Ty Majeski is on a roll in NASCAR trucks and headed to Milwaukee, where he has something to prove

With victories in the past two races, home-state driver Ty Majeski leads the NASCAR Craftsman Truck Series back to the Milwaukee Mile this weekend for the LiUNA! 175 , the start of the series’ playoffs.

The Seymour native and his No. 98 ThorSport Motorsports Ford team return on a mission to put aside the stigma that came with the discovery of bleeders, prohibited devices that keep tires from expanding too much as heat builds, before qualifying last year. The infraction resulted in Majeski starting in the rear of the field for a race in which he was the favorite and led to an additional four-race suspension for crew chief Joe Shear Jr.

Majeski, who turned 30 last week, finished seventh in his only truck start at the Mile , a track at which he has won in super late models, and ended up eighth in the championship.

After a two-week break and with seven races remaining, Majeski starts the playoffs third in points behind Corey Heim and Christian Eckes.

In a recent 20-minute conversation, Majeski spoke of his season to date, the 2023 Milwaukee event, his expectations for the weekend and the rest of the season, and more.

More: What to know about the NASCAR trucks and ARCA weekend at the Milwaukee Mile

More: Key Wisconsin auto racing events for the 2024 season

Q: Is it oversimplifying things to say the wins in the past two races had a lot to do with Indianapolis Raceway Park and Richmond being some of your best tracks? (Majeski also won at IRP in ’23.)

A: The way the schedule lays out, Richmond, IRP, they’ve always been right before the playoffs, or just into the playoffs, two of our best tracks. But I really think our team needed this, just from a mentality perspective. We’ve been on the cusp of winning a lot of races this year, and things just haven’t gone our way. Some self-inflicted, some not, and I think it was just big for our team to get a couple wins to kind of open the floodgates here, so to speak.

And we had a little bit of a chip on our shoulder from last year with how everything went down with the bleeders and whatnot. ... So we really wanted to back up both of our performances from last year at those two tracks and prove that we weren’t using them during the races.

Q: Is there anything else different going on within the team since the start of the year, whether good or bad; has there been an evolution through the season for you guys?

A: Well, there's been a huge evolution, just because we lost a few key parts of our team. We basically had a new tire guy, a new interior guy, a new engineer.

A lot of our pieces changed this season. We get a lot of guys, good, young kids from UNOH, which is a NASCAR technical school in Toledo, Ohio. So we get a lot of guys who are eager to work, but they’re just inexperienced. Throughout the season, it’s a learning process for those guys, learning what needs to be done, and not having to get told what to do, and learning the process of being on a NASCAR team.

They turn out to be really, really good workers. This is the time of the year where typically that starts to show so it takes a lot off of Joe and Tyler (Shullick), my truck chief, just being able to let those guys do what they do, and they can focus on their own job and not having to oversee as much. Because those kids are learning throughout the course of the year, and I feel like this is the part of the season where we’re starting to see the fruit of that.

Our team has just obviously grown together. As you spend all year together, you become friends and build relationships with your team members. And anytime you’re going to the racetrack with your buddies, and you're actually having fun. ... That sometimes gets lost in some of the NASCAR ranks that at the end of the day, we all want to have fun doing this together, just because you have to spend a lot of time with each other. If the team can get along, and you become friends and have relationships outside of just going to the track together, it builds well for the team.

Q: Where does Milwaukee fit into that “best tracks” list?

A: I run very well there, but that track can be frustrating at times. But it’s such a different animal, from the super late to the trucks. … It’s almost like more of an intermediate to a speedway type race for those cars, and then in the truck, it races like a true short track. So two different mentalities with each of the disciplines that I’ve raced there.

I wouldn’t say it’s really up there on my favorite track – maybe not even in the top 10 – but just the fact that it’s so close to home and the NASCAR schedule is really what makes it special, and being able to have friends, family, sponsors who have helped me get to this point come and watch me race in NASCAR is, to me, is the coolest part.

Q: What was your biggest takeaway from the way things went down at Milwaukee last year?

A: Well, listen, it’s obviously not a good situation. That was a huge loss for us, for Joe to (be suspended). We thought we were in a good position to make a run deep into the playoffs, and not having Joe at the racetrack was a huge hit for us. … That’s just my biggest takeaway of how it all went down, is growing from it, learning from it, and knowing it's super important to have your leader at the track with you.

Q: What were your immediate emotions then and how has that changed in a year since?

A: I was most frustrated in the fact that it was going to discredit our team from what we had accomplished that far in the season. I understand, right? Everyone immediately goes, ‘Oh, that’s why he was so fast at IRP and Richmond. … That’s why they’ve been doing this.’  All your competitors are going to say that because they want a reason why they just got their ass kicked for two weeks, right? So that’s where everybody goes.

I understand that as a competitor. That’s where my mind would have went if the roles were reversed. But that was the most disappointing part to me … knowing in our heart that we didn’t use that to our advantage on the track (in races), that’s one thing. But discrediting the whole team and the hard work that we’ve all put in to put fast trucks out on the racetrack, that was the part that bothered me the most.

Q: Saturday last year ... you said it was going to be tough to pass, and then on Sunday, you passed pretty much everybody, at least once.  Knowing that, what can we expect this time around?

A: I was surprised at how wide the track got. Obviously, the darker pavement on the bottom doesn’t have as much grip, but we really did see a few guys really work well down there, (teammate Matt) Crafton being one of them throughout the race last year, and the track just widened out. … We saw guys sort of working the cushion of the track all the way to the yellow curb. I thought it put on a fantastic race throughout the entire event, throughout the field.

