Editor’s Note: This marks the first story in a three-part series as Spire Motorsports allows NASCAR Digital Media to cover its preparation for the 2025 Daytona 500.

MOORESVILLE, N.C. — Jeff Dickerson has long had lofty aspirations for what Spire Motorsports could become. On the precipice of the 2025 NASCAR Cup Series season, those visions are quickly merging with reality.

Gone are the days of excuses for poor results, the team co-owner told NASCAR.com in his office Wednesday morning. Now, both internally and externally, there is an anticipation – perhaps even an expectation – for success to emerge from the three-car outfit.

One month ahead of the 67th annual Daytona 500, Spire Motorsports opened its doors to NASCAR.com to observe how the program is preparing for the “Great American Race,” which officially begins the season on Feb. 16 (1:30 p.m. ET, FOX, MRN Radio, SiriusXM NASCAR Radio).

RELATED: Daytona 500 schedule | Get behind-the-scenes looks at Spire’s shop

EARLY BIRDS GET THE WORM

At 6:30 a.m. this cold winter morning, the sun has not yet crested the horizon in Mooresville, North Carolina. But visible from the towering open glass outside the lobby is a peek to the brightly lit shop floor, already bustling with activity – crewmen, mechanics, supervisors and so forth walking with purpose, even if some are still shaking off those early-morning cobwebs.

Inside the dark shadows of the lobby sit a small handful of race vehicles: two No. 77 Cup Series Chevrolets and two Craftsman Truck Series Silverados, all waiting for the lights to pop on both from the ceiling and from the sky, which will soon bathe the open area in natural sunlight.

The shop floor is crowded. Entering from the lobby, the back left wall features seven truck chassis in various stages of completion in addition to Corey Day’s ARCA Menards Series Chevy, which went to Daytona a week ago for a two-day test. Along the front left are two more truck chassis and a bare ARCA chassis. Directly upon entry sits a completed Next Gen chassis on jack stands awaiting additional parts, plus yet another truck that appears complete, save for a vinyl wrap. To the immediate right, a massive collection of Next Gen clips: centers, front clips and rear clips waiting to be put together.

Along the far right wall sit two enormous pit boxes, one for the No. 7 Cup team and one for the No. 77. At the near corner sits a completed No. 77 car for Hocevar upon the setup plate.

Perhaps the most perplexing trick of all, however, was walking onto the shop floor at that early hour. As the bright white floor reflected the fluorescent lights from above, time seemed irrelevant. There was no indication the sun was still waking up itself, nor that any work had concluded overnight.

So when shop foreman Doug Powers gathers the entire floor of crewmen for a 7 a.m. meeting in the center of the shop, there are no groans or aches audible from anyone; the team, as one, readies its collective ear for an overview of the day’s to-dos.

Powers, standing at the southeast part of the shop with a cup of coffee in hand, notes the first priority is getting one of the vehicles onto the setup plate to reverify and double-check numbers that should be ready to go over by lunchtime. Chassis numbers are in for the vehicles Spire will field in the 2025 Daytona 500.

“I know there’s small windows in between these Clash cars,” Powers said. “I can give you those numbers, assembly guys, and we can start prepping parts, prepping everything we can. Probably Monday morning, first thing, we’ll start hanging clips on those.”

The No. 71 pit box needs to be rewired, and to prepare space to work on Daytona cars, pit boxes and clips of the Next Gen chassis will, in time, move from the shop floor into the lobby to create more space on the shop floor.

Powers then turns the reins of the meeting to his Cup crew chiefs, starting with Luke Lambert, leader of the No. 77 program with driver Hocevar. He notes the team’s new hauler arrives at the end of the week, which will require assistance in preparing it for the Cook Out Clash at Bowman Gray Stadium in just two weeks’ time.

Next is Travis Peterson, who comes to the No. 71 Chevy with driver Michael McDowell from Front Row Motorsports to Spire.

