It has been a crazy NASCAR Craftsman Truck Series season for rookie Andres Perez.
The 2024 ARCA Menards Series champion received a promotion to the Truck Series season full time with Spire Motorsports, driving the No. 77 that Chase Purdy vacated.
Given his success in ARCA, doing everything except reaching victory lane (despite coming close multiple times), and Spire’s meteoric rise to a contending race team, it felt like even if victory lane wasn’t feasible, playoffs and a Rookie of the Year title would be real possibilities.
Fast forward to July and … yikes.
The results of Perez’s No. 77 team have left a lot to be desired.
Some of it was on Perez. Some of it was on his No. 77 team. And some of it was on Spire as a whole, who decided to expand to four full-time trucks, with two of them being rotational trucks with mixed results.
After the Aug. 8 race at Watkins Glen International, in which one of Perez’s career-best performances went sour late in the race, Perez was released by Spire — though it wasn’t for performance reasons, at least exclusively. It appears the team realized running four trucks may have been too much to ask for so quickly in the young team’s career, and downsized to three trucks, with the No. 07 folding, and moving Corey LaJoie, who was supposed to compete in the No. 07 for the final eight races of the season, to the No. 77.
Perez’s free agency lasted all of about two hours, though, as Niece Motorsports announced it would pick the Mexican up for the final eight races of the year.
Perez would drive the No. 44, originally supposed to be piloted by Christian Rose before funding ran out, then becoming a rotational truck for the season. With Kaden Honeycutt’s sudden release from the No. 45 truck, Bayley Currey, the primary driver of the No. 44, moved to the No. 45 for the rest of the season, while the other rotational drivers, such as Conner Jones, Matt Gould and Josh Bilicki, would move to a fourth truck, the No. 41, for their scheduled races.
And after all that shuffling, Perez is now through four races with his new team and is sitting a still-respectable 15th in points. It’s a small sample size to compare to his stint with Spire, which lasted 17 races. But honestly? It seems as if his performance has been elevated.
In his 17 races with Spire, Perez only finished in the top 15 four times. In just four races with Niece, he’s done it three times already. On top of that, the strategy calls made by his team have put Perez toward the front more, even if he doesn’t finish there.
In the Truck Series’ most recent race at New Hampshire Motor Speedway, Perez stayed out under the caution following the end of stage one, vaulting him to the front of the field. He then proceeded to lead 47 laps, a career-high in the Truck Series. However, since he was off-strategy, he couldn’t stay up front forever and fell back to 15th — a lower than expected, yet still decent result for the overall afternoon.
Now, as we enter the Charlotte Motor Speedway ROVAL for the first time in Truck Series history, it gives Perez perhaps an even better shot to avenge the day he should have had at Watkins Glen.
It’s not a stretch to say that Spire’s rapid expansion of Truck Series teams may have held Perez back. It’s no secret that he was probably a shoe-in for the No. 2 Rev Racing truck that Nick Sanchez was leaving behind, but Spire and Rev ended their partnership prior to this year. Spire fully absorbed Rev’s operations after they had a technical alliance dating back to when Kyle Busch Motorsports was in operation (pre-Spire purchase).
That’s what ultimately created the No. 07, and Pérez was given a seat in-house at Spire. But the reality is, the No. 77 team just couldn’t get anything going — and that may vindicate Purdy a little bit, because Purdy couldn’t find any success in the truck either. And when the downsizing came, it may have been at the realization that Spire bit off more than it could chew, and let Perez walk in the aftermath.
Niece, on the other hand, has had experience running as many as five trucks, and knows the effort it takes to make all of them successful. Given that it had already established that it was a three-truck team full-time this season, the resources were already there to set Perez up for more success than he had at Spire.
Depending on how these final four races go, Niece might want to look at keeping Perez next season to further develop him.
After all, Perez spent two years in ARCA, winning the title the second time around.
Maybe a second Truck Series season, this time with just one team, who could certainly give him the resources needed to succeed, can boost Perez’s points position at the end of next season into the top 10.
Anthony Damcott joined Frontstretch in March 2022. Currently, he is an editor and co-authors Fire on Fridays (Fridays); he is also the primary Truck Series reporter/writer and serves as an at-track reporter. He has also assisted with short track content and social media, among other duties he takes/has taken on for the site. In 2025, he became an official member of the National Motorsports Press Association. A proud West Virginia Wesleyan College alum from Akron, Ohio, Anthony is now a grad student. He is a theatre actor and fight coordinator in his free time.
You can keep up with Anthony by following @AnthonyDamcott on X.