Josh Berry has had an incredible rookie season. Unbelievable in that, prior to the 2024 NASCAR Cup Series season, no one would have believed that the Tennessee native and his three Stewart-Haas Racing teammates would all be looking for work halfway through the season because the organization was dramatically downsizing to a one-car team by 2025. But this is exactly what happened.
The 33-year-old described the unexpected circumstance during an interview on the “Beating and Banging” YouTube channel, where he was promoting his upcoming sponsorship with Panini featuring the Caitlin Clark Collection at the July 21 race and NASCAR’s return to the oval in Indianapolis. He described the situation at the company since the announcement and stated that it has not been easy.
“Well, it’s honestly the whole experience for me, I mean, given everything that’s going on, it’s sad in a way because it’s such a great place to work and it’s such a great place to race at,” Berry said. “I think I might’ve said that the last time we spoke, right? How the culture and everything about it. It’s a great race team and there’s great people there.
“The hardest part of that situation was probably when we just didn’t know what was going to happen early, right? We didn’t know if they were downsizing. Are we losing one charter, two charters, three charters? We didn’t know. That was the hardest part because really we didn’t know what direction to go.
“And there was so much speculation and distraction at the time and once we finally knew the finality of what was going to happen, it honestly got easier because then we knew — hey, this is going away. We’re going to all go different ways more than likely, but just buckle down and do the best we can and I think that’s what we’ve been able to do.”
