MOORESVILLE, N.C. (Feb. 13, 2025) – Cory Shea enters the season as the crew chief for the No. 8 Pilot Chevrolet and is in his first full season atop the box. The longtime car chief and mechanic has a wealth of experience with JRM, having been an integral team member for Dave Elenz and the No. 9 team during its heyday in the early 2020s with driver Noah Gragson.
Having that lineage in his first season as a full-time crew chief will help, he said, but there are plenty of new wrinkles to iron out in terms of the season and the new Playoff structure.
Heading into this first season in charge, Shea thinks it will come down to a familiar refrain.
“It’s going to be about consistency,” he said. “The way the point system is, it’s a little different without having the win-and-in mentality of the last several years. Sammy has always had tracks where he could be the one everybody’s racing against, and then some where it wasn’t that way. So just elevating those other tracks to all be top-10, top-five efforts and having consistency week to week is where you need to be.”
No. 8 TEAM LINEUP: Crew chief: Cory Shea; Lead Engineer: Cale Lindley; Second Engineer: Taylor McGuiness; Car Chief: Anthony Alonzo; Mechanic: Ritchie Snyder; Mechanic: Tommy Moran; Spotter: Tyler Green; Truck driver: Paul Lawing.
SETTLING IN: Shea has been a fixture at JRM for years as a mechanic and a car chief, responsible for preparing the cars on a weekly basis. Learning a new team while being the leader is important, he said. He was a crew chief for a partial schedule in 2025 with Ross Chastain, Shane van Gisbergen, Daniel Suarez and Connor Mosack, winning twice (Suarez in Mexico City and Van Gisbergen on the Chicago Street Course) and compiling seven top-five and eight top-10 finishes as well as 225 laps led in those races.
Despite it being his full-season debut atop the box this season, Shea has been there and done that in the NASCAR O’Reilly Auto Parts Series.
“Being the crew chief for the full season is mainly about consistency and getting a feel for each other, knowing where Sammy wants his cars to be,” he said. “Unfortunately, you don’t really get to start doing that until Phoenix with the schedule the way it is. These first few are superspeedways and road courses, sort of their own little deals.
“Once we get to Phoenix, Las Vegas, Martinsville and Rockingham, those are some good tracks for him and good tracks for JRM. So hopefully after that stretch we’ll have a really good base on what we need to work on and what we need to do to carry forward.”
DO THE RIGHT THINGS: Absent the win-and-in Playoff structure of the past several years, Shea will focus on consistency and maximizing the outcomes every week. “We’ll be looking for those top-five finishes every week, getting stage points and putting ourselves in a position to be fighting for the regular-season championship,” he said. “If we can consistently be a top-five car, the wins come by themselves.”
NEW SURROUNDINGS: As a crew chief last year for the No. 9 team, Shea’s part-time effort made a lot of noise with the victories and performances on a limited front. This year, he has the full complement of crew and team resources, and given his history as a car chief, he will direct the team as a whole instead of being responsible for building cars. There are a lot more resources at his disposal.
“Last year, I didn’t have a lot of teammates in general,” he said. “It was a very skeleton crew. It’s going to take some getting used to having so many people, getting used to letting them do it instead of me doing it myself. I had a lot more hands-on control over all the cars. My drivers last year had Cup stuff to deal with and I didn’t get to talk to them all that much. Now, having a team that you can have meetings with and plan, it just takes a lot more of your time that you can’t be out on the shop floor.”
DIFFERENT FOCUS: Car chiefs supervise the physical construction of the cars, while crew chiefs oversee the entire operation, and that’s a big change for Shea.
“Getting used to not building the car after I’ve been a car chief for most of my life is probably my biggest adjustment and where I’ll be weakest, the office side of the job. You know what goes in them. You know where every nut and bolt is. Now you’ve got to kind of take a 30,000-foot view.
“You’ve got to sort of let people do their own thing. At the end of the day, yeah, you want it how you want it, but sometimes there’s a little bit of morale boost if you can let people do it their own way, as long as you both see the same end in sight and the stuff’s right.”
ATTENTION TO DETAIL: Shea is detail-oriented, a trait shared by most crew chiefs, and has had a bird’s-eye view of car construction for several years. “You know everything that goes in there. You know which washer goes to what. Now, you have people to do that, and that’s their job.”
WHOLE NEW WORLD: With Smith, Shea has a young star in the cockpit and a solid team underneath him. The Iowa driver has three wins in the NOAPS and won last year at Rockingham to earn his Playoff berth. He also won at Talladega in the Chase in 2024 and at Phoenix in 2023. The talented young driver has shown both flashes of brilliance and dogged determination, and Shea is counting on both for this season.
“Sammy had some successes, making the Chase last year,” Shea said. “As I said before, it’s about not having those bad days. I told him earlier, ‘I may give you a bad car, you may make a bad decision, we may have a bad pit stop, but we all need to figure out how to salvage the day and make those 20th-place finishes into 10th-place finishes, and if we can do that, everything else gets easier. If we can do that, everything else just gets easier because you’re like, ‘OK, we made it through a rough one and still came out on top as much as possible’
MOJO: Shea was with the No. 9 team when Gragson and then-crew-chief Dave Elenz were winning races and dominating the series, and he carries some of that swagger to the pit box. “I think a lot of the information and the thoughts of how things need to be done is one of them and the basics,” he said. “We were very good in those teams, and that’s something you carry forward.
“The basics of what we do hasn’t changed, so you can take that and then just apply it to any new information that we get. Whether it’s the wind tunnel or compliance changes on the car. But if you just keep all the basics of what made those races winnable and what made those championships winnable, that hasn’t changed. You can bring that with you, the mentality of racing the way we did.”
GOALS SET: Every team wants to win all the races, take the championship and dominate the season. Shea wasn’t quite that specific, but the goals he’s looking for are in the neighborhood. “Honestly, a good season is a few wins, top-three in the regular season and then to be racing down to the last minute for the championship at the end of the year,” he said. “Obviously, 10 wins and locking it up in Martinsville would be the best way, but I might be asking a little too much.”