Ben Rhodes and Jake Garcia swap crew chiefs
Starting this weekend at Darlington Raceway, NASCAR Craftsman Truck Series teammates Ben Rhodes and Jake Garcia will swap crew chiefs.
Rhodes will now have Doug Randolph on the box. Meanwhile, teammate Garcia will have Rich Lushes. The engineering leads will also change.
Lushes is jumping back to the No. 13 team, with Garcia now at the helm, after jumping to Rhodes’ No. 99 team with four races to go last year.
Rhodes and Lushes closed out the season averaging a fourth-place finish and clinching the championship. This season, they’ve only had one Top-10 finish (seventh at COTA) in the first eight races and sit 12th in points, -4 points to the cutline.
With Randolph, Garcia has a better average finish than Rhodes (18.3 vs. 18.5) but no Top-10s and is two spots lower than Rhodes – at 14th in points, -29 to the cutline with a best finish of 11th at Las Vegas and two finishes of 14th.
Randolph has seven career Truck wins – all with Brad Keselowski Racing in 2012-17 – and five Xfinity wins (2 – Scott Riggs, 2003; 2 – Clint Bowyer, 2009; 1 – Brandon Brown, 2021). Lushes has three career wins (2 – 2021, 1 – 2022) and two championships, all with Rhodes (2021, ’23).
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Jonathan Fjeld View All
Jonathan Fjeld is the co-owner of the The Racing Experts, LLC. He has been with TRE since 2010.
A Twin Valley, MN, native, Fjeld became a motorsports fan at just three years old (first race was the 2002 Pennsylvania 500). He worked as a contributor and writer for TRE from 2010-18. Since then, he has stepped up and covered 24 NASCAR race weekends and taken on a larger role with TRE. He became the co-owner and managing editor in 2023 and has guided the site to massive growth in that time.
Fjeld has covered a wide array of stories and moments over the years, including Kevin Harvick's final Cup Series season, the first NASCAR national series disqualification in over 50 years, Shane van Gisbergen's stunning win in Chicago and the first Cup Series race at Road America in 66 years – as well as up-and-coming drivers' stories and stories from inside the sport, like the tech it takes for Hendrick Motorsports to remain a top-tier team.
Currently, he resides in Albuquerque, N.M., where he works for KOB 4, an NBC station. He works as a digital producer and does on-air reports. He loves spending time with friends and family, playing and listening to music, exploring new places, being outdoors, reading books and writing among other activities. You can email him at fjeldjonathan@gmail.com