Josh Wise to return to Phil Parsons Racing
After competing in 35 Sprint Cup races for Phil Parsons Racing in 2014, Josh Wise will return to the driver’s seat for the team in 2015.
Wise, who is in his first season with Phil Parsons Racing, finished 36th in the final point standings. Finishing on the lead lap four times, Wise’s best finish of 2014, a 20th place effort, came at Talladega in May.
“This is the first season this car has raced full-time, it’s my first year with the team and working with Gene [Nead], my crew chief, so I feel like we’ve learned a lot to this point and we definitely have weaknesses to address and gains to make over the off-season,” Wise said.
While Wise and PPR run on a limited budget, notable backers of the team include the Reddit and Dogecoin communities. Wise talked about how he wants to continue driving for the single-car operation.
“This is where I plan to be,” he said. “I think that [co-owner] Phil [Parsons], myself, we all came into this this year knowing that we wanted to work hard and build this thing from the ground up.”
With the team only fielding one car in the Sprint Cup Series, resources are limited for the Huntersville, North Carolina-based team. Wise said the team will be busy in preparation for the 2015 season.
“I think we’ve got a lot to do,” Wise said. “I’m hoping we can actually go to the wind tunnel; we don’t get to go to the wind tunnel at all, or shaker rigs or pull-downs, so I’m hoping we can actually do some development and learn some things to apply.”
Phil Parsons said he’s grateful for the team’s backing from different sponsors this year. Parsons hopes 2015 can attract more sponsorship, but said the off-season will be a busy time.
“We’ll be in a building mode,” he said. “People don’t realize you don’t have quite the travel that you have during the season, obviously, but you work just as hard—probably more hours during the off-season, building new cars, repairing cars, putting new bodies on cars, things like that.”
