Scott Zipadelli, Corey Heim and the Tricon Garage No. 11 are the best team in the NASCAR Craftsman Truck Series this season … and arguably … ever no matter what happens a month from now at Phoenix Raceway.
Heim, the top Toyota prospect, has been paired with what used to be the Hattori Racing Enterprises No. 16 road crew under the Tricon Garage banner since the start of the 2023 season and the results have been literally historic.
They have won 19 races together and a record setting 10 in 2025 with three more races to go. Put a different way, they have emerged victorious in 45.5 percent of Truck Series races this season with an average finish of 5.5.
Again, arguably, this is the greatest team in the 30-year history of the Craftsman Truck Series with a resume to support it even before Heim arrived. This is the same core group that won 14 races and a championship under the Hattori banner with successful roots that trace back to Red Horse Racing.
This team has had several quarterbacks but the head coach keeps winning with minimal fanfare. But Zipadelli does credit longevity and chemistry for how successful this No. 11 has been this year.
“Yeah, this is pretty much the same group I had at HRE,” Zipadelli told Motorsport.com after their win on Friday. “When we can execute the way we did on days like today, it gives our driver, whoever that may be, the confidence to know that we have his back.
“When I tell him ‘we are going to be okay, it’s a little damaged, but run your race,’ he’s going to believe it. He’s going to trust us because he knows we can perform that way. If I tell him the truck is torn up and we’re racing for a top-5 or a top-10, he’s going to trust that and race that way too.
“It helps that he’s an old soul, a wise kid, and I think a lot of the success we’ve had together is that we have built a lot of trust in each other. Not just me and Heim but this whole team.”
It’s a team that has raced in the final four of the current championship format three times, winning it at Hattori with Brett Moffitt and coming up short the past two years with Heim even if they were arguably the best.
They were certainly the season long best last year but Zipadelli wouldn’t agree with the premise that he might ‘resent’ this current playoff format.
“I try not to resent things because then that’s just negative energy,” Zipadelli said. “If you focus on negative energy, you’re not right, and your subconscious doesn’t know the difference between real life and your head space. If you think negative, what you perceive is always going to be negative too.”
With that said, Zipadelli does not like this format at all, because he feels like he 100 percent has the best team this season and just a 1/4 chance of having that validated for posterity at Phoenix.
“I do try to stay positive but this system literally sucks,” Zipadelli said. “And this is just my view, and my view only, but I think it promotes mediocrity. Do you want a champion who doesn’t win a race all year? What does that say?”
That happened in 2019, by the way, when Matt Crafton won his third championship during a season in which Austin Hill and Zipadelli at Hattori won four times and didn’t make the final four.
“Life isn’t always fair but I don’t find that fair in any way, any sport or even in real life,” Zipadelli said. “I view it like a life lesson, that if you want to win, you have to work really hard and sacrifice a lot. It’s not going to come easy.
“So yeah, I feel like there are two championship trophies that should be sitting on my book case at home, but they’re not because of the format. But they didn’t ask me when they made the format …”
The sentence was finished for him within the context of this conversation, ‘and they aren’t asking him now,’ amidst a summer of potential change.
Zipadelli has been challenged by some things out of his control before, like in 2018 when NASCAR forced his team to change from the Toyota engine to the Ilmor spec, and they went out and won the championship anyway.
So is there a similar chip on his shoulder when it comes to a championship format he can’t control?
“Yeah, it’s an interesting way to look at it and I don’t disagree with that but I will say that we are humbled by the season we’ve had,” Zipadelli said. “This is pretty incredible. We have had a lot of fun and a lot has gone our way.”
Naturally, Zipadelli listed off the handful of races they also should have won, because that’s what any racer ever does.
“That’s racing,” he continued. “You lose some, you win some, but on the whole, we stay humble and we focus on the things we have to prove. At the same time, whether we win or lose the championship, it doesn’t define who we are or what we are about.
“The most important things is our family, our prosperity as a group, and win or lose, getting up the next day and doing it again.”
And a whole lot of that is going into his next Phoenix truck, a truck that is already a month into its preparation with another month left until it gets unloaded into the desert. Now that they are locked-in, Heim is singularly focused on his next championship date.
“I would typically say it’s one race at a time,” Heim said. “That has always been my mindset … but this is one of the rare occasions where our goal is winning the championship.”
He says he would like to win Talladega and Martinsville, of course, but he knows what an opportunity this next month is.
“We now have some extra weeks to work on that Phoenix truck, get it pulled down early, and that’s a special feeling.”
Zipadelli says this championship truck has been a work in progress for quite awhile. He just incorporated some things they learned from the race last week at New Hampshire.
“We are heavy into Phoenix,” he said. “But again, when I sit down and look at it, I have a 75 percent chance that we might not win the championship. That’s after 10 wins and countless laps led and all of that.
“How else can I feel about that? But our job is to go win next week, the next week, and go win Phoenix too.”
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