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It’s no secret that Justin Haley has Hendrick Motorsports aspirations. Whether the interest is mutual is not yet clear but the 25-year-old and his management team are working towards that campus.
At the same time, Corey Lajoie had drawn up a similar career map over the past half-decade, once hand-writing a note to Rick Hendrick that expressed conviction that he should drive one of the four flagship Cup Series Chevrolets.
Lajoie had a consistent, if not spectacular, 2023 season driving for an ascendant Spire No. 7 team but followed it up with a campaign in which he has crashed a lot of cars — both his and those around him.
Both of those narratives converged this week, and in an extremely unorthodox fashion, with Haley and Lajoie effectively getting traded for each other starting next weekend at
Haley will move from the Rick Ware Racing No. 51, where he was in the first of a multiyear agreement, to Spire with Lajoie going the other way in an announcement made Friday at Bristol Motor Speedway.
“Justin came to us with a pretty unique opportunity for himself that put him in a position, I think, long-term for his career that was pretty attractive for him,” Benton said. “And I think through the course of talking through with him and obviously we have a close relationship with the guys at Spire and (co-owner) Jeff (Dickerson), we came to the realization that it was probably best to let Justin out of his contract for next year and make a change.”
But in working through all of this, Dickerson said Benton told him something about Lajoie that stuck with him.
“He was just like, ‘I think I can get more out of him than you,’ and okay, he said that as friends, right,” Dickerson said. “He said it as competitors and colleagues and it just stuck with me, you know what I mean?”
Dickerson said he had a lot of conflicting emotions parting ways with Lajoie but this agreement just made sense on several layers.
For Haley, he now moves to a team that has a direct line of resources from Hendrick via a technical alliance. He leaves one that has an alliance with RFK Racing.
Could RFK co-owner match whatever opportunity Haley has?
“Justin had a career opportunity that wasn’t anything we could match,” Keselowski said. “To be part of Rick Hendrick’s deal there and what that means for him after 25, that’s their announcement to have. Certainly everybody, I think, can respect and understand that.”
It also helps that Haley has previously driven for Spire, even winning their respective first Cup races together in 2019 in a rain-shortened race at Daytona.
“We’re going to go out there and do the best we can,” Haley said. “Obviously that’s the goal and see where it takes us in the future.”
Haley is going to finish this season with the current No. 7 team, meaning with crew chief Ryan Sparks, who will transition into a full-time competition director role after the season. Once the calendar flips, Haley will be paired with one of the biggest hires in company history in championship winning crew chief Rodney Childers.
