Williams: “24/7 my life is nothing but motorsports”
Whether it be growing up around motorsports, racing in the NASCAR Xfinity Series (NXS), or owning his own driver development operation, life is all about motorsports for Josh Williams.
Growing up, Williams’ father raced the number six, a number that stuck with Williams and became a big part of his life even today, as evidenced by each of his social media usernames featuring the number six in it.
“It’s always been in my family. I enjoy the number 6 and I put on everything,” Williams stated. “It’s on my necklace, it’s on my legends cars, it’s on the garage door and the Bandolero. If I go race somewhere, it’s what I’ll run.”
“I was a big Mark Martin fan too. It was weird, when we first started running ARCA, we were 02 and then we swapped to 6, and they were both of Mark’s numbers back in the day.”
Williams raced in four full-time ARCA Menards seasons, earning two wins and three Top 5 points finishes. While in ARCA, DGM Racing owner Mario Gosselin served as a mentor and a crew chief, on many occasions, for Williams.
“We built a good relationship in those years and when the time came to do something a little different,” Williams said, “he called me to do some start and park stuff in the Xfinity Series and it snowballed from there. We found some sponsors and partners and we turned it into some full-time efforts.”
Williams is in his third full-time NXS season with DGM Racing and he described 2020 as his best season to date. Williams scored six Top 10s and an average finish of 18.6, which were the best results for a full-time DGM Racing driver in the team’s history.
Recently, however, Williams has experienced the challenges that comes with being in the sport.
Williams had a stretch of races that included suspension part issues at Darlington, a crash at Dover and a DNQ at Circuit of the Americas. Just two weeks after the DNQ, Williams went to Mid-Ohio for the first time since 2019 with no practice or testing time, which meant that other race preparations became even more important.
“I made a couple of laps on iRacing trying to familiarize myself back with the course and watched the race on TV,” Williams said. “It’s just kind of things I do for road courses a lot, so if it’s a new course or not because I’m not a road course driver by any means. Any time I can get used to what corner is next and the balance, is always good.”
Williams started 24th and picked up spots throughout the race, including the chaotic final restarts.
“When someone runs off, it’s so dusty, dirt flying, smoke everywhere. It’s kind of like a Days of Thunder scene all the time so you hope you come out on the other side,” Williams remarked. “It’s crazy. We were able to capitalize on that final restart, get a couple more spots and get a top 10.”
Williams finished 10th at Mid-Ohio, his best finish of the NXS season. It was also his best result since scoring a ninth-place finish in October 2020 at Texas Motor Speedway, where the series heads to this weekend.
“Going into Texas, we’ve had good runs there in the past, like in October. We’re keeping our head up, keep digging, doing what we’ve always been doing,” Williams stated. “We haven’t changed much but we’ve been battling some luck. We’ll hopefully get that behind us and press on doing what we did at the end of last year: Running up front and being a threat.”
In the final six races of 2020, Williams scored four finishes of 13th or better and ran in the Top 15 for all but one lap of the Charlotte Roval race before an incident took him out on Lap 36.
This summer, Williams is also returning to Charlotte Motor Speedway to field cars in the Summer Shootout for his driver development program, JW Motorsports Development.
Williams started JW Motorsports Development in 2019. The program works with Gosselin’s DGM Racing to support up-and-coming drivers, including Brad Perez who has driven legends cars and SCCA-spec Mazdas.
“Basically, we take kids from Bandoleros and we can run them all the way up to Mario’s Xfinity program,” Williams stated, “so we’re kind of like a one-stop shop type deal.”
“We’ve got late models, ARCA cars legend cars, Bandoleros, we’ve got a little bit of everything floating around. It’s something I enjoy doing, I like building racecars, it’s all I’ve ever done.”
Away from the racetrack, Williams has an annual children’s hospital tour that allows him to utilize his place in motorsports to brighten kids’ lives.
“We’ve visited a ton of hospitals and a ton of children over the last ten or so years,” Williams said. “It’s pretty cool to do that and shed a little light on their lives, make them feel like a hero for a day. If I can take time out of my day to make someone else feel better, that’s what I love to do.”
Williams begins his annual hospital tour June 11 in Dallas. He will be broadcasting a bingo event for an entire children’s hospital facility beginning at 2 p.m.
The next race for the NASCAR Xfinity Series is the June 12 Alsco Uniforms 250 at Texas Motor Speedway (4 p.m. ET; TV: FS1, Radio: PRN, SiriusXM NASCAR Radio). Harrison Burton is the most recent NXS race winner at Texas.
SOURCES:
Josh Williams Racing
NASCAR
OpenCorporates.com
Racing-Reference.Info
