It’s only one race, but if Team Chevy has this kind of horsepower, torque, and fuel mileage to offer for the rest of the IndyCar season, the General Motors brand will be hard to beat. Josef Newgarden, Pato O’Ward, Scott McLaughlin, and Will Power …
It’s only one race, but if Team Chevy has this kind of horsepower, torque, and fuel mileage to offer for the rest of the IndyCar season, the General Motors brand will be hard to beat.
Josef Newgarden, Pato O’Ward, Scott McLaughlin, and Will Power used their 2.2-liter twin-turbo V6 Chevys to trounce the field throughout Sunday’s 100-lap Firestone Grand Prix of St. Petersburg as they locked out the top four positions, with the winner from Team Penske turning his pole position into a victory that came with the race’s fastest lap and 92 laps in the lead.
“I think we had some deficits last year. There’s no doubt. You can’t hide from that,” Newgarden told RACER. “But we also had some tremendous strengths. We leaned on a huge win at the Indy 500, we were very strong on ovals. I think you’re seeing a good ebb and flow between the manufacturers, which you want to see as a competitor and as a fan.
“For us, we would love to have it easy, but we want a strong competition between the manufacturers, and I think you had that last year. Maybe we were a little bit weak in some parts that we needed to bring up, and I think today, as I assess the race and as I assess the weekend, I think you see a lot of parity.
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“I would say there was more parity than last year here. I think Honda looked pretty strong at this event for the [2023] opener [which it won]. I think this weekend we looked even in a lot of respects, but we certainly have strength on our side that we can lean on now. This is one example right now, one data point. Let’s keep going a couple more rounds.”
Although Chevrolet won last year’s Manufacturers’ championship, its rivals at Honda took the higher-profile Drivers’ championship, and it’s here where the Bowtie’s teams and drivers decided it was time for the car company to double down and try to rectify the situation. Based on Sunday’s performance, Team Chevy was listening.
“I’ve got to say, Chevrolet, they work hard every off-season,” Newgarden added. “They worked really hard this off-season. We were hard on ourselves. It’s not just them. We had to really improve our side on the chassis, and we were hard on them, too. We said, ‘We’ve got to make all of these things better,’ and they delivered in spades.
“You ask for the menu, and you don’t get the whole menu [of improvements]. They somehow gave us the whole menu. It’s pretty cool. They did a great job, and it makes me very encouraged for 2024.”
Just as one would look around their home after the holidays wondering what they want to get rid of, Joey Cohen and Legacy Motor Club did the same thing at the race shop. “How am I going to get rid of all this clutter?” Cohen, the vice president of …
Just as one would look around their home after the holidays wondering what they want to get rid of, Joey Cohen and Legacy Motor Club did the same thing at the race shop.
“How am I going to get rid of all this clutter?” Cohen, the vice president of race operations, joked to RACER.
In this case, the clutter is cars, parts, and pieces no longer of use to Legacy Motor Club as it goes from competing with Chevrolet to Toyota this season. So, after the November season finale at Phoenix Raceway, one of the organization’s biggest priorities making room for new inventory.
“I turned into part salesman the last three races of the year,” Cohen said. “We have a communication path with all of our other teams, so I’m sending emails to all our Chevrolet counterparts. I’m like, ‘Hey, I’ve got all these Chevy parts sitting here. They’re only a year old, or at most two years old. First come, first served. Whoever comes and gets them, gets them and they’re yours.”
The advantage of NASCAR’s Next Gen Cup series car is the single-source supplied parts. There are hardly any proprietary pieces being made by race teams and kept from public eye.
“There are Chevrolet teams out there willing to take advantage of getting (our) parts used at a discount to save a little money,” Cohen said. “We can just recoup a little bit of our capital back for the parts that are no longer any good to us.”
It took about a month for Legacy Motor Club to remove traces of being a Chevrolet team. Cohen described it as mind-numbing to see just how many parts and pieces ended up in a storage unit after two seasons with a new vehicle. There were full bodies – some that hadn’t been raced – oil tanks, oil lines, air boxes, and specific parts for a Chevrolet motor.
“Frankly, like a million-and-a-half dollars’ worth of stuff,” Cohen said. “What are we going to do with it? It’s a big responsibility to figure out, because I’m going to have to turn around and buy that same stuff again for Toyota. So, I’m sitting here and the owner’s calling asking, ‘what’s our plan here?’ I’m like, ‘hey look, here’s the realistic probability. If we can get 60 cents on the dollar, we’re doing really good.’ The good thing about the Next Gen stuff, it holds its value because it’s common.”
