If you were familiar with the NASCAR Craftsman Truck Series early on, you’d now find two significant differences with Tricon Garage’s flagship No. 11 team.
That’s because Kaden Honeycutt is the team’s new driver, taking over for Corey Heim after his historic 12-win campaign led to a 2025 title.
But missing from the garage is Scott Zipadelli, one of the most successful crew chiefs in series history. And that wasn’t by design.
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Five days before the season opener at Daytona, Zipadelli suffered severe injuries to his left leg in a dirt bike crash. He shattered the top of his tibia, breaking it all the way down toward his ankle. He dislocated his knee, creating internal damage, and also cracked multiple bone chips on his femur. The crash sidelined Zipadelli, a 36-time winning crew chief in the Truck Series, for the first three races of the 2026 campaign, which featured a brand-new driver in his championship-winning Toyota.
“Basically, I crashed my dirt bike pretty hard and drove my leg into the ground when it was straight … my leg went in a direction it’s not supposed to,” Zipadelli told NASCAR.com this week. “Overall, I can’t really complain. A little bit frustrated. Wish I was a little bit further along than I am in my recovery. But, I watched these videos of Lindsey Vonn, and I’m like, ‘How is she doing that?’ But my doctor tells me it’s a different injury, [to] just stay the course. But overall, I’m doing OK.
“It’s just really exhausting being on crutches all day, and my body’s trying to heal and I’m trying to work and do too much. By the end of the day, I’m just completely exhausted.”
Obviously, that all threw an unexpected wrench in the team’s plans for a big 2026 season. But while Honeycutt is new to the organization, he certainly isn’t new to the series. The 22-year-old driver from Willow Park, Texas, has over 60 starts in Trucks dating back to 2022, and unexpectedly joined the Toyota family midway through last year. He raced full-time in 2025 with three different teams, making the first 16 starts of the season for Niece Motorsports and a one-off for Young’s Motorsports at Watkins Glen before filling in for the injured Stewart Friesen the rest of the way.
Despite the unusual circumstances, Honeycutt made the most of it. His performance during the Niece races qualified him for the playoffs, eventually making the Championship 4 in the Halmar-Friesen Racing truck and finishing third in driver’s points.
So battling a little on-track adversity isn’t foreign to the longtime late model ace. Tricon tapped David Stewart, a team engineer, to take over official crew chief duties while Zipadelli stayed back in the Charlotte area for recovery. Zipadelli explained that he’d regularly communicate with Honeycutt and the road crew for his input, and occasionally visited the shop and worked out of the team war room during races — as long as he could access his ice machine.
The two-time championship crew chief returned to the track at Darlington two weeks ago with a large brace on his knee and guided Honeycutt to a fourth-place finish, leading 59 laps. All in all, though, Honeycutt believed the No. 11 pushed through the extraordinary conditions seamlessly.
MORE: Honeycutt ‘really upset’ after Darlington near-miss
“My team is so self-sufficient without Scott at the race track; it was actually pretty mind-blowing,” Honeycutt said in a media availability this week. “I think it shows Scott, as the leader of the team, that he has propelled this team to even be more self-sufficient without him there.
“Having him at Darlington was a huge step. I think it definitely made our relationship good. We were able to communicate with each other, and I can hear his voice and know how he talks and how he is on race weekends. I think we had a really good weekend at Darlington. It definitely sucked not having the first three weeks, but not having him wasn’t a huge challenge just because of the race tracks we raced at and the situations we were dealt as a team.”
Zipadelli agreed. With two drafting tracks and a road course to start the 2026 season, he said those were the best three races he could have missed. The team had a 50-minute practice session at Daytona, and just a few laps at St. Petersburg before rain halted on-track activity. As far as communication and setups go, they aren’t lagging behind as much as one might think.
With Zipadelli now on the mend, saying that he hopes to ditch the crutches in three weeks and begin physical therapy, he and Honeycutt can officially hit the ground running with a crew nearly identical to last year’s with Heim.
“Kaden, in his career, hadn’t had all the tools that we have here from Toyota, so a little bit of a learning curve there,” Zipadelli explained. “He’s adapted really well. I thought it showed at Darlington, where we practiced our sim stuff how we’re going to race, and he applied it to what he learned and he applied it at the race track, and it was pretty seamless. So it’s probably what you’d expect having a new driver come into your program, really. I would say, you know, in a year or two, it would be just like Corey, but the first six months are crucial that you learn these tools the proper way and you don’t pick up any bad habits.
“It’s so hard to get to know a new driver and go through rule changes as they have, procedure changes, and then also have a new crew or even a couple of guys. I’ve been fortunate over the past six, seven years that most of my guys have all stayed together, and it’s just business as usual. They all know their roles and they help each other. They double-check, triple-check each other and work really well together, very efficient. So that’s really huge, and I know that was very important to try to keep our group together, and that gives Kaden a lot of confidence as well.”
Confidence, indeed. And Honeycutt understands that he’s under the microscope. Heim won 21 times in three seasons under Zipadelli’s tutelage, and the Texan realizes it’s now or never to start banking victories and show he belongs with the highly touted team.
“I’d like to say there isn’t, but honestly, there kind of is,” Honeycutt said regarding any added pressure. “I just want to get my first [win]. I definitely have more starts and not enough wins as what the stat sheet says, but I feel like once I can get the first one, I can understand where I was missing in the past starts on running up front. I think Darlington was the first legit race that I was able to lead the race and take control, and also be put in the situation to know what could have happened if I lost it. So now that I have that feeling and knowing what I did wrong to lose that race, I feel like I can go every week now and be in the situation and not make that mistake again and start capitalizing and winning them.
“So I think losing that race was definitely not a bad thing at all, I think, as far as a learning perspective from my end to correct it and just move forward from it.”
With as close as Honeycutt found himself to championship glory a year ago, he and Zipadelli both believe the 11 team is plenty capable of hoisting the trophy come November. They sit second in points entering Rockingham on Friday (4:30 p.m. ET, FS1, NRN Radio, SiriusXM NASCAR Radio), only 33 markers behind series veteran Chandler Smith.
But with still 21 races to go and a new championship format in play, it’s a why-not-us mindset as Honeycutt enjoys the best opportunity of his young NASCAR national series career.
“We have 100% a chance at winning the title at the end of the year, especially from the way the points format is. I think it honestly falls into our favor a little bit easier, just from on a consistent basis on what we can bring to the race track every week, and winning pays a lot,” Honeycutt said. “I feel like we can do that a bunch this year, just need to get the first one and keep on working after that and just keep on rolling through it the rest of the year.”