“Walked around a lot yesterday, looked at all the new stuff coming together,” Peterson said. “Really happy with all the new processes, people, procedures, everything the way it’s trending. Let’s keep the intensity up. I think we’re two weeks from loading the first cars, so thank you, and let’s keep digging.”

Rodney Childers, a champion from his prior stop at SHR leading the No. 4 team over the last decade with 40 career Cup wins, now joins Spire as crew chief of Justin Haley and the No. 7 car.

“Y’all are doing a really, really good job,” Childers told the group. “The cars look really good. All the equipment looks really good. Feels like everyone’s working together really well and just ready to go racing.”

With that, the meeting is adjourned, and the day can truly begin.

PUSHING INTO A NEW ERA

Spire Motorsports’ goal has always been to overachieve. Oftentimes, throughout the team’s fledging years in the late 2010s and early 2020s, that meant a top-30 finish. That quickly grew to top 25s, and slowly to the point where top 20s became an expectation over the last year with drivers Corey LaJoie, Carson Hocevar and Zane Smith.

The path was not linear – especially considering Justin Haley’s shock win at Daytona in the summer of 2019 when a rogue lightning bolt within striking distance of the track prematurely ended the race and gifted him and the young team their first, and so far, only Cup Series victory.

But consider the wealth of experience roaming the shop’s floors now. Childers brings with him 20 years of Cup Series success from years at Evernham, Michael Waltrip Racing and SHR. Peterson led McDowell to a series-best six pole positions in 2024 at FRM in addition to a past win on the Indianapolis Motor Speedway road course and multiple years spent at RFK Racing, Hendrick Motorsports and JR Motorsports. Lambert has served as a crew chief or engineer at NASCAR’s highest levels since 2011 with Richard Childress Racing, RFK Racing, JRM and Legacy Motor Club before he and Hocevar delivered Spire’s highest points finish in 2024 (21st).

Consider also the team’s newest additions in Matt McCall, director of vehicle performance, and Dax Gerringer, technical director, from RFK and SHR, respectively. Spire Motorsports has attracted talent to its shop floors. Now, it’s just a matter of melding all those personalities together.

“We’re rolling pretty deep right now, so the expectation has shifted a little bit,” competition director Ryan Sparks told NASCAR.com.

Sparks has been with Spire since 2021, when the team was still maximizing what it could from hand-me-down chassis and based in Concord, North Carolina. The jarring contrast from those days to these days is best summarized by those changing expectations. But what exactly does a shift in expectations mean to a guy who, through last year, was simultaneously both a crew chief and a competition director?

“I just think the level of accountability we hold each other to,” Sparks said. “At the end of the day, it’s just performance, right? If we’re not performing, or if it’s an individual or a team or whatever, then we have to assess it now, whereas before, we may have had to kind of deal with it till the end of the season. Now, we have the opportunity where our main focus is pushing performance, and if it doesn’t involve that, then we’re not interested in it.”

Past success often fuels egos, especially in a sport based on such fine details that lead to results. So far, those personalities haven’t clashed within the walls of Spire.

“They bring a lot of new ideas to the table, things they’ve had success with,” Sparks said. “Collectively as a group, I think it’s really hard in most cases for a group of six or seven alpha males to get in a room and agree and get along, right? Fortunately for us, it’s been seamless. We’ll have a roundtable and it’s like, ‘Man, you guys were successful here. What’d you see? What’d you do? What was your thinking? What was your approach?’

“And, even those guys, they didn’t come in here and just try to change everything we’ve done. They’ve been extremely open-minded and saw what we’ve done last year and how we built this thing. So I think that’s really what’s been attractive to most people is the process of building and seeing what we’ve created here, the culture. And I truly believe it’s starting to become a destination. People want to be here.”

DAYTONA ON DECK

As the team stood on Jan. 15, just 32 days from taking the green flag in the Daytona 500, none of the team’s three cars had yet been bolted together. In years past, that would be cause for panic.

That isn’t the case in 2025, as the Next Gen chassis utilized by teams allows for quicker build processes. Powers admitted a tinge of nervous energy hit 10 days prior, but quickly added how short-lived those nerves were.

