Spire Motorsports purchases Leavine Family Racing’s NASCAR charter and assets

Spire Motorsports will take over the charter and assets of NASCAR’s Leavine Family Racing team after the 2020 season, Spire announced Tuesday morning. LFR owner Bob Leavine announced the closure of his team last week and Spire was expected to make the purchase. The deal is now official.

“This is an exciting moment for Spire as we take the natural next step in our long-term plan to build our race team and prepare for the Next Gen car in 2022,” Spire Motorsports co-owner Jeff Dickerson said in a release.

The team is a subsidiary of Spire Sports + Entertainment and currently fields the No. 77 Chevrolet Camaro as a full-time entry in NASCAR’s Cup Series, which is piloted by multiple drivers, including Garrett Smithley, Reed Sorenson, J.J. Yeley and Ross Chastain. Spire will expand to a two-car operation and move from its Mooresville shop to LFR’s home in Concord next season.

“Bob Leavine invested more than money into LFR and this industry,” Dickerson said in a release. “He built a team brick by brick and we have long admired how he took his own steps in the garage. He also did it with his family at his side. We won’t let that be lost in this transaction.”

Leavine said last week that the financial impact of the pandemic and NASCAR’s business model forced him to sell his nine-year-old team. He said he was unable to continue financing both his family’s construction business and LFR, and said that talks with NASCAR had not gone as he had hoped. The delay of the debut of the Next Gen car to 2022, which Spire is now counting on, also had an impact on the future of LFR.

“It was the perfect storm,” Leavine said. “With that coming, NASCAR shutting down and the business model, and our biggest sponsor — ourselves — so all of those things, combined.”

LFR will return its car bodies and chassis to Joe Gibbs Racing, which the team has a technical alliance with, at the end of the season. Spire said that it will announce its drivers and manufacturers for 2021 at a later date.

In 2018, Spire purchased the charter of now-defunct Furniture Row Racing, which had also previously had a technical alliance with Joe Gibbs Racing. The driver of the LFR’s No. 95 car, Christopher Bell, will move to the No. 20 car for JGR next season.

“These are no doubt trying times, but I have never been prouder to be part of this sport,” Dickerson said in a release. “NASCAR has managed several difficult situations this spring and into the summer. We believe in the ownership model that NASCAR has built and where this sport is going now more than ever.”