With seven NASCAR Cup championships, tying him with fellow NASCAR greats Richard Petty and Dale Earnhardt, Jimmie Johnson has a great legacy.
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Now, Johnson is trying to build another legacy — as co-owner of Legacy Motor Club (LMC). Purchased and then rebranded from Richard Petty Motorsports (Petty remains a part-owner) in January 2023, Johnson has been building LMC into a contending organization.
With drivers Erik Jones and John Hunter Nemechek, Johnson — who has also competed in two Cup races this season, as well — likes what he sees. Heading into Sunday’s street race in Chicago, Jones is on the bubble to qualify for the playoffs in 16th position, while Nemechek is 23rd.
Jones could receive an immediate playoff berth if he can win any of the eight remaining races in the regular season. Likewise, so can Nemechek.
The difference between the two is Jones may still wind up in the playoffs solely on points earned in the 26-race regular season if he continues to maintain his consistency and current position in the rankings. Nemechek, meanwhile, is pretty much in a must-win situation to make the 16-driver, 10-race Cup playoffs.
Jones, who earned a season-best fifth place finish last Saturday night at Atlanta, comes into Sunday’s race in Chicago winless, but has two top 5 finishes so far (twice as much as he had in the entire 2024 season) and three top 10 showings.
Nemechek has been performing much better lately, coming into Chicago winless but with one top 5 and six top 10s (he only had four all of last season).
NASCAR reporter and IMSA team member Bozi Tatarevic joined Steve Letarte, Todd Gordon and Kyle Petty Sunday on the NASCAR Inside The Race podcast and the quartet discussed how Johnson is building, shall we say, Legacy’s legacy.
“Everybody was saying that Legacy was going to get there last year but I said it’s going to take a year,” Gordon said. “Look at the offseason hires, they brought in some really good people, they got to the point they could digest the information and we’re seeing the progression this year of what people expected to happen last year.
“The Toyota tools are getting kind of solidified because they have groups within Legacy that are helping them kind of drive them forward. Their own TRD tools not JGR (Joe Gibbs Racing, which is Toyota’s premier team in Cup) tools and they’re getting ahold of, how they can manage that data and they’ve put good people in place.”
“So I feel like this is a trajectory that Jimmie had a vision of. It just is a much longer process than I think people want to give it credit.”
Tatarevic agreed with Gordon’s assessment about Legacy’s slow development.
“I think a lot of people maybe overestimated (Legacy’s expected progression), and I fully agree with Todd, because the way the tools work is Toyota Racing has a set of tools and a database, so it’s like you’re building a house,” Tatarevic said. “They’ll bring you the lumber, the nails and a blueprint of how it’s going to go.
“What Legacy has had to do for the last two or three years is build each of these houses individually based on the basic tools that TRD gives them, which is a significant amount but it doesn’t give you that last 2 or 3 percent that makes you competitive.
“Now that they’ve started building this, they have a fully independent technical database that they wouldn’t have otherwise and they’re also bringing in all these key personnel and building up other pieces of their team just like the pit crews.
“They’re now competing in the top 10. If you look at the pit crew rankings, a lot of weeks you’ll see one of those two pit crews show up in the top 10. So they’re putting all the pieces together not just from the technical information but the people are getting there too.”
Jones: The Team Is Now Jelling Better
In the last year, there have been a number of personnel changes and new hires at LMC. It’s taken a bit of time for those changes to start jelling, but Jones is optimistic that the upward trend of success will continue.
“It took a solid six-to-eight months probably to break that down and then beyond that, just hiring more people,” Jones said during media availability on Friday in Chicago.
“We were pretty short-staffed in our engineering department. It took all that time to really get everybody in their right position and figuring out what they were going to be doing.
“Now, I feel like everybody’s really in the flow of it and (there’s) a lot more open communication between everybody just knowing what’s going on, who’s working on what, given enough forum for guys to come up with new ideas and figure things out.”
“It just took some organization. There was just a stretch where we didn’t have the leadership in place and now, I feel like our leadership group is really strong,” Jones concluded.
