The least surprising announcement since the realisation that water is wet is that Cole Custer will rejoin the NASCAR Cup series in 2025. The 26 -year- old is back in the major league following a brief hiatus in the NASCAR Xfinity series. The NASCAR Xfinity and Cup series are racing this weekend at Indianapolis Motor Speedway, where the announcement was made on Saturday. It sent shockwaves through the “we knew this was coming” group. The renamed Stewart-Haas Racing, which was reduced to a single-car squad after going out of business, is now Haas Factory Racing, a name that sounds like something out of a dystopian novel. The man who enjoys a little automation and tooling, Gene Haas, is once again supporting this endeavour through his businesses, Haas Automation and Haas
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Beginning with a single car in 2002, Gene Haas built the Stewart-Haas empire in 2009 after teaming up with Tony Stewart. Now, following a tumultuous divorce that would make Spanish telenovela fans squirm, Haas is going back to basics with his new, slimmer team, with Cole Custer, Joe Custer’s prodigious offspring, set to be the driver. Joe, a longtime executive at Stewart-Haas, has been running the day-to-day operations while Gene flirted with Formula 1 and Tony Stewart dabbled in NHRA racing. The new team, Haas Factory Racing, keeps one of the golden tickets of NASCAR: the Charter, which guarantees entry into races. While the other Stewart-Haas drivers have found new homes, Ryan Preece,is racing for the NHRA. The current No. 41 Ford driver, Cole Custer, will take over the ride for the upcoming season, leaving the new team, Haas Factory Racing, with one of the golden tickets in NASCAR. Here, let’s not overlook the qualifications. No slouch, Cole Custer is. The defending NASCAR Xfinity champion with 14 wins across 162 races, he’s had a taste of Cup series action from 2020 to 2022, even scoring his first, and thus far only, Cup series victory in 2020. But in 2022, like a wayward kid sent off to boarding school, Cole found himself ejected in favor of Preece and ended up at Rick Ware Racing.
