Ricky Stenhouse Jr. breaks silence on JTGD Racing’s rebrand to HYAK Motorsports

Chevy driver Ricky Stenhouse Jr. has detailed his feelings about his teams rebranding after losing one of their key primary sponsors.

Ricky Stenhouse Jr. breaks silence on JTGD Racing’s rebrand to HYAK Motorsports

Ricky Stenhouse Jr. (Via IMAGO)

The 2024 NASCAR Cup season saw a massive changes with 2023 Daytona 500 winner Ricky Stenhouse Jr.’s JTG Daugherty Racing. They lost their key sponsor in Kroger to RFK Racing and Ryan Preece for 2025 season. This had made the team to rebrand themselves following changes to principal ownership.

The team would be known as HYAK Motorsports for the 2025 season and potentially beyond the future. The Chevy driver Ricky Stenhouse Jr. recently talked about the change, asserted that the team is going through a big change, as everything the team has been made more consolidated, with addition of new strong crew members being the highlight.

Obviously, we have a big shift in the organization. You can look at it a couple different ways and I think the way we’re looking at it is everything’s a little more consolidated, we got all the same great employees, the same crew guys and processes will stay the same.

Ricky Stenhouse Jr. said via SiriusXMNASCAR.

The change has instilled a new confidence in Stenhouse Jr. and he feel confident about it going forward. He is determined to work harder to make sure they have faster cars going into the upcoming 2025 season.

I feel confident Mike and the guys will keep working hard to try to make our cars faster when it comes to the on-racetrack portion of it.

Ricky Stenhouse Jr. added.

Ricky Stenhouse Jr. detailed his plans for the 2025 season

While further talking about the changes, Stenhouse jr. explained what his goals for the 2025 season are. He wants his team to get back to performing at the same level as they did in 2023, where they made into the playoffs with Dayton 500 win and had a P14 average finish.

Ricky Stenhouse Jr. (Via IMAGO)
Ricky Stenhouse Jr. (Via IMAGO)

All our eyes at HYAK Motorsports are definitely looking forward and trying to get our performance back to kind of 2023 season. I felt like obviously starting with a win at the [Daytona] 500 was huge, but I think we averaged a 14th-place finish throughout most of the regular season and that’s something we wanna get back to, something that we failed to do this year.

Ricky Stenhouse Jr. said.

Stenhouse Jr. is eying for the level of consistency he produced in his best season with the team, and it would be really special if he is able to do it in the first year since their rebranding. It will be interesting to see if the two times Xfinity series champion can produce a performance that would make Kroger regret their decision to leave him.