Is TRICON Garage On the Edge of an Upswing?

On Friday (April 14) Corey Heim scored his first NASCAR Craftsman Truck Series win of the season at Martinsville Speedway.

Although it was shortened from 200 laps to 124, Heim was the truck to beat regardless, leading the most laps and sweeping the stages.

It was also the first win for Heim’s team, TRICON Garage, since it rebranded at the end of the 2022 season. Formerly called David Gilliland Racing, and before that DGR-Crosley, the team signed Heim at the end of the 2022 season after Heim’s former team, Kyle Busch Motorsports, shifted to Chevrolet.

TRICON switched from Ford to Toyota after the KBM news dropped, and is currently the only big name Toyota team in the Truck Series (ThorSport Racing also switched from Toyota to Ford at season’s end in 2022).

Heim’s signing seemed to be a sign of hope. He had just won two races in 2022 en route to winning Rookie of the Year despite competing in just 16 of the 23 races. Heim’s talent is there, but his new team has struggled to find solid results since the rebrand – and really even before that.

Since its inception in 2018, TRICON Garage has just five truck series wins, with the first four of them coming from the same team, the No. 17. Of those four wins, only one came from a series regular. In 2019, Tyler Ankrum notched his first (and to date, only) career Truck win at Kentucky Speedway, becoming the first driver born in the 2000s to win a NASCAR premier series race.

Since then, only part-time or one-off drivers had won for TRICON until Heim came along. Ryan Preece won two years in a row at Nashville Superspeedway in 2021 and 2022 despite running a part-time schedule, and Cup Series regular Todd Gilliland won for his dad in a one-off race at Knoxville Raceway in 2022, making it the first multi-win season for the team.

But none of TRICON’s past or present full-time drivers have finished higher than 14th in the final standings. The team currently fields five trucks, four of them full-time, but all of them have had their weaknesses.

The first truck, the No. 1, is a rotational truck after Hailie Deegan left for ThorSport this season. That truck’s best finish is ninth, twice, from Kaz Grala at Circuit of the Americas and rookie William Sawalich at Martinsville….