No. 8 Team Season Outlook: Wall, Smith Seeking Title Shot

MOORESVILLE, N.C. (Feb. 15, 2024) – With the new season, the No. 8 team at JR Motorsports will sport an entirely new look at the top, with crew chief Adam Wall at the helm for driver Sammy Smith and Pilot Flying J, TMC Transportation and Allstate Peterbilt as the primary sponsors.

The “new” look, however, is sort of a misnomer.

Wall has JRM ties dating back to 2016 with the team’s No. 1 car under Kevin Meendering, and the majority of the crew is made up of JRM veterans.

Cody Jones is the lead engineer, coming over from JRM’s No. 9 team, and Michael Toner is the second engineer and tire specialist. Danny Earnhardt Jr. remains as the car chief, with mechanics Richie Snyder and Will Hartings making up the rest of the everyday crew.

Smith, in his first season with JRM after a playoff season in 2023, will have spotter Tyler Monn on the roof for the 33-race grind toward the NASCAR Xfinity Series championship.

With all the new parts, the No. 8 team will be starting off at Daytona in a sort of learning mode, Wall said.

“We really just want to get our feet under us to start the year,” he said. “I need to learn him (Smith), he needs to learn me. He learns our cars and kind of gets our feet under us. That’s kind of hard with two superspeedway races right out of the box (at Daytona and Atlanta). There’s a lot that isn’t under your control, and it’s kind of hard to establish that momentum early. At least we can get comfortable with each other through those first couple of weeks.”

While Wall and Smith are the newest additions, the overall team has plenty of experience as a unit, Wall said.

“The group that I’m with was pretty well together as the No. 8 team last year, so I let Danny and Richie kind of take control of the car things and help lead me through that process. Cody, coming over from the No. 9 team has been here for years and knows the cars and the people. I’ve been leaning on them to get me up to speed so I can provide some direction.”

As a first-year crew chief, Wall realizes there is a lot of learning to do overall as well as the finer points of being the man who calls the shots for the entire team.

“I look forward to seeing where it goes. I’m very detail-oriented and trying to focus on the details; not every detail, but the most impactful ones, trying to get all of those that we can control right.”

Starting the season at Daytona, Wall said that his focus would be controlling what can be controlled within the framework of the event.

“I’m going to try to control everything I can from my seat,” he said. “That’s my focus. Keep the spotter and driver communicating the way they need to, keep my hand in the strategy side and what the field is fighting or doing. Communicating with my guys up there on the box is going to be new, so taking all of that information so I can make the right adjustments for him (Smith).”

Wall has plenty of mentors to count on from his time in sport, including Meendering, his crew chief from when he was on JRM’s No. 1 car with driver Elliott Sadler. Add in championship-caliber crew chiefs he worked under at Hendrick, and there’s a solid base of experience from which he can draw.

“I’ve been very blessed to be around Kevin Meendering, Cliff Daniels, Greg Ives and those guys, so I think it’s a combination of what I’ve been through over the years. We’ll see as we go. I haven’t really called a race as a crew chief yet, so we’ll see.”

Attacking the 33-race schedule for the NASCAR Xfinity Series is an exercise in itself, Wall said, and quite a bit of focus has been spent on breaking it down.

“The NXS schedule as a whole is a little bit of relief for me,” he said. “We get an off week after Phoenix, so we can really focus on the first four and take a breath to see where we stand with a superspeedway, a short track and an intermediate under our belt at that point. We can look back on that at that point and adjust. After the first four, you have a decent stretch where you hit another speedway, a short track, an intermediate and the road course at COTA where you truly see what you have.”

The summer break, which is three weeks this year due to the Olympics, is time to regroup and focus on the run to the playoffs, Wall said.

“That stretch after the triple off-weeks, you’re on until the end of the year,” he said. “That’s what you’re setting yourself up for, making sure you have the right stuff in your cars, your guys are in the right head space and giving them the time they need to set themselves up for that last grind to the end of the year. It’s 13 weeks, and that’s what you’re really working toward. The playoffs don’t start right then, but the momentum that you build is going to lead you into the playoffs. That’s really the focus for the year.”