“In a perfect world, we’d have those (Daytona) cars done now sitting,” Powers said, “and you could have the right guys in the company with the right information fluff on them, as we’d say. But that’s a perfect-world scenario. With everything we got going on with the Clash cars, we were on a week-and-a-half timeframe from when we started building them to needing it done on Friday.

“So essentially, less than a week and a half ago, we had those inter-sections sitting here just like these, with nothing on the front, rear clip, no parts at all. And we have added employees — not just changed employees but added employees in positions that, within a day and a half, I knew we were fine. I was a little concerned about it, the timeline with new employees and getting up to speed on how we do it our way here and where the parts and pieces are. And like I said, within a day and a half, I was like, we’re good. The week-and-a-half schedule is fine. If we start Daytona cars on Friday or Monday, that’s a two-week schedule. So that’s even more time on than we have for the Clash cars. So we’re essentially still ahead to be able to meet all our deadlines and not be rushing.”

As work begins to take shape for Daytona, thanks to the morning’s chassis callouts, troubleshooting finds an early importance. By 11:30 a.m. — already five hours into the workday for most at Spire — what could have morphed into a significant problem was already quelled and limited to a minor hiccup. On the team’s first chassis measured of 2025, an error arose, sending numbers out of alignment, which could have added an extra four hours of work to their Wednesday.

“It could have been a big one, but it wasn’t,” Powers said. “It was just a double-check on a chassis-measuring file. We’ve had some new guys start. We’ve made that better. We just had to clean up one end. It was on the first car that we measured this year, and we got it handled. It’ll be done by the end of the day. It got us ahead for the cars coming forward. It’s kind of just a pre-check on things anyway. So we found a bug, got it clean, cleaned up, moved on. Everything else is fairly smooth.

“We’ve got chassis callouts for Daytona. NASCAR gives us an allotment of front and rear clips and with the direction every year that Spire has taken, we have upped our allotment. So we measure those, QC (quality control), pick the best ones for the track. We were holding off this week to see if we got any more. And we’re pretty close to just making a call and assembling front clip, rear clip for our front-line cars. So that’ll probably happen the next day or so.”

The team’s continuing growth means the timing in 2025 is significantly different than it was entering 2024. The timeline of beginning to bolt cars together was roughly the same, Powers said, but the build process simply took longer with fewer people.

“The experience that we’ve added — we didn’t fully take advantage of a bad situation at SHR, but it just so happened that some of those guys needed another place to go,” Powers added. “Super experienced, been around a long time, won a lot of races, championships, and it’s just plug and play. The only learning curve is our process (and) where the parts and pieces are to get going.”

Plenty of new faces have made their way to Spire, which enters its second season as a three-car Cup team housed in what previously stood as Kyle Busch Motorsports. But Sparks’ work continues to this day, focusing on adding even more bodies to the growing staff.

“Right now, we’ve got a few more people we’d like to hire, so doing some interviews,” Sparks explains. “We’ve got a lot of new equipment rolling in, making decisions on processes and approach how we’re going to attack it and trying to implement those and put it in place. And these crew chiefs, keep them away from the track too long, their minds just race and they got all these crazy ideas. So I’ve got to keep the reins pulled on them a little bit and not let them get too far out there.

“But it’s, I mean, anything and everything. Everybody’s coming to me about something or a problem. So I deal with everybody else’s stuff during the day, and then at night, I get to work on or focus on what I need to do.”

Ultimately, there’s plenty still to be done: cars to be bolted together, engines to install, vinyls to wrap. But what’s most notable is the genuine calm of the shop.

There is no sense of overwhelmed anxiety. There is no nervous energy. There is no claustrophobia, despite the numerous vehicles scattered across the shop floor.

There is a steady drive felt within these four walls. There is a sense of diligence and excitement. There is clear purpose in each step. There is organization.

That excitement lingers to deliver upon the potential that sits in front of Spire Motorsports. The Daytona 500 will serve a critical role in that process.