LAS VEGAS – The 2024 NASCAR season was beyond challenging for Legacy Motor Club.
The two-car team, led by majority owner and seven-time Cup Series champion Jimmie Johnson, went to work over the offseason to make the necessary hires and continue building the ‘jigsaw puzzle’ to improve for the 2025 season.
Included in the change was a mentality shift for driver John Hunter Nemechek. Instead of overstepping his boundaries and stretching for an extra position or two on the results sheet, he instead needed to focus on just reaching the checkered flag, as the No. 42 Toyota failed to finish six races in 2024. According to Racing Insights, Nemechek was also the driver involved in the second-most cautions over the 36-race schedule.
Through the opening month of the 2025 season, Nemechek already has a pair of top-10 finishes. In addition to finishing 14th last weekend at Phoenix Raceway, he’s halfway to his top-15 total from 2024.
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“I feel like I’ve been super focused on the race cars showing up to the race track and putting all my effort in there,” Nemechek said Saturday at Las Vegas Motor Speedway. “I haven’t been paying a lot of attention to the stats and points and all that stuff; I don’t want to get caught up in all of that. I think it’s better for me to go into the weekend and know that I need to execute the way that we should as a team. And for myself to be better and continue to push myself to be better as well as the team.”
Putting complete races together has been the primary emphasis for Nemechek. If the team lacks speed early in the race, it’s up to him to relay what he’s feeling to his new crew chief Travis Mack to make the correct adjustments.
Race craft is important to Nemechek as well, and it’s something he continues to progress at.
“You look at our days at Daytona, Atlanta, COTA and Phoenix; they’ve been up and down days,” he added. “We’ve been towards the front, we’ve been in the middle of the pack and been towards the back. We’ve been able to rebound most of the time to get back up to mid pack and have solid results.
“I feel like I was not very good at that last year, so I’m trying to execute and finish races. When we feel like we have a 20th-place car, we need to go finish 20th with it. I don’t need to finish 22nd, let’s finish 20th or a little bit better if everything works out. I feel way better coming into this year for sure.”
The next area of improvement for the No. 42 team is qualifying. Nemechek qualified 30th for Sunday but will drop to the rear at the start of the race due to the team electing to change a throttle body. Meanwhile, his Legacy Motor Club teammate and series veteran Erik Jones qualified fifth for the second consecutive week.
But when it comes to race day, Nemechek has bettered Jones in the finishing order all four weeks to start 2025.
“I feel like in the race, Travis and I and the whole 42 team is able to execute,” Nemechek noted. “Phoenix last week, we didn’t have a lot of speed, and it was an up and down day for us and we continued to work on our car throughout the day and we ended up being able to get ourselves to the point where we got inside the top 10 late and salvaged a 14th-place finish out of it. I think that’s how our year has been so far. We’ve been able to execute late in the races and finish it off where we feel like we should.”
Jones has seen Nemechek mature on the track. He also believes that expectations were likely too high for Nemechek in his first season with Legacy, as he was returning to the Cup Series full-time for the first time since 2020.
“I know John Hunter had one year in Cup, but it was with the old car, so it was more like being a rookie again,” Jones said. “Trying to learn all of that was tough just because our cars weren’t how they needed to be and he’s trying to learn and figure it out. I think there was some heat put on him, unfairly in some ways. I hope this year, with our cars being better, he can take advantage of that and learn more.”
With three wild card races in the opening four weeks of the season, Legacy should have a better indication of where it stacks up following Sunday’s event at Las Vegas. Nemechek ranked 30th in practice and 24th on 10-lap averages.
But with the mindset shift and new hires, Nemechek knows the team has a baseline to begin the new year.
“I don’t know how much better we are than last year, but the culture is better, the team is better,” Nemechek stated. “Everyone is jelling, everyone has a great attitude and it’s been a lot of hard work through the offseason. I feel like overall it’s neat to get to the race track and show speed and be able to run well.”