Spire Motorsports co-owner Jeff Dickerson explains decision to move on from Corey LaJoie
Spire Motorsports made the decision last month to move on from Corey LaJoie for the 2025 NASCAR Cup Series season.
Spire co-owner Jeff Dickerson, making an appearance Tuesday on SiriusXM NASCAR Radio, explained in detail the decision to cut ties with LaJoie. Dickerson called it a “gut feel,” though he admitted he isn’t sure yet if he made the right decision.
“Sometimes it’s just kind of a gut feel,” Dickerson said. “Obviously, the team had been struggling and I had been agonizing over it for a couple months. You guys have been around, I call it struggling team syndrome where everything just gets analyzed to the nth degree. But it was really odd in a way because generally in these situations you have a crew chief that’s saying, ‘man, the driver’s not doing this.’ Or you have a driver that’s saying, ‘man, what’s my guy doing?’ And this wasn’t any of that. In some ways, that actually made it a lot more difficult because it’s like man, if it’s not this and it’s not that, then what the hell are we doing?
“And on top of that Jordan [Bianchi], the relationships are like deep. Corey’s a guy that was with us when we didn’t have anything. I just thought that with Ryan [Sparks] moving up and just trying to figure out what’s kind of going on, I just thought a clean slate was better for next year. I know you guys aren’t my therapists, I’m not sure that it’s the right decision. I’ve been kind of working through that, I still don’t know that it’s the right decision, I just thought it was gonna be the best decision that we have for 2025.”
Corey LaJoie opens up on Spire Motorsports exit
LaJoie, 32, was Spire’s first-ever full-time Cup Series driver, signing with the team ahead of the 2021 season. Unfortunately for LaJoie, the results just haven’t been there. He currently sits 28th in the points standings through 22 races, tallying just one top-10 finish. In his previous three seasons with Spire, LaJoie finished 29th, 31st and 25th in the points standings, respectively. LaJoie is winless through 258 Cup Series starts with nine top 10s.
Last month, Spire hired Rodney Childers away from Stewart-Haas Racing to serve as the No. 7 team’s crew chief next season, a move which looked to be a lifeline of sorts for LaJoie. As we now know, LaJoie isn’t in Spire’s plans. They will now go about finding a driver to fill the void in 2025.
On the latest episode of his “Stacking Pennies” podcast, LaJoie shared his reaction to being let go from Spire.
“I am super appreciative of where I’m at in life financially with my career,” Corey LaJoie said. “It went way different than I ever expected it. Also, it’s never been easy. My entire NASCAR career has not went how I thought it was going to go. So why would I expect anything different, right? Every single plan that I thought I was going to make, it went differently.
“The thing that I’ve been kind of clinging on to the last week or so, and we can get into it, there’s just that Proverbs 16:9. It’s been pinned to my X profile for almost 10 years now. ‘The man can plan his path, but the Lord determines his steps.’ I don’t know what the next step is.”