*Editor’s Note: An attempt to contact Front Row Motorsports for comment on this story has gone unanswered at the time of publishing, there will be updates if a response becomes available.
It looks like Front Row Motorsports will be cutting one of their three full-time NASCAR Cup Series teams for the 2020 season.
A former Front Row Motorsports employee David Helton, who served as a fabricator for the race team for five years, tagged the team in a personal Facebook post, which posted the conversation on the community section of the Front Row Motorsports Facebook page.
In the conversation, Helton tells others that the team was cutting one of it’s three teams for 2019, and that was the reason for his firing this week.
A secondary anonymous source has also confirmed with TobyChristie.com that Front Row Motorsports will shrink to two full-time race teams in 2020.
The anonymous source, like Helton, was a long-time employee of the organization who was let go this week. The former employee explained that the team informed him that the reason he was being let go was that the team would only be fielding two full-time cars for the 2020 season.
You would imagine the team, which as of 2019, owned three NASCAR Cup Series Charters would likely sell or lease one of their Charters to another team for the upcoming year. Who could be interested in purchasing or leasing the Charter is unknown at this time.
Front Row Motorsports, which had not fielded three full-time cars since 2015, expanded back to a three-car operation in 2019 with David Ragan, Michael McDowell and Matt Tifft running the three entries.
All three teams scored at least one top-10 finish this season, McDowell led the way with two top-fives. The three teams finished 28th, 29th and 31st in the year-end NASCAR Cup Series owner championship standings.
Tifft suffered a seizure late in the season at Martinsville and was replaced by Matt Crafton for a race and John Hunter Nemechek filled in for the final three races of 2019.
Now, it looks to be a busy offseason for the organization. One that will be filled with change.
Ragan retired from full-time competition following Homestead and Tifft has already parted ways with the team to focus on his health.
McDowell remains unsigned, but last week at Homestead, he was still hopeful about his prospects of returning to FRM for another year in a chat with Frontstretch’s Christian Koelle.
Recently, sources within the team informed TobyChristie.com that a deal was being worked on to keep Nemechek, who was the highest-finishing Front Row Motorsports car in his three starts with the team, with the team for the 2020 season.