The race season ended on Sunday, November 5. By the time the calendar turned to December, Legacy Motor Club had its first Toyota car on track. Erik Jones drove the No. 43 in the two-day test at Phoenix on December 5 and 6 as NASCAR experimented with its short-track package.
Before the test, Legacy Motor Club had a pile of 2023-style parts sent by 23XI Racing to be put on the pit stop cars. The organization has brought its pit crews in-house – just as 23XI Racing did going into 2023. The Legacy crews will train alongside its Toyota teammates from 23XI Racing and Joe Gibbs Racing.
There have been plenty of other changes around the shop. A fresh coat of paint on the walls and a redone floor. The lobby is also being redecorated, as are the walls leading into the race shop. One wall has a mural of the history of GMS Racing, the now-shuttered Craftsman Truck series operation. The other wall will be done with the history of Legacy Motor Club plus those of co-owners Maury Gallagher, Richard Petty and Jimmie Johnson.
By the front door, a wall has been taken down and replaced by glass windows allowing visitors to see into the shop. And GMS Racing no longer being in operation has freed up more space for the Cup series team since both organizations were splitting the shop floor.
“A majority of the October, November unraveling was how do we wind that down, clear this space out and make it more dedicated, more intentional for a Cup shop?” Cohen said. “Whereas before, we were trying to be good roommates. We were like, hey, you guys are over here, we’re over here, but if you need this … Now we go down there and we have all this space. We cleaned up some things, brightened it up. The building needed some attention.
“We’re bringing tools and people in that needed spaces. So, it was a really good time to tackle that as we’re waiting on the other things to happen.”
There was a lot of waiting before action could be taken. Legacy Motor Club and Toyota announced their partnership on May 2 2023. In the aftermath, the organization remained committed to finishing its tenure with Chevrolet and fulfilling its partnership even as those resources and tools dried up.
“We were in the race season, right? We’re actively competing with a Chevrolet team,” Cohen said. “You have to be respect of your current agreements; you have to honor those. We did that.”
In the interim, no possession of Toyota parts or changes were made in the race shop. But there was a “countdown to Toyota” tracker kept on a white board.
“They had all sorts of countdowns,” Cohen laughed. “Like ‘countdown since the last major announcement.’ Or ‘days without a new hire in the building.’ It was like four or five different ones. It’s funny because that’s what’s the most noticeable about our environment, there is something happening all the time.”
Legacy Motor Club still had to go to the track and compete as a Chevrolet team while preparing to transition to Toyota. John K Harrelson/Motorsport Images
With nothing physically to do for the transition until the season ended, it was all meetings and planning between the May announcement and the season finale. The thrash began the day after.
“You can have conversations and planning sessions, but you can’t put hands on things and you can’t sit down in formal environments and really open the books up and say, ‘Hey, this is how we’re going to do it at Toyota,’” Cohen explained. “Truly, those things were the Monday after Phoenix, but [there was] a lot of conversation, a lot of internal planning on our part.
“There were some connection points there we could make with how we were going to do things with the competition area, how we’re going to do things on the sales and marketing area. Our group could go out and actively sell that partnership because everyone knew we were going to Toyota. So, I think [the months after the announcement] served a huge advantage for our marketing group and sales group to pitch partnership.
“On the competition side, we still have to go out there and run a Chevrolet and honor all our partnership and like I said that’s what we did. Until the last day, the last hour of that agreement, we were a Chevrolet team.”
On the day of this interview, Cohen had just given back his personal Chevrolet vehicle. Many other employees have done so too, and more and more Toyota-branded vehicles were beginning to appear in the parking lot at the shop.
There are also more people employed there. In addition to taking on its own pit crews, Legacy Motor Club has been able to add more depth to its organization while revamping and restructuring some of its departments.
“Part of that is a direct connection with Toyota – we have responsibilities now and stuff we’re beholden to as a tier one partner with TRD,” Cohen said. “We have an aero department now that has a lead. We have a quality control department that has a staff of four that has a lead. We have somebody that’s directly tied in with software development or engineering technology tools that we’re going to start to take on with Toyota and what they do with that type of stuff.
“We have a simulator that lives here in the shop. Those guys are on that two to three days a week, so that’s a responsibility that needs someone to manage it and operate it. We didn’t have that last year.”
Cohen estimated the organization has grown from 70 or 75 employees to about 115 and he’s confident it’s the right size for a two-car team.
