Jeremy Clements has started more races in NASCAR's second national series than anyone who has ever done it. NASCAR's own record book had him at 554 entering the weekend, past Kenny Wallace's 547, with the record broken in June at San Diego.
Asked at Darlington on Saturday what the hardest part of the job is, he did not say the driving.
"The hardest part is keeping the funding rolling in," Clements said, "really, to allow me to do this."
That is the recurring theme of a 554-race career, and it is the reason the engines in his car have changed.
A reporter asked whether his family still builds dirt engines. "My family still builds the dirt engines," Clements said. "And that's why I race so long, because we build our own engines, and that saved a huge part of the bill." He did not say when that stopped applying to his own race car, or why. What he said next was simply that it has: "Now we've been running Hendrick engines."
He has also taken an alliance with Haas Factory Team, one of the larger operations in the series, and he was direct about what it bought. "The Haas alliance affiliation has helped out a ton to make our Chevys fast," he said. "It's been a lot more fun to have fast cars. You drive the same, but the cars are faster."
Two other teams at Darlington described the same arrangement from different points on the ladder.
Sheldon Creed won Saturday night for Haas Factory Team, which runs its own alliance with Hendrick Motorsports. Asked what had changed for his team, Creed talked about the engine before he talked about himself. "I think Hendrick probably has the best O'Reilly motor right now," he said. "They're extremely strong. I feel like we just have a little bit more natural speed."
Alpha Prime Racing announced on Saturday morning that it is leaving Chevrolet for Ford in 2027 and will take Roush Yates engines. Founder Tommy Joe Martins was unusually plain about what the team is buying and about what it is not.
"I don't think we have ever been a team that's gone in and tried to claim that we are something that we are not," Martins said. "We are a small team. We know that we're still going to be a small team." What Alpha Prime wants, he said, is to be "an affiliate-level team," "one of those secondary-type teams."
Alpha Prime has no car in the championship. Neither does Clements. The twelve drivers who do drive for six organizations: four for JR Motorsports, two each for Haas Factory Team, Richard Childress Racing and Joe Gibbs Racing, one apiece for Hendrick Motorsports and Viking Motorsports.
Three teams is not the whole field, and none of them called the arrangement a solution. What each described was an exchange: a smaller operation gets equipment or engines it could not build, and accepts what comes with taking them.
Clements finished ninth on Saturday, his fourth top-10 finish of the year, in a car quick enough to run there and powered by an engine his family did not build. He intends to keep going. "Racing is all I've ever done, so it's all I've ever wanted to do." He will race, he said, "as long as I can keep it funded."
The record book says 554 starts. It does not say who built the engines.