Brett Moffitt certainly has talent as the 2018 NASCAR Camping World Truck Series champion, but he doesn’t have the dollars.
Following Saturday’s NASCAR Xfinity Series race at Indianapolis Motor Speedway, Catchfence‘s Lee Spencer reported Moffitt will not return to the #02 Chevrolet of Our Motorsports effective immediately as a lack of sponsorship proved too much to sustain a full season.
“It’s obviously not an ideal situation or what I planned on, but I’ve had a lot of great experiences with Our Motorsports, (owner) Chris Our and the entire Our family. They’ve given me a lot of opportunities,” Moffitt told Catchfence. “It’s been a good two-and-a-half years. Hopefully, our paths will cross again in the future.”
Moffitt has raced for Our since 2020, initially on a part-time basis while pursuing a second Truck Series championship with GMS Racing. In 2021, he departed GMS for Niece Motorsports but a dismal start to the Truck season prompted him to permanently commit to Our and the Xfinity Series. He finished 2021 with a twenty-first-place points placement, ten top-ten finishes, and a runner-up finish in the season opener at Daytona.
Through the first twenty races of 2022, he was sixteenth in the standings with four top tens while his best run was seventh at COTA. At Indianapolis, he closed out his Our tenure by finishing sixteenth.
After fielding the #02 and the multi-driver #23 in 2021 (the latter being acquired from Reaume Brothers Racing after the #03 was locked out of races without qualifying), Our expanded to a trio of full-time drivers for 2022 with Moffitt, Anthony Alfredo, and Jeb Burton. All three drivers are in the top twenty in points with Alfredo leading the way in fourteenth.
Despite Moffitt’s past success, rising costs have taken their toll on smaller operations. Brandon Brown, who sits one spot ahead of Moffitt in points, was replaced at his family team by Cup Series regular Austin Dillon at Indianapolis as he was unable to bring enough sponsorship, forcing him to move to backmarker Mike Harmon Racing for the race in order to remain playoff eligible. While he is still a full-time Xfinity driver due to the switch, Brown told Frontstretch he might not be able to finish out the year unless he can scrounge up enough funding.
Moffitt’s departure and his replacement have yet to be officially announced by Our, though the Catchfence report mentioned Truck Series rookie Blaine Perkins as a candidate. He ran eight races in the #23 in 2021, a stint that ended with three consecutive top-twenty finishes.