After a season that saw more downs than ups in many ways for the former Chevrolet driver, Noah Gragson now moves over to Ford for the upcoming season, jumping into the #10 Stewart Hass Racing Ford Mustang for 2024.
Coincidentally, this move comes just hours after JGR announced the addition of the former #10 driver for SHR, Aric Almirola, to their Xfinity program, competing in a part-time schedule for his upcoming 2024 season.
Nevertheless, the addition of Noah Gragson comes as no surprise, given that rumors had circulated for weeks that Gragson would be joining the team after his murky departure from Legacy Motor Club.
Gragson didn’t live up to expectations last season at Legacy, finishing a season-best 12th at Atlanta in the Spring.
While Gragson would find success the following week at COTA, finishing 20th, the Nevada native couldn’t mustard anything positive, getting more attention form some of his off track antics, both good, bad and ugly in regards to the in-season incident that occurred.
For Noah Gragson, this hypothetically speaking is a better move given the equipment and performance that SHR has had as a unit.
Although rebuilding, Stewart Hass Racing still has one of the more competitive equipment among teams in the series and by moving over to Stewart Hass, this could be a chance for Gragson to potentially rewrite the wrongs that happened at Legacy.
While it is hard to tell how Legacy may do post-Gragson as the team heads into their first season with Toyota, SHR definitely has seen much better performances than Legacy over the years, even if the team is heading into a new direction.
Now, with the addition of Gragson, SHR will feature Chase Briscoe, Ryan Preece and another new addition for 2024, Josh Berry, giving the team a new feel heading into this new era.
Briscoe definitely feels like the most confident choice in regards to drivers from SHR who could make the playoffs in the ’24 season, but with Berry and Gragson adding to this youthful movement, there could be dark horse potential for this once-powerhouse team.
No matter what, it will be weird not seeing Almirola and Harvick on grid for the group, but SHR had to go in this direction if they want to start to become the Hendrick-like group amongst the Ford group with their young drivers in development.
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