Legacy Motor Club CEO opens up about Chevrolet's 'tier three' support

There is no doubt that Legacy Motor Club and Chevrolet had a less-than-perfect end to their professional relationship together. In the new NASCAR season, LMC is now a Toyota organization and hopes to get a lot more help than they received from Chevy.

In the second half of 2023, Legacy Motor Club named Cal Wells III as CEO of the organization. It is a partnership that they hope will be fruitful. Wells has a strong relationship with Toyota and has helped the manufacturer with projects in the past in the NASCAR world.

Despite the years of work between team co-owner Maury Gallagher and Chevy when it came to GMS Racing – the Cup Series efforts, the Truck Series championship – it didn’t matter.

Cal Wells spoke on behalf of Legacy Motor Club during EPARTRADE’s Race Industry Week. He detailed the “tier three” treatment that his organization received from their former manufacturer.

“Unfortunately [GM] didn’t feel that way,” Wells said about putting more resources behind LMC, via AutoWeek. “And they left [the team] at what I would consider a tier three, where the information was very limited and intentional. I mean, this isn’t to say that [Vice President of GM Performacne and Motorsports] Jim Campbell and [Executive Director GM Motorsports] Eric Warren didn’t pay a lot of attention to Gallagher Motorsports and then Jimmie and then Richard Petty, and then how it continued to evolve into Legacy, because they did. But they had tier one teams that they had made huge investments in and they were wanting to appropriately support their other true key partner teams.”

Sounds like Chevy just ran out of room for Legacy Motor Club.

Legacy Motor Club makes sense for Toyota

Cal Wells III has been through team rebuilds and things. He has been around motorsports for 40 years or so and has found success almost everywhere he has found himself. Working with Toyota is going to be comfortable for Wells and his team since he’s worked with them in the past.

Continuing his remarks, Wells talked about what made sense. For Chevy, adding Legacy as a “tier one” team didn’t make sense. But for their new manufacturer?

“Toyota on the other hand, it did make sense. And so through a series of meetings – that that time I had my TRD hat firmly on – Jimmie filled the voids that weren’t had in his operations as it related to sponsorship development, as it related to certain other relationships that Jimmie could bring, and it ended up the view was it would be the perfect marriage.

“You’ve got individuals that are really, really good in their own swim lane, and now you could build a crossover. That’s how it came about.”

Legacy Motor Club is in a New Year and a new day. They can now focus on building themselves up. After last season, any kind of success would be welcomed.