HUNTERSVILLE, N.C. — Sunday’s Anduril 250 Race the Base will be contested on a 3.4-mile layout, the fifth-longest track in the history of NASCAR’s top level.
While notable, that isn’t the reason this race weekend has been circled on many Cup teams’ calendars since the beginning of the year.
The race — and the companion NASCAR Craftsman Truck Series and NASCAR O’Reilly Auto Parts Series events on Friday and Saturday — will be run on one of the most unusual courses in stock-car racing history. NASCAR has built a winding 3.4-mile course around and through Naval Base Coronado, an active military facility in San Diego, California. It’s more than a bit odd for heavy stock cars to be running side-by-side with an aircraft carrier and other heavy-duty naval hardware as part of the landscape.
Additionally, the weekend will bring together NASCAR’s best and some of the country’s most highly trained military personnel, from sailors aboard seagoing vessels to members of elite SEAL teams.
And that’s where Damian Jackson and his teammates at 23XI Racing enter the picture.
A former SEAL and later a college football player at Nebraska, Jackson is the jackman for driver Riley Herbst’s team. Regarded as a quiet-but-productive team leader in 23XI’s Star Wars-like Airspeed race shop in Huntersville, Jackson saw the Naval Base Coronado weekend experience as a perfect opportunity to blend two worlds. He put team officials in touch with members of the Navy SEAL Foundation. Discussions through the various chains of command led to one active-duty SEAL and several former SEALs visiting the shop recently for two days of activities, with the Navy SEAL Foundation also set for involvement with 23XI over the race weekend.
The race at the base will be an unusual highlight for Jackson and others who have worn or are wearing Navy colors.
Jackson has been a supporter of the foundation, which supports SEALs, former SEALs and family members of the Navy community, since leaving the Navy.
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“The SEAL Foundation helps families (of SEALs) – like when one of my buddies passed away — a lot, and I wanted to see if we could work a sponsorship for them,” Jackson said. “The foundation helped out his wife tremendously, and they do that for all families that struggle with that. That’s why I wanted them involved. I played a little role in it, but it was really 23XI that put it all together.”
Other 23XI personnel say Jackson understates his influence in virtually everything he does, including his work in helping make the SEAL-23XI relationship a reality.
After six years in the Navy, Jackson worked his way from walk-on to scholarship player for the Nebraska Cornhuskers. After a brief flirtation with pro football, he decided to give NASCAR a shot despite almost no knowledge of the ins and outs of working pit road for a team.
A giant of a man, Jackson turned heads when he walked into 23XI for tryouts, but muscles and size don’t necessarily mean success in the high-intensity world of pit stops, just as special skills and dedication fuel the SEALs, recognized as one of the best military units in the world.
“The day that he came over and worked out, it was different from what other people did,” said Jake Lind, 23XI assistant pit crew coach. “Instead of starting to do things immediately, he kind of stepped back and studied it. That’s where he started. It was a different approach. I know he tries to give the coaches the credit for learning so quickly, but it was his work ethic.
“We showed him what to do, but it’s him being here seven days a week and working – that’s what got him where he is now. His work ethic. He’s very, very quiet, but he shows up and outworks everybody. He raises the level just by being here. I think it’s his determination that failure is not an option.”
Head pit crew coach Jon Carvin said Jackson, in only a year and a half at 23XI, has spread his approach to getting things done across the team’s systems.
“The effort level and the attention to detail is what you hope you can instill into your players, and it’s really nice and refreshing when one of your players already has all of that built into his beliefs and core structure,” he said. “You can’t possibly be around him and not raise your game because you’re going to be made to look so poor compared to what he is and what he does.
“He leaves no doubt that he cares and he wants to do well and wants others to do well, too. His contact with the Navy SEAL Foundation and getting that ball rolling and trying to do things that he knows are helping and supporting other people — he does a great job with that.”
Lind and Carvin said the sessions involving the SEALs and 23XI personnel at the shop benefited both entities as they shared approaches to operations.
“When you look at the SEAL teams, you’re looking at the most elite military unit in the world,” said Geoff Leard, the foundation’s director of athletic events and partnerships and among those who visited 23XI. “At the shop, we were blown away from the leadership all the way down to probably the lowest guy on the totem pole. How the team works there – the camaraderie, everything replicates exactly what a SEAL team is.”
At least for public consumption, Jackson downplays the San Diego race weekend. “It’s another race at another place,” he said. “Just because it’s in San Diego, it doesn’t mean we need to start freaking out.”
It’s difficult to imagine, though, that the 23XI contingent, now well-versed in the SEAL approach to life and work, and competing in a dramatically different environment, won’t see this one as beyond special.
