UPDATE: Tuesday, February 15 at 3:30opm
In an interview with SiriusXM NASCAR Radio on Tuesday, Team Penske owner Roger Penske said the team plans to have a presence in the NASCAR Xfinity Series this season but hasn’t yet announced the races the team will compete.
During an interview on SiriusXM NASCAR Radio on Tuesday, Roger Penske said that the organization will continue to have a presence in the second-tier series, but which races and drivers will compete have yet to be announced.
“We’re looking at some races,” Roger Penske told SiriusXM. “We really wanted, with the new car and the drivers we had, we filled these seats with Harrison [Burton] and [Austin] Cindric, we had two pros who are solid in [Ryan] Blaney and [Joey] Logano.
“We said, ‘let’s focus our time on testing and getting ourselves ready and being better in the core series,” Penske continued. “But, we will run some Xfinity races, we just haven’t announced that at this point.”
ORIGINAL STORY:
Team Penske’s NASCAR Xfinity Series program currently has no plans to continue into the upcoming season, Walter Czarnecki, the team’s Vice Chairman, told members of the media on Thursday.
While Czarnecki firmly stated that the team has no active plans for the organization to continue into 2022, he did leave the door open to a potential return, should the desire to return to the series be sponsor-driven.
“At this point, we don’t have any races scheduled in the Xfinity program and any decision that we make to run will be sponsor-driven,” said Czarnecki. “We’ll work with our sponsors and if there’s an appetite to do something, we’ll certainly sit down and talk with them about the number of races and the drivers that would participate.”
In November, TobyChristie.com reported that the organization’s NXS program was still in limbo after it was officially announced that Brian Wilson, the team’s crew chief, would move to the NASCAR Cup Series with Harrison Burton in 2022.
A representative from Team Penske tells TobyChristie.com that the organization is not planning on selling their owner points or equipment to another team at this time, as the series is set to launch the 2022 season in just over a month at Daytona.
With the series’ provisional system relying on the 2021 Owner Standings for the first three events of the year, Team Penske’s current decision not to sell the No. 22’s owner points will likely have an impact on who qualifies for the Beef. It’s What’s for Dinner. 300 at Daytona.
