NASCAR is a fun sport. Just when you or anyone else thinks that they have it all figured out, we’re all reminded how little we actually know. In other words, maybe we should all just shut our traps and watch the racing unfold in front of us.
In the first race following a rare driver trade between Spire Motorsports and Rick Ware Racing, the much-maligned Corey LaJoie came out on top with a solid 15th-place finish behind the wheel of the No. 51 Rick Ware Racing Ford Mustang Dark Horse in Sunday’s Hollywood Casino 400 at Kansas Speedway.
“It was a good day for the No. 51 team and our Children’s Mercy Ford Mustang Dark Horse. I’m super pumped to get these guys a top-15 in our first event together, hit these last six races running, and work to get us up in the points a little bit,” LaJoie said. “We’re just going to continue learning more about each other. Learning the communication and the cadence, but it’s been a pretty cool experience to join this group.”
Sunday’s finish at Kansas Speedway marked the fourth top-15 finish for LaJoie over his last five races, and overall, he now has eight top-15 runs this season.
LaJoie is carrying a lot of momentum heading into this weekend’s YellaWood 500 at Talladega Superspeedway, a drafting track where LaJoie has a career-best finish of fourth. The No. 51 Rick Ware Racing Ford showed a lot of speed at Daytona International Speedway back in August as Justin Haley led 21 laps before being swept up in a late-race crash.
Perhaps LaJoie can continue stacking pennies this weekend, but if he is in the mix, he will do whatever it takes to go for his first career NASCAR Cup Series win.
“I think we’re going to have some stuff to work on going to Talladega and the Roval, but all in all, it was a great day. I’m excited to get to Talladega and see if we can go steal one,” LaJoie jabbed.
While it was a great day at Kansas for LaJoie, Haley, who took over the reins of the No. 7 Spire Motorsports Chevrolet Camaro ZL1, wasn’t as fortunate.
The Indiana native, who was expected to race circles around LaJoie according to the prognosticators on social media, suffered an eerily familiar result as the previous driver of the No. 7 car. Haley spun in a strange incident with John Hunter Nemechek on lap 149. Haley would wind up finishing 33rd, one lap off the pace.
LaJoie, who had a contract with Spire Motorsports through the 2025 season, had already seen his contract cut a year early, and things got even more bizarre for the third-generation race car driver when he was traded to RWR before the end of the 2024 season. While the future for LaJoie is still very much up in the air, the driver will look to close out the season with more good results, and the rest will hopefully take care of itself.
But after race one of the first driver trade in more than a decade, and potentially two decades depending on what you consider a true driver trade, LaJoie has the advantage over Haley.
