In a move Furniture Row Racing has foreshadowed for months, the NASCAR team officially announced Wednesday that it will downsize and field just a single car in the Monster Energy Cup Series next season.
Furniture Row Racing will downsize to 1-car team in 2018
A lack of sponsorship is prompting Furniture Row Racing to close its No. 77 team and revert back to being a single-car team next season.
FRR will continue entering a No. 78 Toyota for Martin Truex Jr., who currently leads the series in wins, points, top-five finishes and laps led, while it will dissolve the No. 77 car for current driver Erik Jones, a rookie who is leaving the team at the end of the season to join Joe Gibbs Racing.
Jones announced he would leave FRR in July, creating a situation where the Denver-based organization required additional sponsorship to remain a two-car operation. During the search for funding, team owner Barney Visser said he would not self-sponsor the car to keep it on the track and when that funding never materialized the decision was made to scale back to a one-car team with Truex its sole focus.
“It is our organization’s goal to operate a two-car team in the future and we will continue to seek sponsorship funding for the No. 77,” Visser said in a statement. “Our 100 percent focus for next season will be on the No. 78 Toyota Camry, which will be driven by Martin Truex Jr.”
Why it matters: As evident by Truex’s success, FRR is a championship-caliber team with the resources and capability to be among NASCAR’s best — even if it’s not located in the sport’s Charlotte, N.C., hub where the majority of teams reside.
But to continue operating two fulltime cars requires funding, something FRR doesn’t have an abundance of despite its high performance level. And that a team of this stature cannot find satisfactory funding to remain as is, speaks volumes about NASCAR’s current economic climate where the cost of ownership remains exorbitant while big-dollar sponsors are hard to find.
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