My reaction to the news of ThorSport Racing once more making crew chief changes mid-season mirrored Marty McFly in Back to the Future.
“Hey, I’ve seen this one before!”
On June 19, ThorSport announced that Rich Lushes, who won two NASCAR Craftsman Truck Series championships with Ben Rhodes, is going from Rhodes and the No. 99 team to the No. 66, with Doug George moving over to join Rhodes.
In case you’re keeping track (or have understandably lost track), that’s three crew chief swaps for Rhodes over the last three seasons, all of which have involved Lushes.
They’ve all been caused by at least one ThorSport truck lagging behind its peers. In 2023, Lushes left a struggling Hailie Deegan to oversee the final races of Rhodes’ championship campaign, while in 2024, Lushes departed a struggling Rhodes to call the shots for Jake Garcia.
Lushes was moved back to Rhodes’ pit box at the beginning of this season, but in a mirror image of 2024, it’s Rhodes’ struggles that are the reason for Lushes metaphorically moving across town to work with ThorSport’s rotating-driver No. 66.
Ironically, after Lushes left Garcia and rejoined Rhodes at the end of 2024, Garcia has carried the banner for ThorSport in what’s been a down year for the organization.
It’s hard to say that Lushes himself is the problem, given that he’s engineered two title runs over the last four years.
When you analyze ThorSport as an organization, its supposed problem becomes more clear: as a five-truck team, it appears to be spread thin.
Those three aforementioned swaps all happened because at least two, if not three trucks were struggling in some way. One that wasn’t mentioned was Jeriod Prince taking over as Matt Crafton‘s crew chief in 2023 after previously working with Rhodes, which opened the door for Lushes to rejoin his champion driver.
ThorSport is an interesting case study in a race team seemingly being spread too thin but also continuing to produce results. A quick glance at ThorSport’s recent history — three championships in four years — tells a story of a powerhouse that doesn’t seem to be slowing down any time soon.
Perhaps this season, though, running five trucks is beginning to take a toll.
With only five races remaining in the regular season, defending champ Ty Majeski is the only ThorSport driver in the playoff field. That position is in danger of being cannibalized by Garcia, who is only four points back of Majeski.
Rhodes finds himself 12th in the standings, 55 points back. The crew chief swap appears to be a last-ditch effort to get the Louisville native into the postseason.
And then there’s Crafton, who is 15th in the standings and needs a win to avoid missing the playoffs for the second straight year. Seeing as he hasn’t won in five years, the chances of that are slim.
ThorSport’s No. 66 is 23rd in the owner standings, and while those are substantially more competitive than the driver points, it’s far from a good look.
ThorSport isn’t just winless this season. It’s looked like a team in year three or four of a five-year plan that’s happy to just have trucks in playoff contention. Only time will tell whether or not this latest crew chief swap changes anything, but a crew chief can only do so much for a truck that is well off the pace compared to the top dogs of the Truck Series.
ThorSport’s MO in recent years has been late-season charges a la Team Penske in the NASCAR Cup Series, but if another is to be in the cards this season, it’s going to take much more than a crew chief change to get there.
For the moment, at least, it appears there are too many cooks in kitchen (or rather, trucks in the race shop) at ThorSport, and NASCAR might as well be an episode of Chopped.
A member of the National Motorsports Press Association (NMPA), Samuel also covers NASCAR for Yardbarker, Field Level Media, and Heavy Sports. He will attend the University of Arkansas in the fall of 2025.