Everything must go: How Legacy Motor Club transitioned to Toyota
Just as one would look around their home after the holidays wondering what they want to get rid of, Joey Cohen and Legacy Motor Club did the same thing at the race shop.
“How am I going to get rid of all this clutter?” Cohen, the vice president of race operations, joked to RACER.
In this case, the clutter is cars, parts, and pieces no longer of use to Legacy Motor Club as it goes from competing with Chevrolet to Toyota this season. So, after the November season finale at Phoenix Raceway, one of the organization’s biggest priorities making room for new inventory.
“I turned into part salesman the last three races of the year,” Cohen said. “We have a communication path with all of our other teams, so I’m sending emails to all our Chevrolet counterparts. I’m like, ‘Hey, I’ve got all these Chevy parts sitting here. They’re only a year old, or at most two years old. First come, first served. Whoever comes and gets them, gets them and they’re yours.”
The advantage of NASCAR’s Next Gen Cup series car is the single-source supplied parts. There are hardly any proprietary pieces being made by race teams and kept from public eye.
“There are Chevrolet teams out there willing to take advantage of getting (our) parts used at a discount to save a little money,” Cohen said. “We can just recoup a little bit of our capital back for the parts that are no longer any good to us.”
It took about a month for Legacy Motor Club to remove traces of being a Chevrolet team. Cohen described it as mind-numbing to see just how many parts and pieces ended up in a storage unit after two seasons with a new vehicle. There were full bodies – some that hadn’t been raced – oil tanks, oil lines, air boxes, and specific parts for a Chevrolet motor.
“Frankly, like a million-and-a-half dollars’ worth of stuff,” Cohen said. “What are we going to do with it? It’s a big responsibility to figure out, because I’m going to have to turn around and buy that same stuff again for Toyota. So, I’m sitting here and the owner’s calling asking, ‘what’s our plan here?’ I’m like, ‘hey look, here’s the realistic probability. If we can get 60 cents on the dollar, we’re doing really good.’ The good thing about the Next Gen stuff, it holds its value because it’s common.”
The race season ended on Sunday, November 5. By the time the calendar turned to December, Legacy Motor Club had its first Toyota car on track. Erik Jones drove the No. 43 in the two-day test at Phoenix on December 5 and 6 as NASCAR experimented with its short-track package.
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Before the test, Legacy Motor Club had a pile of 2023-style parts sent by 23XI Racing to be put on the pit stop cars. The organization has brought its pit crews in-house – just as 23XI Racing did going into 2023. The Legacy crews will train alongside its Toyota teammates from 23XI Racing and Joe Gibbs Racing.
There have been plenty of other changes around the shop. A fresh coat of paint on the walls and a redone floor. The lobby is also being redecorated, as are the walls leading into the race shop. One wall has a mural of the history of GMS Racing, the now-shuttered Craftsman Truck series operation. The other wall will be done with the history of Legacy Motor Club plus those of co-owners Maury Gallagher, Richard Petty and Jimmie Johnson.
By the front door, a wall has been taken down and replaced by glass windows allowing visitors to see into the shop. And GMS Racing no longer being in operation has freed up more space for the Cup series team since both organizations were splitting the shop floor.
“A majority of the October, November unraveling was how do we wind that down, clear this space out and make it more dedicated, more intentional for a Cup shop?” Cohen said. “Whereas before, we were trying to be good roommates. We were like, hey, you guys are over here, we’re over here, but if you need this … Now we go down there and we have all this space. We cleaned up some things, brightened it up. The building needed some attention.
“We’re bringing tools and people in that needed spaces. So, it was a really good time to tackle that as we’re waiting on the other things to happen.”
There was a lot of waiting before action could be taken. Legacy Motor Club and Toyota announced their partnership on May 2 2023. In the aftermath, the organization remained committed to finishing its tenure with Chevrolet and fulfilling its partnership even as those resources and tools dried up.
“We were in the race season, right? We’re actively competing with a Chevrolet team,” Cohen said. “You have to be respect of your current agreements; you have to honor those. We did that.”
In the interim, no possession of Toyota parts or changes were made in the race shop. But there was a “countdown to Toyota” tracker kept on a white board.
