When Regan Smith crossed the finish line, he not only scored his first Daytona win – but also brought JR Motorsports home a very special win.
“It’s obviously a great way to start off the season, “co-owner Kelley Earnhardt Miller said. “Happy for our partners that are here in Ragu and TaxSlayer. Just real exciting there for the finish. I was holding my breath the whole time, for sure.
“It will give our team a whole lot of momentum for the season. We’re just one team with one dream, and that’s to win the championship. This is a great start for it.”
Co-owner Dale Earnhardt Jr. agreed with his sister’s sentiments, saying that the work they’ve done over the past 16 to 18 months in building the team is starting to pay off.
“Everything seems to be going in a great direction. I think Regan understood a lot about last year,” Earnhardt Jr. commented. “This is a great way for him to start the season and give him a lot of confidence after the off-season we made with crew chiefs and whatnot, to race for the championship. I think they got a great opportunity at it.”
Earnhardt Jr. feels Smith will be stronger this year due to the everything that he had learned last season. Smith started off the year strong and led hte points early, though fell off the second half of the year and was unable to capture the championship.
“I told him that the guy that wins the Nationwide Series championship is the guy that’s going to make the least amount of mistakes,” Earnhardt explains. “You have plenty of racecar, but there’s four or five teams that have enough racecar to do it. It’s the guy that will be most consistent and not falter that will be up there. That’s really what happened.
“He had a couple big weekends that cost him quite a bit. Some of that stuff is unavoidable. You just got to be careful of the situations you’re in, especially at the road courses. Late in those races, they kind of run all over each other at the end. He has to be careful at those races and try to get out of there alive.”
When trying to put yourself in championship contention, certainly wins are important along the way. Though wins are also important for the business side as well.
“I mean, it’s just definitely key to put it together. Really with our partners, they want to see us in Victory Lane, they want to see us running on the track and off the track,” Earnhardt Miller commented. “We do a bang-up job off the track with our group. So putting it together and being across the finish line number one really just adds to that.
“At the end of the day this is a performance-based business. Being up front and being up there for the wins is what we really need to do.”
Though going for those wins, it can be tough at times with the Sprint Cup drivers running the series and picking up those wins. Earnhardt Miller says it’s all about balance in how much the Sprint Cup drivers run as they’re important for gaining sponsors and also building the young drivers, in relation to their talent.
“We leverage those relationships so that we can have multi-race partnerships for our other cars,” she said. “This year we’re going to be doing that with Kevin Harvick as well. He’s brought a lot of partners onboard.
“It’s important to be able to have the Cup guys in our series. I think the young guys that are in the series like to be able to race against talent like Dale and Kevin and those guys. We’ll just have to find the balance for what makes it work. But it’s definitely part of our program and part of the leverage we use from a sponsorship standpoint.”
