Steve Lauletta Talks What’s Driving 23XI Racing

Danny Peters spoke to 23XI President Steve Lauletta prior to the race at Phoenix Raceway.

You’re in the fourth year of operations for 23XI Racing and you have five wins, 31 top fives, 51 top 10s, four poles and 1160 laps led. How do you grade your progress thus far?

SL: I think we’re right on schedule. For me, personally, maybe a little ahead of schedule. There’s a lot of work still to be done. The encouraging thing is the consistency of how we were competitive over the last half of 2023, at least, consistently having both cars qualify in the top 10, running in the top 10, the deep run we had in the playoffs. I feel like the momentum we built late last season is carrying over to the start of this season in terms of the confidence level, and now we just need to execute it on the racetrack.

Where do you think you’re ahead of schedule?

SL: In a couple of ways. We had an additional year to work with Tyler [Reddick]. We weren’t supposed to have him as part of the team until this season, and through unfortunate circumstances with Kurt we were able to have him race with us last year. So that’s an additional year of Tyler working with Billy Scott and the team, working with Bubba [Wallace], fitting into our system. So that’s for sure put us ahead of the schedule we had laid out with him joining the team. And I think the progression of Bubba and Bootie and the [No.] 23 team has really ramped up. They’ve taken some major steps since 2021, when they won their first race together at Talladega, to get to be a consistent front-running team. We don’t get the finishes consistently enough but we have the speed in the cars. We’re working really hard both at the track and away from the track, whether that’s with our pit crews or our processes to provide them everything they need to keep that advancement going as fast as it can. Those things all combine, plus us working together as a group, adding the things we’ve needed to add to become a front-running, competitive race team takes time. I think we’ve maybe been doing that faster than I originally thought we could.

Expectations for 2024? Both teams to make the playoffs? Both teams have wins?

SL: For me, it’s the continued progression. If we finished sixth and 10th last year, we need to be better than that this year. We won two races with Tyler last year, I would want to do better. than that this year. We’ve won two races with Bubba over three seasons. How do we…