“They had all sorts of countdowns,” Cohen laughed. “Like ‘countdown since the last major announcement.’ Or ‘days without a new hire in the building.’ It was like four or five different ones. It’s funny because that’s what’s the most noticeable about our environment, there is something happening all the time.”
Legacy Motor Club still had to go to the track and compete as a Chevrolet team while preparing to transition to Toyota. John K Harrelson/Motorsport Images
With nothing physically to do for the transition until the season ended, it was all meetings and planning between the May announcement and the season finale. The thrash began the day after.
“You can have conversations and planning sessions, but you can’t put hands on things and you can’t sit down in formal environments and really open the books up and say, ‘Hey, this is how we’re going to do it at Toyota,’” Cohen explained. “Truly, those things were the Monday after Phoenix, but [there was] a lot of conversation, a lot of internal planning on our part.
“There were some connection points there we could make with how we were going to do things with the competition area, how we’re going to do things on the sales and marketing area. Our group could go out and actively sell that partnership because everyone knew we were going to Toyota. So, I think [the months after the announcement] served a huge advantage for our marketing group and sales group to pitch partnership.
“On the competition side, we still have to go out there and run a Chevrolet and honor all our partnership and like I said that’s what we did. Until the last day, the last hour of that agreement, we were a Chevrolet team.”
On the day of this interview, Cohen had just given back his personal Chevrolet vehicle. Many other employees have done so too, and more and more Toyota-branded vehicles were beginning to appear in the parking lot at the shop.
There are also more people employed there. In addition to taking on its own pit crews, Legacy Motor Club has been able to add more depth to its organization while revamping and restructuring some of its departments.
“Part of that is a direct connection with Toyota – we have responsibilities now and stuff we’re beholden to as a tier one partner with TRD,” Cohen said. “We have an aero department now that has a lead. We have a quality control department that has a staff of four that has a lead. We have somebody that’s directly tied in with software development or engineering technology tools that we’re going to start to take on with Toyota and what they do with that type of stuff.
“We have a simulator that lives here in the shop. Those guys are on that two to three days a week, so that’s a responsibility that needs someone to manage it and operate it. We didn’t have that last year.”
Cohen estimated the organization has grown from 70 or 75 employees to about 115 and he’s confident it’s the right size for a two-car team.
Jimmie Johnson joined the fold ahead of the 2023 season. Nigel Kinrade/Motorsport Images
This is the third iteration of what is now Legacy Motor Club. It was Petty GMS when Gallagher bought the majority of Petty’s operation in December 2021 ahead of the 2022 season, and it became Legacy Motor Club with the addition of Johnson going into the 2023 season. Now comes a Toyota transition, while many other changes have also happened over the last two years. Some have been visible: personnel shuffled and added (i.e., Matt Kenseth and Cal Wells), different drivers (Ty Dillon and Noah Gragson have gone and while John Hunter Nemechek has joined) and crew chief changes.
The season starts in less than a month with a trip west to the L.A. Coliseum for the Busch Light Clash. While the initial thrash of the transition is over, Legacy Motor Club is still in the thick of preparation and will be spending the rest of January building its stable and developing plans on how to hit the ground running as a Toyota team.
“The biggest thing is we’re going to have to be intentional about communication between all of our groups because nobody knows the whys,” Cohen said. “Nobody knows why the Toyota stuff is like this or why the engine group does that. We’re still having calls with Toyota of, ‘Hey, we used to do our stuff this way. Why do y’all do it like this?’ So, we’re walking through it.
“We’re learning every day and everything is new. It’s fun. We’ve not had a boring off-season.”
And there is a lot of anticipation within the race shop to finally get on track.
“I won’t call it nervous energy but there’s a lot of pent-up energy just ready to explode,” Cohen said. “After winning a race in 2022, I think that instilled an amount of confidence in the whole shop that we can do this. Because there was a lot of people who never raced in Cup before in this shop. They never envisioned they could win a Cup race with the vehicles we build here.
“Now, what happened in ’23 was a little out of our control but we’re fine with taking a little pause in this journey and I think now, everyone is looking around like, wow, we have a lot of resources, we have a lot of people here that are really smart and really good. We have great crew chiefs and drivers.
“There are a lot of things happening that everyone is just ready to explode with seeing cars run up front and be in contention for wins. Everybody is kind of anxious right now more than anything.”
