Entering the penultimate NASCAR O’Reilly Auto Parts Series race in 2024, Chandler Smith saw the writing on the wall. Despite two victories that season for Joe Gibbs Racing — and an opportunity to still qualify for the Championship 4 — he fully believed he’d be without a full-time ride in NASCAR the following season.
“For somebody that don’t have a job next year in the industry, I’m probably going to be working for my dad on the construction side, just because of how some things are unfortunately playing out,” Smith said in an NBC Sports interview at Martinsville Speedway. “I feel like I don’t owe anybody anything.”
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The Talking Rock, Georgia, native fell short of a title-race berth, but lived up to that quote. Smith had a heated scuffle on pit road with Cole Custer after the then-Stewart-Haas Racing driver moved him as they battled for the win late, with Smith quite literally fighting for every inch, unsure what would come next.
“I was very much serious about it because of how late in the season I was notified that I wasn’t going to be back at [JGR],” Smith told NASCAR.com this week, reflecting on that interview. “There was no open seats available for the following year, really.”
Smith learned late that summer he wouldn’t be returning to JGR in 2025. He kept in contact with Bob Jenkins, Front Row Motorsports’ owner and founder, after building a relationship with him while driving for Kyle Busch Motorsports. Smith said a NASCAR Cup Series ride with the organization was on the table, but Front Row hired Zane Smith to drive the No. 38 Ford.
Instead, a different No. 38 Ford came into the picture. Just days before Christmas, Chandler received a call from Jerry Freeze, FRM’s general manager, about driving in the Truck Series. He accepted almost instantly. Freeze went to work on securing race trucks and a hauler for FRM’s second full-time foray and tapped Smith to build out the team’s personnel from scratch.
‘”You go start building your team,” Smith said, recalling the conversation with Freeze. “I was like, ‘What do you mean by that?’ He’s like, ‘Well, do you know any crew chiefs that are available, any engineers? Like, we don’t have anybody at all.’ I was like, ‘You want me to start actively pursuing people?’ He’s like, “Yeah, I’m giving you the liberty and freedom to go do that.’
“I’ve never been in a situation like that, but it made me have a deep respect for the people that have to go through that year after year of finding engineers, finding crew chiefs, all the things that have to go into motion to making a race team successful. Man, I was in the trenches of it at the very start of it, and I’ve never been in that situation where I’ve seen that part of it, looking through those lenses.”
Smith first called Danny Stockman, his former crew chief at KBM from 2020-22, for recommendations. Stockman immediately mentioned Jon Leonard, who, at the time, called shots for a Niece Motorsports entry. It didn’t take much convincing from either party.
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“It kind of fell in my lap,” Leonard told NASCAR.com. “To be able to have an opportunity to come to a company that wants to win, or the driver that wants to win, and have that chance … it was a pretty quick and easy decision on my part.”
And that driver/crew chief pairing didn’t take long to develop, either. Both joke that they see and speak to each other more than their spouses.
“[My wife] calls me three times a day, and I feel like I probably talk to Chandler as much or more,” Leonard said with Smith laughing in the background. “You’re around your race team more than you’re around your family a lot of times, and that relationship is super important to me because I can’t have success without him having success, right?
“Everything takes time. The longer we work together, the more we understand, and once you get a baseline, the next step is, OK, what can we do to make this a little bit better, and what’s the next knob we can turn, and what’s the next little tiny thing that will make a difference. Maybe it isn’t a wedge or an easy adjustment, it’s a theory-based conversation, and that’s where me and Chandler talk a lot — I’m able to pawn stuff off of him and he’s able to give me some feedback on what he needs to be better, and I feel like I can give him some stuff that maybe would help that isn’t such an easy knob to push.”
In their first season together, they won two of the first 10 races and entered the playoffs as the No. 3 seed. But in the opener at Darlington Raceway, Smith pushed too hard early, resulting in contact with the wall and a DNF. The No. 38 team suffered a mechanical issue at Bristol Motor Speedway, forcing a must-win situation in the Round of 10 cutoff at New Hampshire Motor Speedway. They ultimately finished second in Loudon and were eliminated.
Smith and Leonard used that disappointment as motivation. When the calendar flipped to 2026, it didn’t take long for them to find Victory Lane. Smith survived an epic overtime restart in the season-opener at Daytona International Speedway, going from sixth to first in the final set of corners and prevailing in a four-wide finish.
“I really do think that is a huge part of why we did win Daytona. We didn’t turn and start pointing fingers [after last season]. We said, yeah, you’re right, it’s pretty evident this was not meant to be,” Smith said. “It truly wasn’t a good reflection of what we were capable of, and we showed that even throughout the entire playoffs. The Lord didn’t will it that way for us to make it to Phoenix and make it to the final four, but it wasn’t a lack of being able to go out and perform.”
That “childhood dream come true” of winning at Daytona set the tone for a season where Smith remains a top championship threat. Through 13 races — and with just five remaining in the regular season — the No. 38 team sits third in the series ranks, trailing shopmate Layne Riggs by 128 markers heading into Lime Rock on Saturday (1 p.m. ET, FS1, NASCAR Racing Network Radio, SiriusXM NASCAR Radio).
Overall, the numbers are stout, with six top fives and eight top 10s. But the 24-year-old wheelman points to a few races in particular where there were missed opportunities. The team surrendered a top-five finish at Rockingham Speedway in the spring after failing post-race inspection, resulting in a disqualification and just one point. Wrecks took him out of contention at both Charlotte Motor Speedway and Naval Base Coronado, accepting blame for the former. He felt that Dover Motor Speedway was the only race all season where he lacked pace.
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“Taking out those four races … I would say we’ve been performing really well,” Smith said. “All those other performances where crap happened, we were still performing at a high level, so I would say on paper it’s kind of rocky, but reality is we’ve been running pretty well, so just need to clean up a few small things. I feel like our pit crew is starting to progressively get a little bit better, which that’s been a weakness of ours.”
And after Lime Rock, the schedule lines up right in Smith’s wheelhouse. The next five races are at tracks a mile or shorter, spanning The Chase opener at Bristol. Five of his eight career Truck wins came at those types of tracks.
Expecting a strong stretch ahead, Smith and Leonard target a final push for the Regular Season Championship — knowing the benefit of additional points to start The Chase. The top team after 18 races begins with 1,100 points — 25 above second and 35 above third.
Is that attainable?
“If you look at Denny’s run [in the Cup Series] and obviously even Layne’s run, I feel like if you do your job and you win stages and you win races, you go string together two, three, four of these next races, I think we can,” Leonard said. “It’s gonna be hard. I think you’re going to need a little bit of help. I do feel like Layne and Kaden [Honeycutt] are probably the two that we got to compete with every week, but he made up a good chunk of ground in a good amount of time, and we’re just kind of feeling like we’re coming into our stretch of tracks we’re really strong at. It’s gonna be work, but I feel like we can do it as a team and a company, for sure.”