While Kaulig Racing held a press event to announce Daniel Dye as a new part of their Xfinity lineup for 2025, Daniel Hemric was left waiting.
Kaulig’s current Cup Series driver has not had a good season by any measure, with just four top-fifteen finishes for the entire year. However, the team has also failed to bring fast enough cars, with team president Chris Rice acknowledging that the team ‘knows their place’ in the premier series and cannot compete with the biggest teams.
However, whether his fault or not, Hemric looks like he might be on the chopping block at the team. The team recently also announced that AJ Allmendinger will be moving to the Cup Series next season.
Pressed about current Hemric’s situation during the Dye announcement – which he did not attend, unlike Allmendinger and Kaulig’s other Xfinity driver Josh Williams, Rice wouldn’t say one way or another whether Hemric was likely to return to the team. But he did stress that it all hinges on the sponsors Hemric personally brings: particularly Cirkul and Poppy Bank.
“He could be,” Rice said about whether Hemric might be on the team next season. “He and I sat down and talked this week, and it goes back to partners and wondering what Cirkul’s going to do, Poppy Bank, all of his partners.
“We sat down this week and talked about it quite a bit. He knows that we have to have partners to make it go. We have a partner for AJ, that’s one of the biggest reasons he’s back Cup racing which is really cool.”
However, while saying that a Hemric deal was not ready, Rice said that a final lineup for Kaulig’s Cup program is “really, really close.”
“It’s not signed or anything, but it all boils back down to where the partners land, that’s what’s so bad about it,” he said.
As for whether the team might just move Hemric down to Xfinity, that appears to be off the table. Rice said that the other driver has been determined and the deal just needs to be signed, with an announcement promised over the next several weeks.
For his part, Hemric was magnanimous about the announcement and wished the Xfinity program success.
“From a Daniel Dye side of things, with him going full-time racing, I think he’s done a great job with the Truck Series this year for Bill McAnally, and kind of proven himself that, in good stuff, he can run well. And that showed when he got to run some part-time Xfinity stuff with us and he got a couple of top tens and ran well,” he said.
“I think what this team is just people who get in the cars consistently and just try to build the program, and I feel like pre-Nashville probably the program was awful on the Xfinity side compared to where they used to be. But it’s been fun to turn it around, and it’s been fun to have conversations around the shop on how they changed directions on some things, and hearing all that stuff from the outside looking in.”
As for his own situation, Hemric seemed less sure about the possibility of a deal of his own, although he was certainly hopeful for one.
“As far as my stuff, I’m still on the outside looking in,” he said. “I signed over here in 2021 to start here in 2022 with the expectation to be here for a long time. The company has been very good to me, and I’m just waiting to kind of see what they have in mind.”
It all leaves the question open: what about Hemric? That may finally be clear sooner rather than later when Kaulig finalizes its lineup. Whether Hemric is part of it remains to be seen.
