NASCAR outfit 23XI Racing to assemble pit crews using an unusual procedure

23XI Racing's affiliation with Joe Gibbs Racing is a vital part of the NASCAR Cup Series team's success thus far and in the future of the sport. However, the relatively new team, headed by basketball legend Michael Jordan and owner-operator Denny Hamlin, has decided to part ways with the Toyota-backed JGR with respect to pit crew duties.

The 2022 season saw the Mooresville, North Carolina-based racing outfit suffer from a string of bad performances by their pit crew on pit road, mostly affecting the #23 Toyota Camry TRD, driven by Bubba Wallace Jr. The car and driver were seen being compromised on several occasions after pitting and losing out on potential wins and good results.

This prompted the team to make a change away from Coach Gibbs' second-best pit-crew hand-downs and assemble a homogeneous group of their own. Josh Shipplett was promoted from the task of tire changer to heading the newly formed pit-crew as their performance coach.

Altering several aspects of the team, from hiring experienced pit crew members to altering the choreography of the pit stop itself, Shipplett seems to be hard at work on trying to give his drivers every chance to win, atleast on the pit road.

With an all-new crew for Bubba Wallace Jr. in the 2023 NASCAR Cup Series season, with only three members remaining from the previous season, Shipplett and Hamlin have come to a joint conclusion of trading young, inexperienced members of the pit crew with experienced ones from other teams.

The pit crew's live pit stop choreography has also been altered by the 33-year-old Shipplett, with now the front and rear tire changers attending the rear-left and front-right tires respectively, before advancing to the remaining tires, as opposed to both teams attending the same sides on the front and rear of the car.

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Ex-NASCAR tire changer turned pit crew coach elaborates on his promotion at 23XI Racing

Josh Shipplett, the new pit crew coach at 23XI Racing and in-charge of the NASCAR Cup Series team's performance on pit road from the current season onwards, elaborated on how he looks forward to building a pit crew that functions like a well-oiled machine, and said:

"Coaching opportunities in this series don’t come available every day, to be able to do it from scratch and build something the way that 23XI believed in and I also believed in, I knew it was going to be hard, but in my thoughts it would have been a lot harder to go somewhere else and change a philosophy they already had."

"To have this opportunity to start from new and have the coaching opportunity was something that probably wasn’t going to happen, so I had to jump on it.”

Witness 23XI Racing's new pit crew philosophy in action on February 19, 2023 as the NASCAR circus heads to Daytona Beach, Florida for the 65th Daytona 500.