COREY LAJOIE | KAZ GRALA
Phoenix Season Finale Advance
Event Overview
● Event: NASCAR Cup Series Season Finale (Round 36 of 36)
● Time/Date: 3 p.m. EST on Sunday, Nov. 10
● Location: Phoenix Raceway
● Layout: 1-mile oval
● Laps/Miles: 312 laps/312 miles (502 kilometers)
● Stage Lengths: Stage 1: 60 laps / Stage 2: 125 laps / Final Stage: 127 laps
● TV/Radio: NBC / MRN / SiriusXM NASCAR Radio
Corey LaJoie, Driver of the No. 51 Mighty Fire Breaker Ford Mustang Dark Horse
● Corey LaJoie, driver of the No. 51 Mighty Fire Breaker Ford Mustang Dark Horse, will make his 272nd-career NASCAR Cup Series start in Sunday’s season finale at Phoenix Raceway. It will be his 15th start at the 1-mile oval and seventh with Rick Ware Racing (RWR).
● LaJoie’s best Cup Series finish at Pheonix is an 18th-place result earned in the final race of the 2022 season. He also owns two NASCAR Xfinity Series starts at the track with a best result of 22nd in November 2017.
● LaJoie enters the final race of the season with one top-five, three top-10s and nine top-15 finishes. The 33-year-old from North Carolina joined RWR prior to the Sept. 29 race at Kansas Speedway in Kansas City. He finished 15th in this first start with the team and totaled three top-20 finishes in six starts.
● Mighty Fire Breaker LLC is a leading provider of environmentally safe and sustainable solutions for proactive wildfire defense. The Mighty Fire Breaker portfolio includes EPA Safer Choice Certified Citrotech® wildfire inhibitors, mobile and stationary spray application systems, and GPS-tracking, recording and mapping technologies that support intelligent proactive wildfire defense management practices.
Kaz Grala, Driver of the No. 15 Meat N’ Bone Ford Mustang Dark Horse
● Sunday’s race marks Kaz Grala’s 31st-career Cup Series start and his second at Phoenix. The driver of the No. 15 Meat N’ Bone Ford Mustang Dark Horse finished 30th in his debut at the 1-mile track on March 10.
● Grala has five NASCAR Xfinity Series starts at Phoenix, resulting in two finishes inside the top-15 with the best being a 10th-place outing earned in November 2023. He also has two NASCAR Craftsman Truck Series starts with a fifth-place finish earned in his last outing in November 2022.
● In 22 starts this season for RWR, Grala has three top-20 finishes. His best was a 14th-place effort in the Feb. 25 race at Atlanta Motor Speedway. Grala enters Phoenix with 6,110 of 6,572 available laps completed (93 percent) and an average finish of 28.3.
● Meat N’ Bone is an online butcher shop offering premium quality meats delivered locally and shipped nationally. Customers can order from more than 300 products, including USDA Prime and Wagyu A5, and have it delivered fresh to their door. Meat N’ Bone also offers local pickup and a personalized retail experience in its boutiques.
Rick Ware Racing Notes
● The Mission Foods NHRA Drag Racing Series visited Las Vegas for the penultimate event of the 2024 season and RWR Top Fuel driver Clay Millican made his eighth semifinal appearance of the year. The Drummonds, Tennessee, native went up againt eventual winner Brittany Force in the third round of eliminations, falling short by .0487 of a second. Millican sits sixth in the playoff standings, 93 points out of first, as the series prepares for the NHRA Finals at Pomona (Calif.) Dragstrip Nov. 14-17.
● Rick Ware has been a motorsports mainstay for more than 40 years. It began at age six when the third-generation racer began his driving career and has since spanned four wheels and two wheels on both asphalt and dirt. Competing in the SCCA Trans Am Series and other road-racing divisions led Ware to NASCAR in the early 1980s, where he finished third in his NASCAR debut – the 1983 Warner W. Hodgdon 300 NASCAR Grand American race at Riverside (Calif.) International Raceway. More than a decade later, injuries would force Ware out of the driver seat and into fulltime team ownership. In 1995, Rick Ware Racing was formed, and with wife Lisa by his side, Ware has since built his eponymous organization into an entity that fields two fulltime entries in the NASCAR Cup Series while simultaneously campaigning successful teams in the Top Fuel class of the NHRA Mission Foods Drag Racing Series, Progressive American Flat Track and FIM World Supercross Championship (WSX), where RWR won the 2022 SX2 championship with rider Shane McElrath.
Corey LaJoie, Driver Q&A
How would you evaluate your time with RWR and the 2024 season as a whole?
“I’ve really enjoyed working with everyone at Rick Ware Racing. I feel like we’ve had some good races and some tough weekends, but we keep going. As far as the season, it’s about the same. Ups and downs, but we’ve got one more race to go out and have a strong run. I’d like to finish the year on a high note and give everyone something to be proud of.”
Phoenix doesn’t look like a tricky track, but that all changes when the race goes green. What makes it so challenging?
“Like a few other tracks we go to, it can be hard to get your car driving good at both ends. The turns are very different, and then you add in the challenge of restarts and it’s just a lot of layers to putting together a good run. I think we’ve seen good racing at Phoenix recently and we’ll see the same this weekend. And with how Martinsville played out, I wouldn’t be surprised if it was a little more hectic than it typically is.”
Kaz Grala, Driver Q&A
How would you evaluate the 2024 season?
“My goal for 2024 was to learn these NextGen cars and be able to maximize our weekend results by the end of the year. I feel like those boxes have absolutely been checked and I’ve been able to get everything out of this second half of this season. I’m looking forward to going back to Phoenix again and ending this year strong with RWR.”
There is a high level of aggressiveness that is often on display at Phoenix. Will you let those drivers competing for a championship have at it, or do you expect to be in the mix and taking the same risks?
“Phoenix certainly rewards pushing hard and taking some risks, so that’s what the plan will be for this weekend. While we’re not in the championship fight, we feel like we have just as much to race for as everyone else does. There’s nothing better than ending a season with a satisfying result. I was able to finish last season with a top-10 at Phoenix, so we have our sights set on capping this year off on a high together once again.”