Gonna see a great, exciting race again. A lot of passing, I think once again, just because it's a track where you can move around, you can find different ways to find grip. And as a driver, it’s nice to have options, and that creates good racing.

Q: Practice was, like, an hour last year or something, and this year is just 20 minutes. Does that play into your hands?

A: Obviously had more track time than everybody leading up to the race last year, and I think that was an advantage for maybe a little bit of practice. … And then by race time, and especially for this year, I think my home track advantage is probably gone as far as the competitiveness goes.

More: Milwaukee Mile NASCAR and IndyCar weekends are upon us. Here's what to know about entry, concessions, infield access and more

Q: Finished seventh last year, so good recovery on track from the penalty, but some not so good pit stops, right?

A: We’d dig ourselves out of the hole and have our head peeking above ground, and then we get knocked back down. So it was just one of those races where nothing really went our way. And in order to recover from something like that, you do have to have everything go your way. We just never got there.

So, yeah, I passed a lot of trucks, for sure. I thought we had a good truck. I don’t know that it was a winning one. Probably a top-three or -four truck. I think (winner Grant) Enfinger and a couple others probably were a bit better than us.

Q: Have pit stops been a consistent issue with you guys?

A: Actually, really, our pit stops have been fantastic all year. I haven’t looked in a few weeks, but I think after Gateway, I think the fourth-ranked on pit road. Our pit crew has been very, very good. They’ve been very, very consistent. I think one of the only mistakes they’ve made all year was actually at Richmond with the uncontrolled tire.

They’re not a crew that’s going to go and bust off a 13½-second stop, but they’re also not going to give you many mistakes.

Q: What are the drawbacks and advantages for the team to be headquartered where it is, rather than Charlotte, in terms of attracting pit road talent, or making changes, or whatever?

A: We get a lot of kids from UNOH, and most of the time, if they end up being good talents they get recruited. We sort of do the work, we train them and get them to the point where they’re a very, very good employee and then, not all the time but a lot of times, they end up moving on to Charlotte, because at the end of the day, that’s why they’re going to NASCAR school. They want to work in NASCAR and work on a Cup team.

It's good and bad being in Sandusky, Ohio. We control our own destiny. We hang all our own bodies. We build all our own chassis. Everything is pretty much done in house. And I think that can be advantageous, especially when you hit on something very well, because it stays in your circle. We're not in Charlotte. A lot of employees in Charlotte kind of bounce around from team to team, and there really are no secrets down there. In contrast, being up in Sandusky, Ohio, we can sort of keep things a little bit tighter to our chest. So, yeah, pros and cons, harder to get people for sure.

It’s just really a different mentality up in Ohio. We have to do things differently. We have, we feel like we have very, very good people at the top. We have very good truck chiefs, very good engineers, or very good crew chiefs, and we feel like we have a slew of very good drivers so that we use, you know, those people to train younger talent underneath, because that’s just sort of the way we have to operate up in Ohio.

And it’s fun, right? It’s fun, you know, watching new people grow and move on. And obviously we wish we could keep them for the entirety of their careers, but that’s just not how we operate up there.

Q: Since your part time season in 2021, ThorSport has won two championships (2021 and ’23 with Ben Rhodes), but has also won only 10 races, and you’ve got five of those. So what shape is the team in overall?

A: That's an interesting question. For some reason this year there’s been, I feel, a gap in performance from team to team, more so than the past years, and we’ve been working really hard internally to figure out why.

I can just speak to the 98 team. I feel really good about where we’re at. I don’t know that we’re really performing any worse than the last two years. If anything, you can maybe argue a bit better. I feel like we were really in great position to win four races this year, at the very least. Darlington, we had won; six (laps) to go a caution comes out. Martinsville, same thing. Gonna win the race; 18 to go a caution comes out.

Different things could have played out differently, and we still could have won those races. I just didn’t execute at the right time. But we could have easily won those two races, and then I could go on a list of maybe two or three more that we were in position to win as well, and it just didn’t go our way.

Specific to the 98 team, we feel like we’re running as good as we’ve ever been. And I feel like we’re in the best position we’ve been in to make a run at a championship.

Q: The rest of the tracks, in terms of results, Milwaukee and Martinsville have been pretty good. Homestead has been decent, Phoenix OK. What are your concerns in terms of the specific tracks the rest of the way out?

A: Won at Homestead, Bristol, finished second at Kansas as well as Martinsville. In Phoenix, we won the first stage and qualified second last year. Talladega is always going to be a sort of a wild card. Obviously, the second round of the playoffs is the biggest hurdle for everybody, just with Talladega looming. The good news is that it’s the first race of the second round, so after Talladega, we’ll kind of know what everybody has to do come Homestead and Martinsville. … But for this first round, man, we just we want to get more playoff points to build up a bigger gap to give us a better shot in that second round.

Q: If this championship is about wins, it’s Corey Heim’s to lose. If it’s about best average finish and leading laps, it’s Christian Eckes’ is to lose. Convince me it should be yours.

A: We’re going to a short track. That’s all I have to say. I feel like, anytime we go to a short track, I feel like Joe and I are the favorites.

Phoenix has been a good track for us the last couple years. We don’t have the finishes to show for it. Spun out going for the lead in 2022 for the championship, and then last year, missed a shift on the restart, and I got run over from behind with a chance to win with under five to go. So had two really good trucks. No reason why we can’t do that again.

I feel like there’s no one hotter in the truck series right now than what we are. So we just have to keep that momentum up, win the right races at the right time and keep the forward momentum going.

This article originally appeared on Milwaukee Journal Sentinel: Ty Majeski is on a roll in NASCAR trucks and headed to Milwaukee, where he has something to prove