Here's a sentence I did not have on my Coca-Cola 600 week bingo card: an 85-year-old industrial sandblasting company from Washington, Missouri, is about to put its name on the hood of Ricky Stenhouse Jr.'s Chevrolet.
That's the news out of Harrisburg on Wednesday. Hyak Motorsports — the team you might still know as JTG Daugherty Racing — announced a multi-race sponsorship with Clemco, a global maker of abrasive blasting equipment. The headline: Clemco will be the primary sponsor on the No. 47 for two Cup Series races and an associate sponsor on the car for every other race the rest of 2026. The company gets a title out of it, too — Official Abrasive Blast Equipment Partner of Hyak Motorsports. (Yes, that's a REAL sponsorship category now. I love this sport.)
The two primary races aren't this weekend. Clemco makes its debut with the team at EchoPark Speedway in Atlanta, then comes back for World Wide Technology Raceway in Madison, Illinois, on Sept. 13 — a date the company picked on purpose. That's Clemco's 85th anniversary. Founded in 1941, still building the blast machines, blast rooms, dust-collection systems, and protective gear that keep heavy industry running.
Meridien Sports, a Charlotte sports-marketing agency, brokered the deal — which makes this close to a hometown story. The Hyak shop sits in Harrisburg, about four miles up the road from Charlotte Motor Speedway, where the 600 runs Sunday.
"I'm really excited to welcome Clemco to the Hyak Motorsports family," Stenhouse said. "It's always great to bring new partners into our sport, and we're looking forward to representing them on the No. 47 Chevrolet this season."
Mark Warren, the president of Clemco Americas, made exactly the pitch you'd expect from a manufacturing company — that what works in a blast room and what works on a Cup car come down to the same thing. "From industrial operations to the intensity of NASCAR competition, the standard is the same. Deliver results every time," he said.
And here's the thing — this matters beyond the paint scheme. Hyak rebranded over the offseason, and a new name is only as good as the partners willing to sign on behind it. Earlier this month, the team locked Stenhouse into a multi-year extension, and now it's stacking commercial partners on top of a driver who isn't going anywhere. That's an organization building something — not just filling Sundays. (Sponsors have been finding the Charlotte-area garages all spring; Rockstar Energy did the same with Tyler Reddick's 23XI car a month ago.)
And the driver they're building around is quietly worth a look this weekend. The folks who put together the 600 News & Notes book tabbed Stenhouse as a sleeper for the Coca-Cola 600, and they're not wrong. The man won the 2023 Daytona 500 for this same team — one of three Cup wins on Hyak's board — and superspeedway racing is where he's most dangerous. Clemco's first race on the car is Atlanta, another track where the draft does the talking. Smart place to start.
So no, the new sponsor doesn't debut Sunday. But a company that builds the machines that smooth out steel just bought into a Charlotte-area team that's been smoothing out its own future one signature at a time. For a sandblasting company, that's a pretty clean finish.