track today so the victory did little to clear that up.
Instead, the only team representative made available was crew chief and competition director Mike Kelley.
“I’m on the competition side,” Kelley said. “I don’t know. I know I’ve got a great group of owners with Ernie (Cope) and Gordon (Smith). I just resigned my deal for a couple of years, and I’m excited we re-signed.
“We have an alliance with Hendrick, and they help us with technical alliance and Mr. H and Jeff Gordon and Jeff Andrews and Scotty Maxim, that whole group, Chad Knaus. We’re the little team. We don’t get everything we want. They give us what we can and when they can.
But, yeah, I’m excited about the future here. We’re still a small team. There’s no getting around that. It’s not easy, but I’ve told everybody last year when I took this position over that I always felt like even though if I got 30 guys working on our race team, if I got 30 guys pulling in the same direction, I like my chances.
“It’s not pretty some days. There’s days we want to forget about some of the races, but there are a lot of days that, man, we know there are other teams questioning how we do what we do when we do it.”
Regardless of what this team will be called and who owns it, there remains Mike Kelley and Ricky Stenhouse, who have been paired at this team since 2020 but their driver-crew chief relationship spans over a decade. Stenhouse also signed a multi-year extension this summer to remain in the No. 47 car moving forward.
They won Xfinity Series championships together, the 2023 Daytona 500 and now this win at Talladega.
“For those of you that know or don’t know, me and Ricky have a long, tenured relationship,” Kelley said. “I got introduced to him in 2009, and we’ve had an up-and-down career. We’ve won some big races and won a couple of Xfinity Championships. My first race back with him, we won the Daytona 500.
“Our biggest goal after that Daytona 500 was to keep this team relevant. I told him, I said, Man, we’ll make it — from this point on we’ll make it into the chase. I want to make it on points even if we didn’t win the 500, and I think we went into the Daytona in the fall, and we were 15th or 14th in points. That meant a lot to us to prove that it wasn’t a one-race deal.
“This year we’ve actually had a lot of opportunities to do well, and just one thing after another. You know, I’m not the only team sitting up here telling you that they’ve had bad days, but I know that kid more than anybody. I’ve spent more time with him. We talk more than me and my family do, and I know he’s got my back, and I got his back. I know he’s going to give me 100 percent out there.”
Kelley also says Stenhouse is his ride or die.
“The trust level is through the roof, and when we get to do something like this today, I couldn’t be happier,” Stenhouse said. “I wouldn’t want to do it with anybody else. I will end my career with Ricky if it’s next year or two years after that. This will be it for me.”