For now, though, the focus is on getting into the season and seeing how he, Smith and the No. 8 team adjust to the grind. The opening flurry will dictate what, if anything, needs adjustment.

“I know we are a new team with a new driver and all of that, but you don’t want to start the year off poorly,” Wall said. “If we do have some stumbles here and there early in the year, the focus will be to get ourselves straight after the off-weeks there.”

His relationship with Smith has been good, Wall said, despite not having any real on-track experience.

“It’s really good,” Wall commented. “We’ve gotten some good simulator sessions in, and he knows what he wants to feel at a lot of these places and he’s been in a good car for a full season. We have solid JRM setups that we can give him and I have some I can provide outside of that. Trying to arrive at a feel has been kind of the focus that we’ve had so far.”

As a first-year crew chief with a ton of experience at the Cup level, Wall is fortunate to have experienced teammates in Jim Pohlman and Mardy Lindley, who led drivers Justin Allgaier and Sam Mayer to the Championship 4 last season.

“Both Jim and Mardy had really solid years last year and both made the Championship 4, so being able to lean on that is very helpful,” Wall said with a smile. “We’re not starting from square one, we have really good stuff to build on and I’ve been leaning on those guys. Among the four of us (including Phillip Bell, crew chief of the No. 9 team), we have a good mix of the analytical, the racer side, a little bit of everything. I like what we have going on.”

Returning to JRM has been comforting in a way for the 34-year-old Wall.

“How much and how little has changed here has been interesting,” he said. “I was here last in 2018, and these are essentially the same cars we have had since 2018 as far as the body and chassis go. There’s been growth and evolution of the setups, but it’s still a lot of the same building blocks we were working with back then.

“That’s been reassuring, that I’m not playing catchup on leaps and bounds of development and change that’s happened. In the Cup Series, they deal with so many rule changes in the bodies and different things that come along, it’s nice that they haven’t messed with the rules package and a lot of what’s in the series. That has a lot to do with why this series is as competitive and fun to watch as it is. It’s a really good package they have right now.”

At the start of every season, goals are set and success is measured against them. Wall is not so focused on the numbers, but rather the process.

“As soon as I got here, I wanted to set a goal for this year,” he said. “The more I got into it, the more I don’t think it makes sense to set a hard and fast number for top-fives and so on. Our pace throughout the year is more my focus, our execution of the races, is more important than the results. I know that it probably makes sense to say ‘we want 10 top-fives this year,’ but I know that there’s so much that can happen in any given week. You can have a first- or second-place car and you get taken out. I don’t want that to count against the guys and what they’ve taken to the race track and say that we haven’t met our goal and didn’t get that final result. We’re here to win every race, so yes, that’s the goal.”

How the first four-race segment of the schedule goes will be a good measuring stick for the rest of the season, Wall said.

“Daytona and Atlanta are wild-cards in the fact that we don’t have control over the final result,” Wall mused. “I think that when you get to Phoenix and Las Vegas, you have so much more control of your destiny. I don’t want to let what happens in the first two weeks on track affect the team, because so much is out of our control. We’re going to do what we can and we’re working on all those details to achieve that, but we’re not going to let that affect us. That’s the wild-card.”

Six superspeedway races dot the schedule, and those are double-edged swords, Wall said. They’re the wild-cards that will play a huge role in the way the 2024 season ends up.

“The speedway races are the unknows,” he stated. “The rest of them, I feel like with what he (Smith) had last year, what JRM had last year, we have a solid foundation to build on. That goes for the speedway races too. JRM had cars that were second through fifth in the spring last year at Daytona, so the speed is there. It’s the final details, the execution you have to get right.”

Road courses-there are six races on the twisty circuits this season-will also play a pivotal role, he said.

“You’ve got a repaved Sonoma, so you’ll have some things there,” Wall said. “We have a new driver, a young driver, that doesn’t have all these preconceived notions of Sonoma and what it was could be an advantage for us. I look forward to getting back to Iowa. He really enjoyed Chicago last year, and the road course package here at JRM has been good, we had a good car last year, and building on that. I look forward to the road courses generally.”