Halfway through this season, John Hunter Nemechek has already topped his career mark for top-10 finishes in a season.
Travis Mack spent the offseason listening to radio communication John Hunter Nemechek had with his Legacy Motor Club team to better understand what he could do to help his new driver.
Mack, who came to the team from Kaulig Racing, was just one of many changes Legacy Motor Club has gone through since the end of the 2023 campaign. Nemechek was brought in before the 2024 season as the organization moved from Chevrolet to Toyota. That change meant different ways of doing things, different tools and much to learn.
Nemechek and teammate Erik Jones struggled last year as Legacy Motor Club went through additional personnel changes. Performance has improved for the team owned by seven-time Cup champion Jimmie Johnson.
Heading into Sunday’s Chicago Street Race, Jones is 16th in the season standings, 49 points below the playoff cutline. Nemechek is 23rd in the season standings but has had a career-high six top-10 finishes this season — his most recent a sixth-place result two weeks ago in Mexico. Nemechek has four top 10s in the last eight races.
The recent performance is a sign of how Mack and engineer Sydney Prince, who became the team’s lead engineer in May, have worked well with Nemechek and given him a car he needs.
That goes back to what Mack heard in the offseason as he listened to the radio communication Nemechek had with his team last year.
“In his past, in lap one or two, they were on the radio already telling him how to drive,” Mack told NBC Sports. “They were trying to lecture him on what he needed to do different, how to drive like somebody else.”
Along with Legacy Motor Club’s cars getting better, Mack also seeks to give Nemechek more freedom on what he needs with the car.
“The sim driver could tell us something all week, but if (Nemechek) goes out and says ‘You can’t do that … the car is not capable of that,’ we’ve got to trust what he’s telling us and that’s one of the biggest things.”
That also relates to the information the team provides Nemechek to help him.
“We put together a ton of notes throughout the week on (such items as) differences of how he drives vs. other people,” Prince told NBC Sports.
“He’ll retain that information and he’ll go out there and run how he thinks he needs to drive the car and have that (information) in the back of his head, so if we need to change up something during practice or during the race, it’s not necessarily changing his driving style to drive like other people — because none of the drivers are exactly the same — it’s just notes to keep stacking on ways to get better.”
All of that has helped Nemechek perform better on the track since May, scoring sixth-place finishes at Pocono and Mexico, an eighth-place result at Texas and a 10th-place run at Kansas.
“I think it’s confidence in your equipment,” Nemechek told NBC Sports. “When I go out on the racetrack, I’m confident that I know that he car is going to stick and that I can push it. Last year, you never really knew what you were going to get from a correlation aspect, from unloading from sim to the racetrack.
“I know when I’m coming to the racetrack kind of where we’re going to be as far as balance-wise. If it’s not that way, it’s not that way, but having confidence in them that we can make our cars better.”
Nemechek says his team’s growth is just an example of what’s taking place at Legacy Motor Club this season.
“I think that last year was a very big building year,” he said. “I think there were a lot of things that we didn’t do great as team last year at Legacy. I think the personnel changes, the hires, the people that are now running competition, that are running the tech side, shop guys, everyone has bought in.”
Category: General Sports
