Steve Lauletta is the President of 23XI Racing and a veteran of the NASCAR industry, having previously spent 10 years in the same role at Chip Ganassi Racing. We’ve split this interview into two parts, the first focusing on the drivers and the second (out Saturday, Feb. 11) a broader look at the team overall.
Danny Peters, Frontstretch: You’re just two years in and you have three wins, 13 top-fives, 22 top-10s and 396 laps led. How would you grade the team’s performance overall?
Steve Lauletta: I think we’ve done a very nice job of delivering strong results as a very young team. I think the three wins in our first two seasons, having a win with a new team [the 45 team] and Bubba [Wallace] getting his second win [at Kansas Speedway] shows the progression we are making. And that’s why taking another step in 2023 is so important to us and being prepared to do that is what we’ve all been focused on since the end of the last season.
Peters: What was your favorite moment so far?
Lauletta: I think Talladega in 2021. Getting that win for Bubba, for Denny [Hamlin] and Michael [Jordan] his owners. It was really special to get our first win in our first year. Only three teams have won races in their first year at the Cup level — including us. It’s a pretty strong testament to us coming out of the gate and being not just an interesting brand off the track but one that made some noise on the track in our first year.
Peters: Low Point?
Lauletta: Starting at Pocono Raceway with Kurt [Busch]. If anyone had asked me in 2021 to guess when we would have been a two-car team my earliest guess would have been 2023, knowing we had to develop ourselves as an organization. But when a guy like Kurt Busch becomes available and Monster Energy wants to come to the team, we jumped at the chance to become a two-car team in 2022. We had a multiyear agreement with Kurt to be our experienced driver and to take the steps we needed. He’s a great teammate then that all kind of stops with a qualifying crash at Pocono. We had five different drivers in the [No.] 45 [in 2022] including Bubba: Kurt, John Hunter Nemechek, Ty Gibbs and Daniel Hemric. Those are a lot of moving parts over a season that none of us expected. It shows the resilience of this organization that we didn’t miss a beat in any of it. The 45 team — we switched drivers for the owner’s championship — finished 10th in points in our second year. We got our second win at Kansas…
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