Jimmie Johnson joined the fold ahead of the 2023 season. Nigel Kinrade/Motorsport Images
This is the third iteration of what is now Legacy Motor Club. It was Petty GMS when Gallagher bought the majority of Petty’s operation in December 2021 ahead of the 2022 season, and it became Legacy Motor Club with the addition of Johnson going into the 2023 season. Now comes a Toyota transition, while many other changes have also happened over the last two years. Some have been visible: personnel shuffled and added (i.e., Matt Kenseth and Cal Wells), different drivers (Ty Dillon and Noah Gragson have gone and while John Hunter Nemechek has joined) and crew chief changes.
The season starts in less than a month with a trip west to the L.A. Coliseum for the Busch Light Clash. While the initial thrash of the transition is over, Legacy Motor Club is still in the thick of preparation and will be spending the rest of January building its stable and developing plans on how to hit the ground running as a Toyota team.
“The biggest thing is we’re going to have to be intentional about communication between all of our groups because nobody knows the whys,” Cohen said. “Nobody knows why the Toyota stuff is like this or why the engine group does that. We’re still having calls with Toyota of, ‘Hey, we used to do our stuff this way. Why do y’all do it like this?’ So, we’re walking through it.
“We’re learning every day and everything is new. It’s fun. We’ve not had a boring off-season.”
And there is a lot of anticipation within the race shop to finally get on track.
“I won’t call it nervous energy but there’s a lot of pent-up energy just ready to explode,” Cohen said. “After winning a race in 2022, I think that instilled an amount of confidence in the whole shop that we can do this. Because there was a lot of people who never raced in Cup before in this shop. They never envisioned they could win a Cup race with the vehicles we build here.
“Now, what happened in ’23 was a little out of our control but we’re fine with taking a little pause in this journey and I think now, everyone is looking around like, wow, we have a lot of resources, we have a lot of people here that are really smart and really good. We have great crew chiefs and drivers.
“There are a lot of things happening that everyone is just ready to explode with seeing cars run up front and be in contention for wins. Everybody is kind of anxious right now more than anything.”
Chevrolet completed the sweep of the manufacturers’ championship in all three NASCAR national series by clinching the Cup series honor at Martinsville Speedway. It is the third consecutive year Chevrolet has won the manufacturers’ championship in …
Chevrolet completed the sweep of the manufacturers’ championship in all three NASCAR national series by clinching the Cup series honor at Martinsville Speedway.
It is the third consecutive year Chevrolet has won the manufacturers’ championship in the Cup Series and their 42nd overall. Chevrolet previously clinched in both the Craftsman Truck series and Xfinity series Oct. 21 at Homestead-Miami Speedway.
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“Chevrolet is honored to win the 2023 NASCAR Cup series manufacturer championship for the third consecutive year and the 42nd time overall,” said Jim Campbell, General Motors U.S. vice president of performance and motorsports. “This title is the result of great teamwork by the Chevrolet drivers, crew chiefs, and teams working tirelessly throughout the season.”
Chevrolet has won 17 races with seven different drivers and started the year winning the Daytona 500 with Ricky Stenhouse Jr. It was their first win in the Daytona 500 since 2018 with Austin Dillon.
William Byron has a series-leading six victories in the No. 24 Hendrick Motorsports Chevrolet.
“Winning the Manufacturer Championship in the NASCAR Cup Series is a remarkable achievement,” said Megan Brobeck, GM Racing program manager for the NASCAR Cup series. “We are very proud of the dedication and cooperation among Chevrolet’s teams and engineers, and their efforts all season long paid off with this special honor. Congratulations to all who contributed to the championship for this much-deserved accomplishment.”
Chevrolet will have two drivers racing for a championship in the finale at Phoenix Raceway. Byron and teammate Kyle Larson both advanced for Hendrick Motorsports.
Despite winning only five races to Honda’s 12 this year, Chevrolet has taken its eighth crown in the 12 IndyCar seasons since it returned to the series at the start of the 2.2-liter V6 twin-turbo era. Team Penske’s Scott McLaughlin and Will Power, …
Despite winning only five races to Honda’s 12 this year, Chevrolet has taken its eighth crown in the 12 IndyCar seasons since it returned to the series at the start of the 2.2-liter V6 twin-turbo era.
Team Penske’s Scott McLaughlin and Will Power, and Juncos Hollinger Racing’s Callum Ilott finished second, fourth and fifth in the 2023 season finale at WeatherTech Racing Laguna Seca to clinch the title by 12 points. The number of early engine changes – that not only drop a car by six grid positions on road courses, and nine spots on ovals – prevent that car from scoring points on that weekend. In this regard, Chevrolet’s engine units proved more sturdy in terms of reaching 2000 miles.
General Motors’ VP of racing Jim Campbell said, “It was close. It was close. Big thanks to Will Power and Callum Ilott. They got the key positions for the key points to put us right over the top. Super proud of the fact this is, as you said, the second in a row, eighth overall since we returned to IndyCar in 2012. It feels really good.
