Bayley Currey On Niece Motorsports, Continuous Improvement & Texas Group

In his time in NASCAR, Bayley Currey has bounced around quite a bit.

Between the three NASCAR national series, he’s driven for 10 different team owners.

These days, Currey is driving full-time in the NASCAR Craftsman Truck Series for Niece Motorsports alongside Matt Mills and a truck that is shared by a number of drivers. Currey took some time at World Wide Technology Raceway back in June to talk with Frontstretch about his time with the team and where things are going.

Phil Allaway, Frontstretch: Coming into the 12th race of the season, you’re currently 16th (he’s now 19th after 13 races) in points with a couple of 11th-place finishes at Kansas Speedway and Bristol Motor Speedway as your best finishes of the year. Perhaps not the most indicative of how you’ve run, but how would you describe your season to this point?

Bayley Currey: Hasn’t been the best, obviously. We’d like to have more top 10s, top-fives and some wins in there. We’ve had some great trucks, but we’ve had a lot of things not go our way.

At Charlotte … we had a really fast truck and kind of let that slip away from us. Getting stuck in the back with the riff-raff. Getting caught up in someone else’s mess.

Kind of goes for a lot of places. We’ve had a lot of weird stuff happen. We had a roof come off this year [at Atlanta Motor Speedway]. I don’t really know how to describe that.

Super proud of our team. They’ve been bringing me good trucks. Just gotta keep fighting, get them to the end [and] get them the finishes that they deserve.

Allaway: I didn’t want to spend too much time on the roof issue since it was two-and-a-half months ago. It did make some press since that doesn’t really happen unless you barrel-roll the truck. It must have been a very unusual feeling.

Currey: It was. It sucked since I think we [could have won] that race if the thing stays together. We had a really good truck, and we were kind of hanging out in fourth. But it wasn’t meant to be.

Definitely weird. Don’t think I’ll have it happen to me again. Never seen it happen before, but we push on.

Allaway: This is probably the most stable situation that you’ve had in your NASCAR career. You’ve been here at Niece Motorsports for a couple of years now. What’s the atmosphere like with the team?

Currey: It’s great, man. I’ve been in and out with the Niece group here since 2019 but really ramped it up last year. I think I got to run 11 or 12 races here last year.

To be full-time this year is really cool. I’m really tight with a lot of the guys here. [General Manager] Cody Efaw’s been really great to me, and Al [Niece]’s been really great as well.

Al’s water truck business, where they build them, is about 20 minutes away from the house I grew up in. I always go over there on the holidays and go see him. It’s been really cool to have that Texas connection. I love this group and hope to continue with them.

Allaway: Texas does have a fair number of people that are in the sport these days, such as Chris Buescher. However, it’s not the biggest group here since the sport has been so Carolina-centric for the past 70 years. Is there really a whole Texans-stick-together mentality in the sport?

Currey: Somewhat, since there’s so few of us. I’ve known Chris for years, and Kaden [Honeycutt]’s coming over here and running. I’ve known Kaden since we were younger. I didn’t race with Brennan Poole too much growing up.

There’s definitely a Texas group, and we’re all tight with each other. We know that connection’s there.

Allaway: Speaking of Kaden Honeycutt, you have a variety of teammates this year. You have Matt Mills full-time in the No. 42 and four people sharing the No. 45, including Kaden. What’s it like working with your five different teammates?

Currey: It’s been good. You can learn stuff from everybody. It’s good to have those different perspectives, be able to talk and bounce ideas off of one another. That’s been really cool to have.

We have our pre-race meetings and our post-race meetings where we talk. Even in the times at the simulator, it’s good to be able to watch them, learn from them and we can talk back and forth. If I can help them out, I’d love to [do so]. We try to keep that bond pretty tight and always keep an open line of communication.

Allaway: You’ve been racing in NASCAR off and on for eight years now. How have you grown as a driver over that time?

Currey: There’s been a lot of learning, especially here in the Truck Series. I raced in the [NASCAR] Xfinity Series for a long time. The way that you race an Xfinity car versus how you race a truck is very different.

Have to be a lot more mindful of the [aerodynamics] on these things as compared to an Xfinity car. An Xfinity car doesn’t have any aero to begin with, so when you lose it, it doesn’t matter.

With [the trucks], it’s a bit of a learning curve. But it’s been cool to find new ways to race. I’ve raced late models and modifieds where I just went to the track and raced. I didn’t really do anything else.

Being able to watch film, watch things, talk to teammates, go to the simulator, [they’re all] super-helpful in being able to learn how to use those resources and use them well has been pretty big for me.

Allaway: In your time in the Xfinity Series, there was a lot of back-and-forth movement between small organizations. There was some start-and-parking as well.

I remember talking to Mike Harmon on the grid at Charlotte [in 2019], when you put his second car in the field in the top 20, which was considered to be quite the accomplishment given the field size.

Just getting rides at that point would be difficult. How were you getting those rides back then? Was it simply putting yourself out there?

Currey: Oh, yeah. I have definitely showed up at plenty of shops unannounced or uninvited just to talk to people. That’s the only way to do it.

A lot of it was like that weekend at Charlotte, running a start-and-park car and qualifying well. [With that, I was] showing what I could do behind the wheel.

At that time, there were a lot of cars showing up every week and you needed people that could put the car in the race. I had gotten pretty good at qualifying the Xfinity car at the time, and that definitely helped.

From there, start-and-park rides turned into full races. It kind of snowballed from there.

Allaway: You’re up to 55 starts in the [NASCAR Craftsman] Truck Series over the past few years. How do you think the Truck Series is as a whole right now?

Currey: Tell you the truth, I think the past handful of weeks, we’ve put on some really good races. We’ve had our rough patches as a series. Had some races last year that didn’t go great. Martinsville’s a tough one for anyone, lots of beating and banging at those places.

We’ve been able to put on some great races. We went to Kansas and had one caution for cause, but the racing was great.

I love the Truck Series. It’s definitely a “get up on the wheel and go immediately” kind of racing. This group hit a low point last year at Phoenix. Everyone’s kind of the same people in the series, but I feel that everyone has [risen] up and come out better from hitting that rock bottom. I think it’s been really good this year.

Allaway: Were there a lot of meetings after Phoenix last year where [NASCAR] effectively said ‘this shenanigan-ry can’t continue?‘

Currey: There’s that. Everyone’s got Twitter [X], right? No one wants to be reading about their series on Twitter like, ‘Oh, this sucks.’ No one wants to read that.

Everyone has learned from it and has gotten better. I think it shows.

Allaway: At this point, there are 12 races [10 now] left in the season. If you can’t get yourself into the playoffs somehow, what would be something to aspire to for the remainder of the season?

Currey: We’re going to keep doing the same thing. We come to the racetrack trying to win every week. Where we fall, that’s where we fall. We’re going to keep doing that.

We learn every week, and we get better every week. That’s the goal. You go to win, but you take every little bit of information you can from each week and put it toward the next [race]. Keep moving forward.

Allaway: Do you lose momentum with these three-week breaks in the middle of the season?

Currey: I think it’s easy [to lose momentum] if you let yourself. When we go to the simulator, we do a lot to try to keep moving forward and getting better, even on our off-weeks.

It is nice to have the time off, but if you could bump it to 27, 28 races, that’d be nice.

Since this interview, Currey has had back-to-back 29th-place finishes, coming at Gateway and Nashville Superspeedway. As a result, he has slipped to 19th in points. In addition, personnel changes have resulted in Efaw temporarily stepping in as crew chief after Mike Hillman Jr. left the team to take the crew chief role at Freedom Racing Enterprises.