“We’re at the top echelon of motorsports, and we’ve got guys who have never won Late Model races running on the racetrack,” Kyle Busch said in the aftermath of tangling with back-marker Garrett Smithley in this year’s playoff opener at Las Vegas. “It’s pathetic. They don’t know where to go. What else do you do?”
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Well, Brennan Poole won Late Model races. In fact, he won 10 of them across a two-year stretch in UARA STARS, the now-defunct Carolina-Virginia touring series where Matt DiBenedetto and Bubba Wallace also cut their teeth. He has six ARCA wins to his credit, too, thank you very much, and these are notions important to Cup Series talent sticklers like Busch.
We can safely assume Poole knows where to go, thanks to his upbringing, which also included 83 starts for HScott Motorsports (affiliated with Chip Ganassi Racing) and CGR in the NASCAR Xfinity Series from 2015-17 and, most recently, a 13-race stint in the Truck Series for the part-time On Point Motorsports team in 2019. He went winless in both of NASCAR’s top developmental series, but don’t confuse him for a slouch. He turned in a 1.885 Production in Equal Equipment Rating this year, ranked 13th out of 48 drivers, thanks to finishes like his second at Charlotte, sixth at Las Vegas, and seventh and ninth in the two races at Texas with a truck ranked 16th for the season in Central Speed. He proved himself an asset as an above-par passer (with a plus-2.6 percent surplus value and 36 positions gained beyond what was expected) and an above-average restarter from both the preferred and non-preferred grooves (with position retention rates of 72 percent and 53 percent, respectively).
The 28-year-old Texan will be a Cup Series rookie in 2020, as announced last week, for Premium Motorsports. Considering the speed rankings of Premium’s two cars this year (34th and 39th), his decision to make the leap now seems a peculiar one. His rationale, though, was pretty simple.
“Well, it’s Cup, man,” Poole told The Athletic in a phone interview this week, where he also acknowledged the challenges he’ll face and outlined his realistic expectations.
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“Each weekend, I’m going to have stuff to learn,” he said. “Obviously, it’s a car I’ve never driven before and I’m certainly going to be racing against a lot of guys, some I’ve raced before, some I have not.
“If I have a race where I get everything I’m able to get out of the race car and I do all the little things right and don’t make any mistakes — I do well on restarts, I do well on pit road and I finish the highest I’m capable of finishing — then that’s a win for me and a win for this team.”
It appears he’ll be immune to Premium’s alternative team-building methods. In previous seasons, the organization functioned via crew chief by committee; between its two teams and the team it fields on behalf of Spire Motorsports, 18 different driver-crew chief combinations were trotted out in 2019. Poole has been assured he’ll pair with Pat Tryson, who spent 34 of 36 races this year with the program’s previous bellwether, Ross Chastain.
“This coming year is going to be a little different,” said Poole. “Obviously, I wasn’t a part of it (in 2019), so I don’t really know the minutiae behind everything that happened, but I do know that I’m going to be working with Pat Tryson. I’m looking forward to that. I’ve been able to meet him a few times and chat with him a little bit.”
Such continuity could be key; Ryan Preece and Daniel Hemric, Cup rookies in 2019, identified communication with their crew chiefs and the delivery of feedback as the most daunting parts of their learning curves.
“I’ll have to learn an entirely new group of guys and work on the communication and build that chemistry,” Poole said.
He’s keen to make things work with Premium, but one can’t ignore the obvious: This could be Poole’s stepping stone to something better. His predecessor, Chastain, took a roundabout path to his full-time, top-tier Xfinity ride in 2020 that included two years driving for Premium, in which he ranked first and third in surplus passing value among drivers most regularly in the bottom half of the field. Reed Sorenson, also a Premium driver, ranked first in 2019.
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Poole is aware that any sort of peripheral strengths he’s able to display on the sport’s biggest stage could turn the heads of those making hiring decisions in the future.
“It’s so difficult to look so far ahead,” he said, when asked where he’d like to be in five years’ time. “But in a perfect world, hopefully (I’m) with a good team that’s competitive and believes in me and trusts in my ability and what I’m saying about the car.
“Something (like that) would be awesome, whether or not that’s with a team like Premium that’s growing. There were teams in the past like Furniture Row that were basically back-marker teams that, over time, came into the right funding and found themselves in a situation where they’re winning a championship. You never know what’s going to happen. I think that’s what’s great about the sport, right? You just never know. Once the green flag drops, you find out who’s going to be good and who’s not. Things change so much and so quickly in our sport.”
In the short term, Poole is going to have his hands full. Premium’s best car on a non-drafting oval in 2019 was the entry piloted by Chastain in the spring at Richmond, which ranked as the 27th fastest in the race. This upcoming season likely won’t contain good, believable results with the ends of races earmarked for allowing those with more resources room to battle, unimpeded, for the win.
Poole’s decision to join Premium is a low-risk move with high upside, even though that won’t always be clear as he’s vying for top-30 finishes. If he acquits himself well, and his circ*mstances are taken into appropriate consideration, he’ll win over those competitors regularly driving past the Premium fleet.
(Top photo: Jared C. Tilton / Getty Images)