“Obviously proud of the five wins…Josef [Newgarden] with four, Scott McLaughlin, one at Barber. Certainly would have loved more wins, but we got the manufacturers’ championship. Super proud of that.”
Rob Buckner, IndyCar program manager added: “Just so proud of our people. A huge thank you to everyone that wears a Bowtie in the paddock, not just our technical partners at Ilmor and our GM employees — all of our race teams, everyone worked together.
“Like Jim alluded to, not enough race wins. We have a lot of work to do. Not pleased with all of the results, but to get the manufacturers’ championship, huge moment for us. Very proud of everyone on the program. Thank you to everyone who played a big role in that.”
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Asked about the reliability battle toward the close of the season, Buckner said, “I think each one of those situations is unique. Sometimes it’s crash damage. Can’t comment on the Honda side, what issues they had. For us, I think it’s a huge testament to the build quality of our engine builders, the way our trackside group works to eliminate any issues as they pop up. It really comes down to an attention-to-detail-type situation.
“Also, both of us are pushing these engines so hard compared to when they first debuted. They were right on that edge of reliability, so huge kudos to our trackside group for looking after everything. They’re the reason we had cars on four engines eligible to score points.”
Buckner was not giving anything away when questioned by Racer regarding the amount of horsepower the Chevy has now compared with 2012 at the start of this engine era.
“If you can get Dave Salters [HPD president] to come in here and show you some charts, Honda’s number, we’ll follow up with ours,” he smiled. “It’s definitely been a huge increase. If you ran a 2023 spec 2.2 liter engine against 2012-spec 2.2 liter engines, it would lap the field. It’s been that sort of magnitude. It’s all small, incremental gains. Just goes towards the diligence of the group to keep finding performance every year.
“We think we have exhausted the 2.2 liter formula – and we keep finding more! We know if we slow down, we’re going to get surpassed. Us and Honda really push each other very hard. It’s a fun battle, one that we really enjoy.”
There have been similar leaps forward in fuel mileage.
“That’s another area we’re always pushing really hard,” agreed Buckner. “Working with the teams and drivers, fuel mixtures, the way they drive the car, looking for efficiency. I don’t see any reason that’s going to stop. Fuel mileage competition is like clean air versus dirty air — once you know there’s a huge advantage there, you’re never going to unlearn those things. We’ll just keep polishing on it. I don’t doubt our group will be able to come back in ’24 with a better package.”
Team Chevy’s response to its drubbing by Honda at the 2022 Indianapolis 500 was on display throughout most of the race as its drives led 130 of 200 laps while making exceptional fuel mileage on the way to victory for American auto manufacturer. …
Team Chevy’s response to its drubbing by Honda at the 2022 Indianapolis 500 was on display throughout most of the race as its drives led 130 of 200 laps while making exceptional fuel mileage on the way to victory for American auto manufacturer.
Josef Newgarden’s triumph for Team Penske and Team Chevy on the last lap was a thrill felt throughout the Speedway and General Motors.
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“What an exciting pass by Josef Newgarden and an incredible finish to The Greatest Spectacle in Racing,” said Jim Campbell, the brand’s VP Performance and Motorsports. “We all will be talking about Josef’s last-lap move, sprint to the finish line and post-race celebration for a long time. Josef drove a solid race all afternoon and he put himself in position for that well-timed and memorable move. This is a great win for a popular driver and champion.
“Congratulations to Josef and the No. 2 Shell Team Penske Chevrolet for his first Indianapolis 500 win, and congratulations to Roger Penske on his 19th. Thanks to all of the hard work by our Chevrolet engineers along with our technical partners at Ilmor on delivering an engine package that delivered the right combination of power, durability and efficiency.”
In recent years, Honda has made use of strong late-race engine settings that made their 2.2-liter twin-turbo V6 engines a problem for the front-running Chevy drivers to overcome. Team Penske president Tim Cindric credited the progress made in this area as making a difference in Newgarden’s ability to sweep past Honda-powered 2022 Indy 500 winner Marcus Ericsson and claim his first victory on IndyCar’s biggest stage.
“They’re here to win, and they’ve continued to put more and more resources behind it,” Cindric said. “It’s the details that win this place, and when you look at last year’s race, I think the Chevys needed a little more at the end when it was time to go, and they gave us more at the end when it was time to go.
“I think we either closed the gap or at least gave us the tools to win as Chevy teams, and when you looked at it, there were quite a few Chevys going into the third to last restart, I think there was four Chevys up there in the top 5. It’s a testament to what that whole group has done.”
