Legacy Motor Club crew chief optimistic about 2025 NASCAR season

There is no sugarcoating it, 2024 was not a great season for Legacy Motor Club. There is reason to be optimistic in 2025, though. Making it in the NASCAR Cup Series is tough and LMC is doing things the hard way.

Building your own resources, data, and team is not easy. 23XI Racing has taken a “shortcut” by paying a lot of money to have share data with Joe Gibbs Racing. Legacy Motor Club has not taken this route.

Year one with Toyota had growing pains. Crew chief Ben Beshore of the No. 43 car believes next season will be better.

“It took us a while to get up to speed with the manufacturer change there,” Beshore said to SiriusXM NASCAR Radio. “Maybe longer than we wanted it to but I think we’ve got a lot of the pieces in place now where we can start the year off strong. Brought on a lot of new people with technical director and adding Chad Johnson and Travis Mack from Kaulig. So, getting some different viewpoints from different teams and hopefully, trying to mesh those together and put together a good package for Erik to compete with.”

The crew chief went into what it takes to be successful. NASCAR has changed a lot in the last few years. Teams are still finding new ways to get speed out of the Next Gen car. Only able to change so much with single-supplier parts and pieces.

“You know, the Cup Series used to be more of an engineering, you had to sort of be an engineering juggernaut to kind of, you know, just come out with new parts and pieces and lighter stuff and constantly developing clips and suspensions and now that’s all kind of the same across the board,” the Legacy Motor Club crew chief continued.

“So, now it’s more of a QC [quality control] process that the level of refinement is so small that, you know, just one guy does something one percent or two percent better than the next guy. And that’s kind of the difference these days is just stacking up those one percent gains that you can get here and there through either organizing your parts or coming up with the best way to put the best package together there. So, it’s just about the fine details now and like you said, that takes good quality people to refine that.”

Erik Jones is coming off his two worst seasons ever in the NASCAR Cup Series. Jones finished in the top-20 every season in his first four years in the series. Since moving to the 43 in 2021, Jones has only finished higher than 24th once.

Both John Hunter Nemechek and Jones had struggles. Legacy Motor Club as a whole has to get things figured out. Ideally, these are two drivers that should be top-20 drivers in the Cup Series. But someone has to be 28th, 29th, 30th, etc.

It is a 36 race season but the margins are thin. Winning is the cure-all for any team ailing in the back of the pack. But can Legacy Motor Club get themselves to a level where they are able to compete for wins? I’m not sure that will happen in 2025.

Can Legacy Motor Club get both cars in the top-25 in points? That should be the bare minimum goal, to be honest. Jones has a better chance than Nemechek just based on what he’s accomplished in his career. The new season is two months away.