NASCAR team 23XI Racing brings in a coach for its pit crew: "We need the results now and quickly"

NASCAR Cup Series team 23XI Racing has decided to appoint Josh Shipplett as the team’s pit coach. The appointment resulted from the team's decision to have its own pit crew rather than contracting them from Joe Gibbs Racing.

Appointing Shipplett might be a gamble as he has never coached a NASCAR pit crew before. However, the North Carolina-based team has backed the 33-year-old to fulfill the responsibilities.

Steve Lauletta, president of 23XI Racing, told NBC Sports:

“I think it is part of how we are looking at everything here, We have an engineer that worked in DTM (German grand touring car series). We have a mechanic from Formula One. It’s the way Denny is looking at it. This is where his input is so beneficial.”

“We will continue to develop younger talent down the pipeline, but we don’t have the time to develop them at the racetrack. We need the results now and quickly. We want to continue on a good trajectory.”

Josh Shipplett is an experienced tire carrier. His first NASCAR Cup race as a tire carrier was in the 2011 Daytona 500 with Wood Brothers Racing.

Shipplett was the tire carrier when Denny Hamlin won the 2019 and 2020 Daytona 500 as well. He was part of the 23XI Racing crew which serviced the No.45 car last year and was part of Kurt Busch’s winning crew at Kansas Speedway.

Speaking to NBC Sports, he said:

“Coaching opportunities in this series don’t come available every day, to be able to do it from scratch and build something the way that 23XI believed in and I also believed in, I knew it was going to be hard, but in my thoughts, it would have been a lot harder to go somewhere else and change a philosophy they already had.”

“To have this opportunity to start from new and have the coaching opportunity was something that probably wasn’t going to happen, so I had to jump on it.”

Last season 23XI Racing’s pit crew struggled at times. Denny Hamlin expects to have both cars in the playoffs this season, which is only possible if the crew delivers consistently every weekend.

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Toyota NASCAR teams innovate new pit stop style

NASCAR teams Joe Gibbs Racing and the 23XI Racing Pit crew debuted a new way to service cars last year. In this new style, after changing the wheel, both the tire changers move to change the diagonally opposite wheel. The new way of pitting was faster but required precision and any error would adversely affect the stop.

Shipplett said the team has been practicing the new style, but it wasn’t the primary focus this year. He would rather have consistent stops, as he said:

“Let’s have that (good) average, but let’s not do it by having three really fast stops and then a catastrophic failure.”

Shipplett will also be training with the pit crew, as he will be the tire carrier for the No. 67 car driven by Travis Pastrana at the Daytona 500. The team doesn’t have any plans to run the No.67 car after Daytona.