Why Haas Factory Team is choosing Chevrolet

Haas Factory Team president Joe Custer always anticipated a ‘gut check’ moment this season and the results led them to Chevrolet next season.

In the first year following four-car powerhouse Stewart-Haas Racing consolidating into the single-car Haas Factory Team Custer expected a challenge but is also under a mandate from team owner Gene Haas to be more competitive.

Driver Cole Custer, also Joe’s son, is 33rd in the Cup Series standings but also has a championship winning resume to suggest there is more to unlock under the right circumstances. Thus, over the summer, the elder Custer competed a thorough analysis of where they were compared to the expectations in Year One.

“Well, for us, the results speak for themselves on the Cup side,” Custer told Motorsport.com on Wednesday. “This is a performance based, results driven sport and we need to be better. Candidly, we expected to have to assess where we were by a certain point this year and we found reasons for optimism but we also needed a reality check in other areas.”

Operating almost like a start-up, Haas Factory Team entered into an alliance with Haas Factory Team but upon shopping around this summer, Custer found a better deal with some familiar faces in the General Motors circle.

“I do want to say that Ford did literally everything they say said they would,” Custer said. “It’s a just a matter of what we found when we evaluated our strengths and our weaknesses, did our deep dive, and decided we wanted a degree of synergy and alignment when it came to our strengths and what we have not done as well.”

(Re) enter Rick Hendrick.

Gene Haas first entered NASCAR in the 1990s as a partner to Hendrick Motorsports, not only as a sponsor but also as a key partner, providing his CNC shop and metal cutting expertise to the emergent Cup organization. Haas then started his own team in 2003 with support from Hendrick, a relationship that extended into the SHR years and both championships with Tony Stewart and Kevin Harvick.

So this is kind of a Back to the Future moment for Custer.

“The times have changed but what hasn’t changed is the relationship,” Custer said. “It’s a healthy relationship. Rick has always appreciated good manufacturing and our heritage is in CNC machinery and metal cutting.

“Dive deeper, we have tools at our shop that have value and engineering tools to augment what they’re already doing. There’s a friendship and mutual trust that makes this just make a lot of sense for us.”

Haas Factory Team will continue to operate out of the former Stewart-Haas shop in Kannapolis. Custer does not expect to have an office at the Hendrick campus in Concord but anticipates there being a lot of travel back and forth between both parties as they help each other.

Ultimately, Haas just needed better data to unload with the kind of speed they will need in an era with drastically reduced practice time and a single source supplied racing platform.

“Where we needed help is data,” Custer said. “We need simulation tools to have a predictable car at the track. Ideally, it unloads the way we expect it to based on what we developed in simulation.”

Cole Custer, Haas Factory Team Ford

Photo by: Samuel Corum / Getty Images

And that just hasn’t consistently been the case this season.

Another element of Haas Factory Team business this decision will affect is the company’s customer car program. Haas services chassis development and repair for Sieg Racing and AM Racing. A partnership with Chevrolet means closer coordination with JR Motorsports and Hendrick at the Xfinity Series level but Custer says it’s too soon to know what this means for the customer program.

“We’re exploring our options with our partner teams,” Custer said. “They might want to stay with Ford and they might want to explore their options. They have to decide on the best course of action for them and no matter what decisions they make, we’ll certainly do what we can to help them.”

Custer says HFT has a ‘symbiotic relationship’ with its partner teams and they are just as valuable to them as vice versa. He anticipates having that program next year but ultimately says what that looks like will be shaped by all those conversations in the months to come.

With certainty, Sam Mayer and Sheldon Creed will be back in the flagship No. 41 and 00 cars, respectively. Custer also expects his son to be back in the No. 41 Cup car, while also saying if other opportunities were to come about for the 2023 Xfinity Series champion, he would be free to explore them.

“He’s got a career to look out for,” the elder Custer said. “We have to build a team for him to best showcase his abilities. We’re aligned right now in the sense that our goals and his are pointed the same direction. That could always change. That’s how racing is.

“Ultimately, if you’re improving, everyone is generally happy and if you’re not, everyone generally isn’t.”

Most importantly, Custer thinks it’s possible to build a championship contender under this model, a single-car satellite team, albeit one with its own independent shop and machining capabilities. In fact, he thinks it’s actually more straightforward than what Furniture Row accomplished with Martin Truex Jr. in 2017.

Custer thinks its simpler in a sense because they are in the greater Charlotte area and they do have their own high-performance car building capacity and history. The decision to join Chevrolet and Hendrick just came down to the data, engineering and CFD.

“I think it can be done,” Custer said. “I wouldn’t do this if I didn’t think we could. Has it been done yet? Certainly not with this car but that’s also the allure to me, what drives me, that I believe we can win races and compete for a championship.”