Spire Motorsports announced Tuesday that crew chief Travis Peterson will join the organization on a multiyear deal starting in 2025 to lead the No. 71 team with driver Michael McDowell.
Peterson has spent each of the last two NASCAR Cup Series seasons with McDowell at Front Row Motorsports, heading the No. 34 car to a 2023 victory at the Indianapolis Motor Speedway road course with a total of four top fives and 14 top 10s in 58 races. The duo has also won three Busch Light Pole Awards in 2024, with one each at Atlanta Motor Speedway, Talladega Superspeedway and World Wide Technology Raceway at Gateway.
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Peterson, 33, previously worked as a race engineer on the No. 17 RFK Racing Ford with Chris Buescher before transitioning to FRM for the 2023 campaign. Peterson, a graduate of the University of North Carolina at Charlotte, also served as a race engineer for Hendrick Motorsports‘ No. 88 Chevrolet from 2015 through part of the 2018 season with drivers Dale Earnhardt Jr., Jeff Gordon and Alex Bowman, collecting three wins while responsible for the car‘s setup, according to Peterson‘s LinkedIn profile. He served the same role on JR Motorsports‘ No. 9 Chevrolet in 2014 when Chase Elliott wheeled the car to the NASCAR Xfinity Series championship.
“It‘s exciting to have Travis Peterson join Spire Motorsports,” Spire Motorsports president Doug Duchardt said in a team release. “The first time Travis and I worked together was when Greg Ives and Travis came to Hendrick Motorsports to be the crew chief and the engineer for the No. 88 car with Dale (Earnhardt) Jr. I got to spend time with Travis there as a young engineer and it‘s exciting to see how he‘s grown into a leader and a crew chief. He‘s going to add tremendous depth to our crew chief lineup and be a great compliment to Luke (Lambert) and Rodney (Childers). I‘m really excited to see what those three can do together.”
Indeed, Peterson will join an impressive lineup of crew chiefs at Spire in 2025 as Lambert continues to lead the No. 77 team with driver Carson Hocevar and Childers slides atop the No. 7 team’s pit box next season after a remarkable stint at the outgoing Stewart-Haas Racing.
“It‘s going to be exciting,” Peterson said in a release. “Rodney is a veteran of the sport. It is exciting for me to learn from a guy with that much success. Luke and I worked together when I was an engineer at Roush so we‘re definitely familiar with one another. We have all seen each other around and we‘ve all paid attention to each other. Combining all those ideas will be exciting. That is where a lot of strength is right now in the sport. The teamwork side of our group is going to be very valuable.”
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Peterson’s endeavor with McDowell at Front Row marked his first as crew chief, a coupling that has proved fruitful in just over a season and a half. By joining McDowell at Spire, Peterson offers both himself and his driver stability. Each now has a multiyear contract, allowing the duo to build the No. 71 team as they see fit without needing to relearn how to communicate with either a new driver or a new crew chief in the interim.
“There are times when you meet people and you are immediately able to naturally communicate on a real level,” Peterson said of his relationship with McDowell in a team release. “I feel like we were that way from the start. We didn‘t have to work at it. Our personalities, the way we openly communicate, and our honest nature helped us click from the start. We have no problem talking about hard stuff or easy stuff. We can be happy together when we win and be sad together when we lose. There is no red tape. We just work. It‘s hard to recreate that. Staying together is a huge part in coming to Spire Motorsports for both of us. It‘s hard to put a value on a driver/crew-chief pairing, but there‘s an intangible there. We just knew it has been working, and if we can keep it going, we‘re only going to get better over time. That‘s what we‘re chasing. We want to continue to grow and get better together.”
The efforts of McDowell and Peterson in 2024 have produced two top fives and six top 10s in 22 races, with the No. 34 car leading 151 laps so far this season — a career-best for McDowell in his 17th year of Cup racing. McDowell is also averaging a career-best 13.0 starting position, up four positions from his prior best of 17.0 in each of the past two years. The team is also averaging a 20.7 finish, scoring a season-best second-place finish at Sonoma Raceway in June.
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“It is a very exciting opportunity,” Peterson said in a release. “Michael and I had the opportunity to meet with Doug (Duchardt) and (team co-owner Jeff) Dickerson and they really sold us on the vision of where Spire is going and how we could be big role players in building the organization. I think having that skin in the game was important to both of us. The opportunity in front of us has all the potential to be very rewarding. That was a huge part of it. I love the energy right now and the overall culture around Spire Motorsports. They‘re investing in people and team ownership is highly engaged. The mindset is ‘We‘re going to do what it takes to win and this is what we want to build. Here‘s the vision, where we‘re going, what we‘re going to do to get there, and we want you to be part of it.’ That was the biggest selling point.”
Up next is Richmond Raceway on Sunday (6 p.m. ET, USA Network, MRN Radio, SiriusXM NASCAR Radio, NBC Sports App). McDowell has typically struggled at the 0.75-mile oval but scored his lone top-10 finish in 26 starts there with Peterson in the spring of 2023.