A vast majority of employees at the new team came over from the old one
Joe Custer, president of Haas Factory Team, recently appeared on SiriusXM Radio's The Morning Driver Mike Bagley and Brad Gillie to discuss the transition from Stewart-Haas to what the team has become now.
It has a Cup Series relationship with RFK for Cole Custer and the No. 31 team and will continue to serve customer cars to RSS Racing and AM Racing for the Siegs and Harrison Burton next season.
Here is a snippet of the most interesting takeaways from the conversation.
How do you evaluate last year given everything that happened?
"Well, yeah, I guess someday I can maybe comment in a more formal study on exactly what happened but I will say I believe it was a success given what happened. I believe it was a success given what we had to. At the end of the day, I believe our employees rallied and showed no quit. We came up with strategies to help them financially to stay focused and looking for jobs during the season so they didn't get put in a bad spot, not having to say they weren't exploring job opportunities or whatever. We worked through it and our company was in the playoffs and competed as well, if not better than the previous year. I don't recommend it, for sure, but given what we had, I believe it couldn't have gone better. I credit our employees for that and the partners that stuck with us. We didn't lose a single partner ... It was interesting and something we wish we didn't have to go through. We're looking towards the future now but the past, we can all look each other in the eyes at Stewart-Haas and say we fought the good fight and finished strong."
How is the transition from Stewart-Haas to Haas Factory Team going?
"So there's the building blocks of it, right? We were at around 330 people with Stewart-Haas and now we're at about 117 so, you know, roughly a third, which is great from a standpoint of providing jobs. I can report that the vast majority of our employees did find jobs and are well places. There's obviously a couple of exceptions and we're very concerned about those and working through. As far as how we're shaping up next year, it's great. The vast majority of the 117 were existing Stewart-Haas employees, with some important changes and additions, and they're impact players. We've got a technical alliance on the Cup side with RFK and Brad (Keselowski) and (Steve) Newmark and that has gone great. We've hired a crew chief, Aaron Kramer and a director of competition for Cup, Nick Sandler, who both came from RFK. So we feel like that's a solid base for our organizations aligning and working well together. So the Cup side is trending very nicely. The pit crew is in solid shape, the over the wall guys, of course. The rest of the departments are humming right along."
How about the Xfinity program?
"The Xfinity side is really, really sold. We've returned every single employee, except two, if I'm not mistaken. Maybe a couple of truck drivers as well, so maybe four. Jason Trinchere has come aboard to crew chief Sam Mayer and we have Jonathan Toney with Sheldon Creed. Crew chiefs are set. We've elevated to Adam Gravitt to Xfinity director of competition. We've got a great program with our technical alliances set with RSS-Sieg and AM Racing. So that whole program is looking very similar and we believe will pick up where we left off. We finished half the deal in Phoenix with winning the race and the championship slipped through our fingers, which was disappointing but we were there and led a lot of laps, had a lot of speed, so we're optimistic about next year at Phoenix and putting our two drivers hopefully into that final race.
What is it like being a customer to RFK in Cup but the provider in Xfinity?
I feel like we have a lot of experience starting with Hendrick Motorsports and the great relationship we had with them over many years and that resulted in wins and championships and we want to apply that, and we've been trying to apply that knowledge with our Xfinity program. To answer the question, what I've found to be the absolute key to going to the next level in these relationships is having embedded employees and having a key engineering resource that is accountable, that comes from the mothership to the alliance team and that person or persons has accountability and is compensated for the success of the alliance team. Brad and the folks at RFK have done that and we've done that. If you look at RSS Racing, we were super proud of those guys this year. They're a small team in Georgia with a heck of a driver and a lot of passion. But in a lot of areas, we they were lacking in resources, but we were able to install Mayy Noyce from our group and look what happened. We expect big things out of Ryan Sieg and Kyle Sieg this year. Same thing with AM Racing. They took it on the chin this year. There was a lot of change and a lot of learning but they are on the right path and are going to be on kill now. So we're working and embedding employees over there so they are able to use our IP to apply to their race cars and be more successful.. And Brad is helping us with that on our Cup side."