KANSAS CITY, Kan.: With his limited experience at NASCAR tracks, Rajah Caruth’s familiarity with Kansas Speedway makes the 1.5-miler one of his most anticipated stops of the 2024 Craftsman Truck Series season.
The 21-year-old racer from Washington, D.C., has competed in the Xfinity, Truck and ARCA Menards tours at Kansas since arriving on the scene in 2021.
Caruth’s first stock car start in the Sunflower State resulted in a ninth-place finish in the ARCA race—and he’s loved racing at the track ever since.
“I’ve gotten to race there—probably the most out of any of the mile-and-a-halves that I’ve done,” Caruth said. “I think three ARCA races there, two Xfinity, two truck races and the only other mile-and-a-half I had more experience than that was Vegas. So, it’s nice to go back there.
“I think from a from a driving standpoint, it was the first mile-and-a-half that I went to the first time going 180 miles per hour. I’m just excited to be back in that track.”
As Caruth was getting his footing in the truck series last year with GMS Racing, his team announced it was closing its doors last August. While the news would have devastated some young racers—particularly one without family ties in the sport—Caruth kept digging.
Just weeks before the 2024 season began, Spire Motorsports named Caruth the driver of the No. 71 Chevrolet Silverado. HendrickCars.com extended its partnership with the rising star three weeks later. In just his third start of the year with his new team, Caruth won the Victoria’s Voice Foundation 200 at Las Vegas Motor Speedway.
Although the transition to a new team might have been daunting for a driver in his sophomore truck season, Caruth was fortunate to bring his crew chief, Chad Walter, along to Spire. Caruth spent a good part of the offseason familiarizing himself with personnel and learning the systems at the new team.
“It was big to keep my crew chief, Chad,” Caruth said. “That was a huge, huge, good thing. I had already known a lot of the people at Spire. Bono (Manion), that’s Nick (Sanchez, Caruth’s current and former teammate), my interior guy, Peter (Shepherd) and a lot of the other guys that are at Spire from the Cup side as well.
“I was neighbors with them when I was at Rev (Racing) when they were in Harrisburg (N.C). Also just being at the shop every work day of the offseason.
“It’s not necessarily like I was turning wrenches on the on the trucks and cars—but just being there and showing my face in the shop and learning the guys in the parts room, the people upstairs, the people at the the chassis building down the street, just being there helped speed that process along.”
Caruth appreciates the programs Spire and Chevrolet has in place for up-and-coming drivers to acclimate to racing in NASCAR’s top tours.
“They’ve got a really good system in place to help their drivers become better,” Caruth said. “So with all that—and Hendrickcars.com supporting me with the relationship we started at the back part of last year—it just hasn’t felt a whole lot different to be honest, with those people staying with me.”
The driver has incorporated not only the team resources he has at his disposal but also iRacing for race craft–no to mention the discipline and training he acquired while competing in track and field during school.
“There are a lot of similarities in pacing between running races and driving a race car,” Caruth said. “You have a finite amount of energy when you’re running and it’s similar to understanding your tires’ life over the course of a run. You don’t want to go super hard at a start of a race because you’re going to burn out. The same with a tire. You can’t go hard the first five laps of a run or you will burn your stuff up.
“There’s a lot of similarities and I feel like it’s helped me a lot to draw those parallels and helped me to be better. From a working out standpoint, I think it’s helped me because I had to learn how to weight lift because I didn’t really lift. I just ran a lot and had practice every day after school.
“But just that understanding of how to be an athlete and what it takes to manage it with everything else, that’s helped prepare me for this driving thing. So it’s been pretty cool.”
The work has paid off for Caruth. In his Kansas truck series debut last year, he finished 34th. For the remainder of the truck schedule, Caruth picked up his pace on intermediate tracks. He finished 11th at Charlotte Motor Speedway, 12th when he returned to Kansas and eighth at Homestead-Miami Speedway.
Walter says the key for his driver is “not overthinking it” when behind the wheel.
“He’s learning to control the things he can and adapt to what he cannot,” Walter said. “He’s capable of doing that, not everyone is.”
In the first 1.5-miler of 2024, Caruth won from the pole at Las Vegas—his first career truck win. With a solid average finish of 7.7, Caruth is hoping to continue this season’s success at Kansas.
“I feel like I’ve got a good feel for the track,” Caruth said. “I’ve had speed there. I just haven’t had the finishes that I feel like we’ve deserved. So hopefully we can change that trend this weekend.
“I think this year has gone really well so far. There’s definitely room to grow and more to be desired. But I’m just super excited to be back at Kansas.”
Caruth qualified a track career-best fourth at Kansas Speedway Saturday morning.
Follow Lee Spencer on Twitter @CandiceSpencer or email her at: [email protected].
