NASCAR’s Stewart-Haas Racing team, which has won two Cup Series titles and 69 races since Tony Stewart acquired an ownership stake in 2009, is closing its operation at the end of the 2024 season, he and co-owner Gene Haas announced Tuesday.
“Racing is a labor-intensive, humbling sport,” Stewart and Haas said in a statement. “It requires unwavering commitment and vast resources, with a 365-day mindset to be better than everyone else. It’s part of what makes success so rewarding. But the commitment needed to extract maximum performance while providing sustainability is incredibly demanding, and we’ve reached a point in our respective personal and business lives where it’s time to pass the torch.”
A three-time Cup Series champion as a driver before ending that phase of his career in 2016, the 53-year-old Stewart has more recently been driving for a National Hot Rod Association drag racing team he owns. Haas, 71, has reportedly been more focused of late on his Formula One team, which sits seventh in the constructors’ standings after parting ways with longtime operations chief Guenther Steiner earlier this year.
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SHR, which evolved from a Haas team that began racing in 2003, has four Cup Series drivers — Josh Berry, Chase Briscoe, Noah Gragson and Ryan Preece — and two on the Xfinity Series (Cole Custer and Riley Herbst). Briscoe is faring best of the Cup Series quartet thus far, at 16th in the driver standings, with Berry is 19th, Gragson 21st and Preece 28th out of 40 listed competitors. None has won a race this season. Last year was the first since Stewart arrived in which SHR failed to notch a win.
A joint statement from Tony Stewart and Gene Haas, the co-owners of Stewart-Haas Racing, regarding the future of our team following the 2024 season. pic.twitter.com/S9hkjnTNXi
— Stewart-Haas Racing (@StewartHaasRcng) May 28, 2024
After last season, SHR lost Kevin Harvick, a decade-long team standout, to retirement. Harvick won the team’s most recent Cup Series title in 2014, after Stewart accomplished the feat in 2011. With the departures last year of Harvick and Aric Almirola, who had driven for SHR since 2018, the team also lost major sponsors in Anheuser-Busch and Smithfield Foods. Adding to the uncertainty surrounding the team well before Tuesday’s announcement was the impending end of its manufacturing contract with Ford after this year, per reports.
“I push for answers, but nobody knows anything,” Briscoe, who has raced on the Cup Series for SHR since 2021 after representing it on the Xfinity Series from 2018 to 2020, said earlier this month of the ominous chatter swirling about the team. “It’s crazy. I feel like when there are rumors people know stuff, but it seems nobody knows anything.”
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On Tuesday, following the announcement from Stewart and Haas, Briscoe took to social media to note that “at the end of the year myself and the entire organization will be looking for a new home and new opportunities in the Cup series.”
“I have amazing partners behind me and can’t wait to get them back in victory lane,” Briscoe wrote. In a video accompanying the post, he said: “Crazy time. I never thought this day would come. … First and foremost, I just hope that all the guys and gals at this place find a great opportunity, because each and every single person here deserves it.”
“Today was a tough day for all of us,” Berry, in his first year with the team, wrote on X. “It is pretty hard to find the right words. I’m proud of our team for how they have been handling this and will going forward.”
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Stewart enjoyed great success as a driver for Joe Gibbs Racing from 1999 to 2008, winning the Cup Series twice while never finishing worse than 11th in the season-long standings, before he was reportedly lured to join Haas with the offer of a 50 percent ownership stake. Over his first four years with SHR, he added three top-10 season finishes to a third Cup title.
“We’re proud of all the wins and championships we’ve earned since joining together in 2009,” Stewart and Haas said, “but even more special is the culture we built and the friendships we forged as we committed to a common cause — winning races and collecting trophies. That is the same commitment we made to our personnel, our partners and our fans coming into this year, and that commitment will remain through the season finale at Phoenix.
“We have tremendous respect and appreciation for all of our employees,” they continued, “and we will work diligently to assist them during this transition to find new opportunities beyond the 2024 race season.”
