HUNTERSVILLE, N.C. — 23XI Racing announced a renewal and strengthening of its partnership with Xfinity on Wednesday, a move that provides both sponsorship and a technological edge to one of NASCAR’s newer teams. In doing so, the organization opened the doors of its Airspeed headquarters to provide a glimpse into how that partnership powers its race-day nerve center and to offer a first look at a new paint scheme with that support on full display.
23XI pulled back the curtain — at least partially — on its in-race war room, which has been newly branded as the Xfinity Speed Center. The team also unveiled the No. 45 Xfinity Mobile Toyota for Sunday’s Ambetter Health 400 (3 p.m. ET, FOX, PRN Radio, SiriusXM NASCAR Radio) at Atlanta Motor Speedway, with Jess Muir — Xfinity’s senior director of brand partnerships and amplification — helping driver Tyler Reddick reveal the new look.
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The renewed commitment from one of NASCAR’s premier partners has produced a full-circle moment for 23XI’s roster. All three of its drivers — Bubba Wallace, Tyler Reddick and Riley Herbst — rose to the NASCAR Cup Series through the Xfinity Series, creating bonds with Xfinity’s representatives along their developmental path. Wallace, who spent two full seasons (2015-16) in the Xfinity Series, called it a “welcome-home party, just because of the people that run Xfinity.” The homecoming feel also resonated for Reddick, who won two Xfinity Series championships (2018-19) before reaching Cup.
“Typically, when you bring someone in that you’re going to work with, you meet new people, new faces, and with this, there’s a lot of familiarity,” Reddick said. “We’ve gotten to spend a lot of time over the years through running in the Xfinity Series. So for me, just really cool. I wouldn’t be here today, sitting here talking about this partnership, if I didn’t have those huge moments in the Xfinity Series, and so it’s just really cool that it’s come back around.”
23XI — the organization founded by Michael Jordan and Denny Hamlin — is beginning just its second season operating out of Airspeed, the 114,000-square-foot facility that houses its newly expanded three-car Cup Series outfit. The attention to detail shows throughout the building’s two stories, and the Xfinity Speed Center stays true to that meticulous theme.
Dave Rogers, 23XI’s senior director of competition, says that roughly 12 to 15 employees work from the Speed Center on race day, with about half that workforce manning practice and qualifying sessions. Each of 23XI’s race teams has a vehicle dynamics engineer and one analytics engineer. The vehicle dynamics group works from the war room as one unit, while analytics engineers set up shop at the track.
“They’re the guys looking at fuel mileage and race strategy and stuff like that,” Rogers says, “and then we keep our vehicle dynamicists here and through all the equipment here, those vehicle dynamicists can report directly to the crew chief.” Keeping that group of personnel closer to their North Carolina homes, free from travel time and the long hours at the track, helps to keep them fresh — “human performance,” as Rogers terms it.
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War-room staff for all three teams share information from the four rows of theater-style seating, communicating freely through an intercom system on their laptops and soaking in a wide array of data and camera feeds on a giant display. A full-field leaderboard separates 23XI’s own drivers and Toyota stablemates with different color-coded highlights on one side, and on the other, eight sections show pit-stall cameras, in-car feeds and weather radar.
It’s a potential overflow of information, but not of noise. The much lower-key bustle of the Speed Center environment — quiet, connected and collaborative — draws a sharp contrast to the typical at-track commotion.
“What’s crazy for us is, as you hear now, it’s very calm in here,” says Mike Wheeler, 23XI Racing’s senior director of planning and operations and a former crew chief. “I sat on the (pit) box for many years, so has Dave. It’s easy to get punched in the face at the race track and not know what’s going. In here, it’s easy to keep track of two or three teams, so it’s a never-ending success for us to have the group here.”
Wheeler recounted a moment from last season’s Cup Series playoffs, when broadside contact between Reddick and Hamlin at the Charlotte Motor Speedway road course caused the No. 45 Toyota to lift and jolt. He said that a vehicle dynamicist and a junior engineer analyzed images of the damage, then told crew chief Billy Scott about their calculations, helping inform his decisions about which adjustments to make.
“What’s interesting now that we’re here at the Xfinity Speed Center, I spend most of my time on the weekends here and don’t feel disconnected from the race track,” says Wheeler, who has five Cup Series wins during his time as a Cup Series crew chief. “It’s actually amazing how much you can be in here and know what’s going on, and not even just knowing what’s going on with one team. You can actually listen to … all three teams, because it is quiet, it is condensed and it is structured.”
23XI’s competition czars held back on what information was displayed to a gathering of reporters Wednesday, suggesting that the team has more analytics and insights in reserve to stay competitive with other Cup Series operations. That effort now has extra backing and branding from Xfinity, which has long prided itself on its reliability and speedy service.
“Technology changes so fast,” Rogers says. “I think if you look at the display, I imagine we’re hard-pressed to be beat on that, the amount of data we can get up there and then the secret sauce that we’re not showing you. … I think that’s what separates the top teams is the data that you can get and how you can present it in a digestible form and get it to the crew chief so they can actually do something with it.”
