MOORESVILLE, N.C. (June 26, 2025) – After enjoying five consecutive victory lane celebrations, Corey LaJoie aims to make it six straight when the checkered flag falls on Saturday night’s Quaker State 400 at EchoPark Speedway in Hampton, Georgia.

This one, however, would be the sweetest.

LaJoie comes into the 260-lap race around the 1.54-mile oval on the outskirts of Atlanta after a very successful and universally praised performance as a race analyst during Prime Video’s five-week foray into broadcasting NASCAR Cup Series races. From the Coca-Cola 600 on May 25 at Charlotte (N.C.) Motor Speedway to The Great American Getaway 400 last Sunday at Pocono (Pa.) Raceway, LaJoie and his Prime Video cohorts – host Danielle Trotta and fellow analysts Carl Edwards, Dale Earnhardt Jr., Steve Letarte and Adam Alexander – highlighted backstories, spotlighted strategies and reveled in teams’ triumphs.

After 10 years of analyzing Cup Series races from the windshield of a racecar, LaJoie viewed races through the lens of live television. It provided a perspective that has made the 33-year-old a better racecar driver, despite eight races having passed since his last Cup Series start April 13 at Bristol (Tenn.) Motor Speedway.

“Driving the racecar can be a really lonely place. You have all this weight of expectations to deliver for your team and your sponsors and yourself and your fans, and when you feel like you’re not doing that, it feels like everybody is looking at you,” LaJoie said. “But what I realized these last five weeks during my time on Prime, I’m intently watching the race, but I’m really only focused on three guys’ races. The other guys who are there grinding away, unless they somehow factor into the main storylines of the race, they’re not top of mind.

“Before this opportunity to see the race from a TV perspective, I would feel like if I wasn’t running well, then I was letting a lot of people down. I think that I cared too much, and I would hold the outcome too tightly, as opposed to just enjoying it when I was doing it.”

Like a batter who had been pressing at the plate before finally earning a hit, the freedom to swing away is liberating for LaJoie.

“Now that I’m back in the seat, I’m going to enjoy it,” LaJoie said. “I really like the atmosphere at Rick Ware Racing, and now we’re going back to a place where I’ve been close to winning before. It’s a great opportunity for me to run well and have some fun.”

LaJoie, driver of the No. 01 Schluter®-Systems Ford Mustang Dark Horse, nearly won at Atlanta in July 2022. He led 19 laps and lined up second for the green-white-checkered dash to the finish.

“We led the final restart of the day, and then Chase Elliott got a big push, got to the lead, and I should’ve worked a bit harder to block that run for the lead,” LaJoie said. “I thought I made the right move on the last lap to get to his right-rear quarter, but he just threw his block a bit later, and he threw the block to win, right? It didn’t work for me and the help didn’t go my way, but that was pretty close to career victory number one.

“But that’s why I keep showing up, especially here at Atlanta. I feel that we can find ourselves in the same spot.”

EchoPark Speedway features the kind of pack-style racing seen at the behemoth, 2.5-mile Daytona (Fla.) International Speedway and the even bigger 2.66-mile Talladega (Ala.) Superspeedway. Yet the track is a mile shorter in length, making each race a frenzied affair.

“Atlanta is like a speedway on steroids. Things happen so quickly, and you can get yourself into a bad spot,” LaJoie said.

LaJoie returns to EchoPark Speedway with an ally in his Rick Ware Racing teammate, Cody Ware.

“It’s always good to have a teammate out there on the racetrack,” said Ware, driver of the No. 51 Jacob Construction Ford Mustang Dark Horse. “Corey is a very good superspeedway racer. He’s someone you can lean on and work with before the race even starts, and that alone is an advantage.”

Both Ware and LaJoie raced together in the Cup Series’ first visit to EchoPark Speedway in late February. Each had their competitive runs tour sour when they were collected in separate, multicar accidents.

“Going back and looking at the things that went wrong in Atlanta back in February will be a good thing to learn and prepare for how we’re going to strategize at Atlanta this time around,” Ware said.

Another big difference will be the weather. Late February was cool. Late June is hot and humid, with the stifling heat wave currently engulfing the Southeast only exacerbating the massive change in track conditions.

“I think it’ll make for tighter racing. Handling’s definitely going to be of importance,” LaJoie said.

LaJoie still has the feel of a racecar despite last racing a Cup car at Bristol.

“I’ve driven some Modified races and I ran a Truck just a few weeks back at Michigan,” said LaJoie, who nearly won the NASCAR Craftsman Truck Series race June 7 at Michigan International Speedway in Brooklyn, as he was leading seven laps short of the finish.

“So, I’m going to drive that Schluter-Systems Ford Mustang as fast as it’ll go. It’s just a matter of executing the day and putting ourselves in good track position, and we did that well at the first Atlanta race this year.

“We drove into the top-15 and we got crashed, but that’s right about the point where you can start to maneuver and get a sniff of clean air. Anything outside the top-15 is really turbulent and hard to make gains, so we want to have a car that has the pace to be able to do that.”

It comes from a perspective that is now two-fold – from the driver’s seat and the analyst’s chair.

“Prior to my time with Prime, all I’ve ever known was driving racecars or working toward trying to drive racecars, so going to the racetrack with a different mission was originally uncomfortable, but over the last five weeks, I really got settled in and it was really fun to have that perspective on the sport,” LaJoie said.

“Working with Stevie and Dale and Carl and Danielle and Double-A (Adam Alexander) – they all answered any dumb questions I had, and everybody from the Prime side kind of gave me the tools to figure out how to become good at it.

“I didn’t know what to expect, but I knew that it was going to be fun.”

LaJoie brings that same mindset to EchoPark Speedway when qualifying for the Quaker State 400 begins Friday at 5:05 p.m. EDT. The green flag drops Saturday at 7 p.m. with TNT and SiriusXM NASCAR Radio providing live, flag-to-flag coverage.

About Rick Ware Racing:

Rick Ware has been a motorsports mainstay for more than 40 years. It began at age 6 when the third-generation racer began his driving career and has since spanned four wheels and two wheels on both asphalt and dirt. Competing in the SCCA Trans Am Series and other road-racing divisions led Ware to NASCAR in the early 1980s, where he finished third in his NASCAR debut – the 1983 Warner W. Hodgdon 300 NASCAR Grand American race at Riverside (Calif.) International Raceway. More than a decade later, injuries would force Ware out of the driver’s seat and into full-time team ownership. In 1995, Rick Ware Racing was formed, and with his wife Lisa by his side, Ware has since built his eponymous organization into an entity that competes full-time in the elite NASCAR Cup Series while simultaneously campaigning successful teams in the Top Fuel class of the NHRA Mission Foods Drag Racing Series, Progressive American Flat Track and FIM World Supercross Championship (WSX).

–RWR-