MOORESVILLE, N.C. (Sept. 26, 2024) – Sam Mayer, Mardy Lindley and the No. 1 team at JR Motorsports will enter the NASCAR Xfinity Series Playoffs for the second straight season this weekend at Kansas Speedway. The young driver and his veteran crew chief enter the postseason as the No. 7 seed in the 12-car playoff field, earning two victories and posting seven top-five and 11 top-10 finishes.
Lindley clarified his team’s objectives to make it to the Championship 4 at Phoenix in November with a fairly narrow focus.
Win a Race in the Round of 8
“We have to win a race in the Round of 8,” he said. “We’ve had a lot of speed in all these races, but we haven’t been able to get to the finish line where we’re capable of running. We have to get that cleaned up. I feel like we can point our way in first-round, and Kansas this weekend is the key race, because the others, like Talladega and the Roval, are kind of outliers.
“Talladega is kind of out of our control, so you have to score max points there and we won the Roval last year, but it’s kind of difficult to repeat those things. I feel confident going to the Roval, but I’ve only finished one speedway race (13th at Daytona this season), the whole time I’ve been here with Sam. We’ve crashed in the others. Kansas is our main focus and we have to win a race. We’ve had great cars, we were second at Martinsville this year, should have won it, and we won at Homestead last year. Las Vegas could be a good race for us too.”
Finish Races
“We haven’t had mechanical issues this year,” Lindley pointed out. “The guys on this No. 1 team do a great job with Pat (Martin, car chief)’s leadership. We’re fast but we’ve been inconsistent. We had the potential of winning five races this year if we could have avoided some of those. Sam has a switch he can turn on. We started off rocky and then we won at Iowa, started to turn it around and then the wheels fell off again. It’s starting to tick back toward the right direction and hopefully it picks up this weekend and we can get a good finish.”
Early Success
“The playoffs need to go way better for us this year,” Lindley said. “We made it to the Championship Four last year but we were swinging for the fences to get in. That’s a tough situation and you can’t do that year after year. We wrecked at Kansas last year, in the opener at Bristol and we wrecked at Texas in the Round of 8 opener. We have to avoid all that. Everyone on the team feels like we have a shot. We have been able to win races. If we were sitting here without having some of the bright moments we’ve had as a team, we would probably be a little bit down. But everybody knows that at any moment we can ring the bell. That’s a good feeling to have and we’re pumped up about it.”
In terms of a wild-card race, Lindley immediately pointed to Talladega. “Definitely Talladega,” he stated. “It’s the least amount of control that you have. You’re stuck in the pack and just hoping the guy in front of you doesn’t cut someone off and get turned sideways. They’re going to wreck and you have to be lucky to miss them. We haven’t been able to score enough playoff points during the season to have a comfort into the second round. After the first round, it gets really serious. It’s serious now because any little hiccup you have can take you out of it, but it gets really serious in the second round.”
The No. 1 team for JR Motorsports:
Driver: Sam Mayer
Crew Chief: Mardy Lindley
Lead engineer: Aedan McHugh
Second engineer: Josh Lewis
Car chief: Pat Martin
Mechanics: Kyle Stevens, James Cragg
Spotter: Kevin Hamlin
Truck driver: Brian Sollars
