​​One Secret to Team Chevy’s NASCAR Success​ 

As NASCAR’s season wound up at Phoenix Raceway last fall, Chevrolet took its fifth consecutive NASCAR Cup Series Manufacturers’ championship, and Chevrolet driver Kyle Larson, driving the No. 5 Chevrolet, took home the Cup Series Drivers’ title. In the Xfinity Series, Chevrolet earned the Manufacturers’ championship for the ninth year in a row. This Barry’s Chevrolet blog post dives into what makes Team Chevy so successful.    

Eric Warren, Vice President of Global Motorsport Competition, states that a primary factor is that GM Motorsports provides resources to the individual racing teams, so they do not all have to duplicate such endeavors on their own. Providing a useful computer simulation is one such example.  

“We work very well together as a group of collective Chevrolet teams, which requires leadership from our teams,” Warren explains. “Whether it’s Hendrick Motorsports, Richard Childress Racing, Trackhouse, all those teams have to work together for the benefit of Chevrolet racing.” 

The challenge, of course, is that this requires coordination among the different racing teams running Chevrolets, all of whom are competing with one another.  

“Sometimes it’s like kindergarten recess because you’re trying to keep everybody together when they all want to go in a different direction,” says Warren, “But once you build that momentum, all of a sudden, that’s where everybody wants to be. It’s a self-fulfilling prophecy of getting better people, better drivers, better teams.” 

If coordinating all of the Chevrolet Racing teams in NASCAR’s Cup series was challenging enough, GM Motorsports has to do the same with the Xfinity and Truck series as well, where the budgets are lower.  

“If you look at Xfinity, a large part of why there’s a lot of Chevy teams is nobody else is able to quite scale the support that we provide,” Warren says. 

There is also considerable attention to driver development. Not just in finding Xfinity and Truck drivers ready to move to the premier Cup series, but also in finding drivers to enter those two series by supporting lower-level non-NASCAR teams. “It’s hard for a team to say, ‘Okay, where are all the great nine-year-olds that are racing around the world?’” Warren explains. “Because of all the series we race in, we get exposed to talent at a much younger age, and we can put drivers in different situations to understand, ‘hey, this driver really has the skills, and I think they’d be perfect for NASCAR.’” 

One irony, though not for the truck series, is that Chevrolet is featuring a nameplate in the Cup and Xfinity series that it no longer sells, as the Camaro ceased production in 2024. NASCAR teams can continue running the Camaro in the Cup Series for the foreseeable future because current rules allow the use of a model as long as it was in production when approved. So, Chevy is sticking with it through 2025 and beyond and is even updating it for 2026 with revised styling that more closely adheres to the ZL1 carbon-fiber racing package offered to existing Camaro owners.  

Although the Camaro itself is no longer in the Barry’s Chevrolet inventory, the model has inspired the exterior styling and dash details of several other Chevrolets, including all of its crossover models, from the high-value Trax to the spacious Traverse.  

See the models of the company that knows how to win where it counts by visiting Barry’s Chevrolet at 11380 State Route 41 S., West Union, Ohio.