Xfinity underdog Clements fights on
Jeremy Clements hoped his improbable victory at Road America would provide the boost his small, family-owned team needed to compete more regularly at a high level on the NASCAR Xfinity Series.
A year later, two things are apparent.
His situation hasn’t changed much. There’s been no great influx of new sponsorship that would allow the team to acquire newer equipment that could help performance and would take away some of the sting from each failure or crash.
And Clements would still cringe just a little bit at the word “improbable.”
“I think about winning all the time,” he said. “I’m like, we won one of these races. We can do it again.”
The 33-year-old from Spartanburg, S.C., will try to win for the second time in the series in the Johnsonville 180 beginning at 2 p.m. Saturday. Practice opens Friday at the 4.048-mile, 14-turn course in Elkhart Lake.
The deck will be stacked against Clements, though, as it has been since he arrived fulltime in the series in 2011.
Everything at Jeremy Clements Racing is second-hand or older. Engines are home-built, not leased from one of the big teams. Clements has never raced a top-of-the-line car. In fact, the one he had at Road America last year was 9 years old and still a little beat up from a crash at Mid-Ohio three weeks earlier.
Clements’ primary sponsor has been loyal and generous – without RepairableVehicles.com, there’s a chance he’d be out of business – but the market is limited and the margins small for a company that sells crash-damaged passenger cars.
“With the purse and the sponsorship all year, we race off probably a million (dollars) all year,” Clements said. “A million all year, vs. the five to six million we’re racing against. It takes a lot of dollars to make these cars fast and everything keep going.
“We build our own engines. We race older cars. We’re just trying to keep this going as long as we can, and make the best of it when we come to these tracks where we can go after a win or a top-10.”
In Clements’ world, “these tracks” are the road courses, short tracks and superspeedways. The 1.5-mile ovals that make up about one-third of the schedule put a premium on engineering and aerodynamics. But a driver can hustle a mediocre car a little more on a road course or at a short track, and the draft is an equalizer on the big tracks.
Clements has 14 top-10 finishes throughout his career, none on traditional mile-and-a-half tracks but three on road courses, two at Road America and one at Mid-Ohio.
Not bad for a guy who came out of dirt late models and hadn’t seen a road course in person before pulling through the Road America gate in 2011.
“I didn’t even know where I was going,” Clements said. “I was pretty intimidated. I didn’t know the track. I didn’t know what to do, where to shift. Didn’t know anything.”
He has found the simulation game iRacing beneficial to keep his skills sharp, but there’s nothing quite like actually being on track, especially the first time.
“I’m a student of racing. I try to learn every time I get in the car,” Clements said. “It was just, go out there and learn, try to follow cars. There wasn’t one particular person. It was just try to learn as I could.
“And then in the race – this is what I say every road-course race – stay on the track and you’ll get a good finish.
“I see a lot of guys just killing the … brakes, transmissions. Halfway through the race, they’re not in it anymore. I always try to think about that, keep this car, don’t kill everything, and we’ll be good at the end.”
But then that’s Clements’ goal every week. He has to be more careful than the drivers racing fully-funded cars for the big teams that also compete in the Monster Energy Cup.
Clements hates to even think about how fragile his team is. And not just his team, his place in the sport.
“Any time we can just complete a race, do the best we can, there’s money that comes in and we can try to make our stuff better, save up for the next wreck,” Clements said. “It’s always a tightrope.
“We definitely have the best stuff we’ve had and we have the best people. Danny Gill’s our crew chief now, and he’s coming to our shop two days a week, setting up the cars. That’s a lot better than we had before, so that helps a ton.”
Just like his career, Clements’ victory wasn’t smooth. He ran down Matt Tifft but then spun both of them out while making his pass.
Clements was fortunate, though, to have enough of a gap on Michael Annett and re-fire his engine quickly enough to get away.
To think about that day makes Clements smile. As improbable as winning is for a team like his, it’s not impossible. Everyone has a trophy to prove it.
“Actually a few of us got rings too, first-win rings,” Clements said. “You never know.
“Hopefully that’s not it, but it’s our first win anyway so we wanted to make sure we got everything we needed to remember it the way it needed to be remembered.”