Corey Heim will return to Tricon Garage to drive the No. 11 Safelite Toyota in the 2024 NASCAR Craftsman Truck Series season, he and the team announced Monday.
Heim is locked into this year’s Championship 4 in his first full-time campaign in the series, with three of his five career victories coming in 2023, his inaugural season with Tricon Garage.
“It’s all good things,” Heim told NASCAR.com in a phone interview. “I think with the progress we’ve made throughout the organization at Tricon this year and the partnership between Toyota Racing, we started off a little bit slow but once we got rolling in the early summertime, I really feel like we were right in the mix pretty early.”
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Indeed, Tricon Garage previously operated as David Gilliland Racing before 2023 running Fords. The operation transitioned to Toyota Racing Development this year as the manufacturer’s top team, and Heim delivered.
In addition to his three wins, Heim netted the Regular Season Championship despite missing a race at World Wide Technology Raceway, and he has collected 11 top fives and 18 top 10s in 20 starts this year.
“We kind of got on a roll quicker than expected,” Heim said. “I really feel like we’re still growing to this day, and now that we have a full offseason to work on it and improve for 2024, it’s gonna be really good, I think.”
The success Heim has found translated from a successful stint at Kyle Busch Motorsports, where he ran 16 of 23 races in 2022 on the way to two victories, six top fives and 10 top-10 finishes. Those stats would seem to favor a promotion to the NASCAR Xfinity Series, the next rung on the proverbial national series ladder and where Heim has made four starts for Sam Hunt Racing.
The 21-year-old will instead stay put for more seasoning in the Truck Series, where he could be a champion in less than three weeks’ time.
“I feel like it’s just what’s gonna set me up best for my future,” Heim said of returning to Tricon. “And the other side of that is I do want to go out and have immediate success and win races, contend for wins, so on and so forth. So for me, I think it was just being in such a good spot, I really felt like the best bet for me was to return to Tricon and return to my team. They have everyone coming back for me, and I feel like we’re gonna really be in a really good position to have success going forward.
“As I mentioned earlier, we’re making so much progress every week that I feel like we’ll be in really good shape next year. I feel like timing is kind of everything in racing and I feel like the timing for me is just to stick with that team. They’ve brought me so much success, so I feel like it would almost be crazy to not stick with them.”
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The spread of the Truck Series schedule, combined with his Sept. 14 triumph at Bristol, means that Heim has already been locked into the Championship 4 for more than a month. That time has allowed the No. 11 team led by crew chief Scott Zipadelli a healthy amount of time to prepare for the title race at Phoenix. The series’ penultimate race of the year is set for Saturday at Homestead-Miami Speedway at noon ET (FS1, MRN, SiriusXM NASCAR Radio).
“It really is a big advantage. I mean, we’ve really just focused on that race specifically,” Heim said of the long breaks between races. “Of course we want to win the races in between – Talladega and Homestead. Had a good run at Talladega and want to run good at Homestead as well.
“But of course, all the marbles are in for Phoenix and that’s our priority, so we were able to really dive deep into that. We started doing simulator work basically immediately after Bristol. Of course, you can only prepare so much until you just go there and you got to do it or don’t kind of thing. But I really feel like we’ve been able to use this time off just to improve and make sure we’re as prepared as we possibly can be.”