Zane Smith Finding His Footing With Front Row Motorsports

MOORESVILLE, N.C. – During his rookie season, Zane Smith found his stride in the NASCAR Cup Series during the summer stretch when he was with Spire Motorsports.

In 2025, this time with Front Row Motorsports, Smith is doing so again.

Smith has three top 15s in his last five races, and last weekend at the Chicago (Ill.) Street Course, he drove from 26th starting position to finish 14th.

In short, he’s building in the right direction.

“Our year so far, I feel like it’s been pretty good. We’ve had pretty good speed and made our cars better throughout each weekend, which is a lot to be proud of,” said Smith. “To start the year, my Daytona 500 didn’t go well. I got hardly any points, and then obviously not many points at the Coca-Cola 600 and then at Mexico City as well. Without those races, I feel pretty confident I would be well inside the top 20 in points.

“The points standings are incredibly close right now, but with this back half of the year starting at Atlanta, my main goal was to try to stack up some top 10s and be a little bit more consistent and focus on things where we lacked in the first half of the season.”

Just 34 points separate Smith in 24th from Kyle Busch in 16th, and only 12 points separate him from being inside the top 20 in points.

The 26-year-old feels his team has done a good job in the back half of the regular season. Smith has targeted his road racing experience and the wild card dates in previous weeks as things that have helped to right the ship of his development at Front Row Motorsports.

Smith has 12 top 20s this season, as well as a pole he captured at Alabama’s Talladega Superspeedway in April. He is also on pace for a career-best season in average finish, as his metric has jumped from 23rd last year with Spire to inside the top 20 at 19th place with Front Row.

Despite not having a top five so far this season, Smith has led more laps than his previous rookie season and part-time races combined.

All of this comes as Front Row Motorsports continues its legal battle against NASCAR for an antitrust lawsuit. News came out on Wednesday that due to a denial of appeal, Front Row and 23XI Racing could lose their status as fully chartered teams starting at Dover (Del.) Motor Speedway on July 20.

This would force both teams to run as open organizations, meaning they wouldn’t be guaranteed a spot in the field each weekend, and would have to qualify in on speed if the entry list were to exceed the standard 40-car field.

Smith said he’s focused on staying in his lane as a driver and not on the legal fight.

“I obviously saw some of that news. That’s well above my pay grade, so my focus is on just competing to the best of my capability with this No. 38 group, and my role is to bring good energy to my team and keep them fired up.” said Smith. “Fortunately, my crew chief Ryan Bergenty does just that. He’s an incredible leader and has been a lot of fun to work with. We’re all just focused on our jobs and allowing the lawyers to take care of that side.

“We’re racers, not lawyers. I don’t know anything about that, so I’m not going to act like I do. We’re excited to go compete, and with this charter change we often don’t see 40-plus cars, so I don’t know what it will look like,” he added. “But I know I’ll still have the same tools every Saturday for practice and qualifying, and the same for the race.

“My seat is not going to change, so I’m just trying to continue to stack up some good runs and hopefully get team owner Bob Jenkins a win here shortly.”

Smith feels one of his better shots at competing for a win will come at the remaining two road courses in the regular season ahead of the playoffs. The Huntington Beach, Calif., native will race in his home state at Sonoma Raceway this weekend, then at Watkins Glen (N.Y.) Int’l in August.

“I had an awesome time at Watkins Glen last year. The weather we got that whole weekend was awesome and my car was really good, so I hope to have another round of that this year,” Smith noted. “Comparing Sonoma and Watkins Glen, I would say since Sonoma got repaved they’re pretty similar, it’s just really fast-paced. It seems like a qualifying lap every lap.”

In his first full-time season, Smith was 16th at Sonoma and fifth last year at Watkins Glen. He’s a solid road course racer dating back to his time in the Craftsman Truck Series, where he had two wins at Circuit of the Americas in Texas and five top fives on the road.

“Sonoma used to be incredibly worn out and now it seems like you’re just pushing every single lap and it’s very demanding. Then at Watkins Glen, there are some bigger braking zones,” he said. “Sonoma, it seems a little bit more technical and momentum based, but they’re both awesome road courses and it’s cool to obviously get two different fan bases from each side of the country.

“We’re taking it one week at a time, but I’m trying to get a Sonoma trophy and hopefully advance [to the playoffs] so we can go compete down at Watkins Glen in August.”

Smith echoed earlier that his season would have gone a bit better if he didn’t have controllable things go wrong. He feels like speeding penalties, untimely cautions, and racing luck have all affected his results.

“Earlier in the season little dumb things would happen where there was a crazy caution or maybe we weren’t quite where we needed to be on pit road a little too late in the race and you get set back and you run out of time. I felt like that happened a lot,” Smith said. “I don’t know how many times I’ve finished 11th this year, but I felt that if I was one spot better, it would be talked about a lot differently with more top 10s.

“But I’m really proud of the speed we’ve been able to bring. The capability we’ve had to make our cars better is important and I’m just having a lot of fun working with this group. For this back half of the year, like I mentioned, I really wanted to just try and stack up these top 10s and hopefully find myself in contention on one of these late-race restarts in the first few rows and try to execute a win.”

Smith is looking to continue building this weekend in Sonoma to get closer towards the top 20 in points and victory lane.

“I believe our speed is there to do it, so as a team we’ve got to execute the whole day.”

Coverage of the Toyota/Save Mart 350 from Sonoma begins Sunday, July 13 at 3:30 p.m. ET, live on TNT Sports, the Performance Racing Network, and SiriusXM NASCAR Radio, channel 90.