Christian Eckes grateful to get NASCAR future back on track

LAS VEGAS — Christian Eckes is grateful to be in the NASCAR Xfinity Series after six years of all the highs and lows the sport can offer.

“If you had asked me in 2019 I mean, hell, I was so confident I’d probably be Cup racing by now,” Eckes said.

Eckes had won the ARCA Menards Series championship for Venturini Motorsports in 2019 and earned three Top-5 finishes and three poles in eight NASCAR Craftsman Truck Series starts for Kyle Busch Motorsports.

He was seemingly on the fast-track to the NASCAR Cup Series as he moved to the Truck Series full-time in 2020 with KBM.

Then, an ill-fated rookie season pushed him back to 10 opportunities with ThorSport Racing in 2021. One of those opportunities saw him break through to win at Las Vegas Motor Speedway, helping him get back to full-time racing in 2022.

Yet, he faced the same uncertainty after 2022.

“There’s been a lot of long nights of not knowing what I’m going to do if I needed to change career paths or do something different. [There were] probably three different times that I’ve had to have those conversations. After 2020, ’22 and ’21 really, those three years, I really didn’t know what was going on,” Eckes said.

At McAnally-Hilgemann Racing, he found his footing. In 46 Truck starts, he earned eight wins and 36 top-10 finishes, including four wins and 22 top-10s last year in a 23-race season that saw him lead 29.8% of the laps he ran (1,050 of 3,524).

Losing the championship in November was a little easier for Eckes. In August, he signed with Kaulig Racing to race full-time in the Xfinity Series in 2025.

Over the last couple of years, Eckes had talked with general manager Chris Rice about any opportunities to move up and run part-time with them. He said the talks weren’t that serious until last summer.

“It kind of came as a surprise to a certain degree. I’d say around July or August, talks kind of started getting real serious,” Eckes said.

Now, Eckes is here in 2025 after what he described as the “busiest off-season of his career.” Before Daytona, he had never raced in the Xfinity Series before – in contrast to predecessor A.J. Allmendinger whose 18th career win vaulted him into the Championship 4 for the second time in his career in 2024.

Eckes’ inexperience has been somewhat of an advantage. NASCAR rules state a driver with no prior Xfinity starts can get a rookie test session with their team so Eckes and his team were able to test on their own at Darlington Raceway.

From there, they rolled into a two-day, series-wide test at Rockingham Speedway, where Eckes had broken the ice with his team and the Xfinity car on two of the toughest tracks on the schedule.

“Driving the cars went good. I thought the team worked together really well, and I really think we made some improvements over those two days. It was very productive and helped me a lot,” Eckes said.

Eckes added the transition wasn’t as big as he anticipated but still has required some extra focus.

“I just think the the less grip more than anything. With a truck, you can drive it really hard and it’s able to do that because of the downforce and the Xfinity car doesn’t have as much,” Eckes said. “I feel like I’m relearning what I was doing in ARCA six years ago because the truck is so much different than than both of those cars.”

Helping Eckes through that transition is his predecessor.

“A.J. [Allmendinger], for sure [has been the biggest help],” Eckes said. “A.J. has been a huge help of just answering all the dumb questions that I have that are necessary but he probably thinks they’re dumb.”

Allmendinger’s wisdom on Eckes shined through at Circuit of the Americas.

After starting 10th and finishing seventh in the 20-lap first stage, Eckes had a speeding penalty during his first pit stop. That sent him to the rear of the field, where he sustained damage and ran as low as 34th.

Eckes and his team didn’t give up. He moved up to 22nd and then restarted 11th in the final stage, thanks to a strategy call by crew chief Alex Yontz late in stage two.

In the end, Eckes finished fifth – his best Xfinity finish so far.

“My number one thing is to still do the best that I can every step of the way. And if it works out, it’s going to work out. Obviously I think we’re plenty capable of winning. It’s just a matter of when, you know? it’s probably going to take me some time to get used to the car, get used to the processes of the series and everything like that, but the team itself is capable of winning. We’ve seen that before. I’ve seen it over the last couple of months, so obviously that’s the expectation,” Eckes said.

So far this season, Eckes is ninth in points, 13 points ahead of the playoff cutline, despite a wreck at Atlanta. He has averaged 26 points per race in the first four races, compared to Allmendinger’s 30-point-per-race average last year in the same, albeit wreck-free, set of races.

Heading to Las Vegas, the No. 16 team is looking to go two-in-a-row. In October, Allmendinger won and secured the Championship 4 berth – two months after Kaulig announced he would race in the Cup Series in 2025.

“To get this opportunity with plenty of future advancement is definitely something that I probably wasn’t expecting a couple years ago but everything’s really worked out to my favor in the last couple years. I just have to seize this opportunity,” Eckes said.

It has been a long six years but the 24-year-old is back on track to make it to the Cup Series. Eckes is playing with house money and high stakes, headed to a place where he and his team are ready to go all-in on what the future may bring.