NASCAR: Roush Fenway Racing shut down Xfinity Series team

Roush Fenway Racing have shut down their NASCAR Xfinity Series team after competing in the sport for 27 consecutive seasons going back to 1992.

From 1992 to 2018, Roush Fenway Racing competed in the NASCAR Xfinity Series (formerly known as the Busch Grand National Series, the Busch Series and the Nationwide Series) on some level.

The Concord, North Carolina-based team competed part-time in the then Busch Grand National Series from the 1992 season through the 1996 season before they became a full-time team in the 1997 season.

In every season from the 1997 season through the 2018 season except for the 2003 season, the team fielded at least one full-time entry in the Busch Grand National Series/Busch Series/Nationwide Series/Xfinity Series.

But as it was speculated that they would last month, the team have announced that the 2018 season was the final season of competition in the Xfinity Series both on a full-time level and a part-time level, at least for now, as they have officially shut down the team after 27 overall seasons in the series and 21 seasons of full-time competition in it.

Here is what Roush Fenway Racing team president Steve Newmark had to say about the matter, according to Yahoo Sports.

"“We’re going to focus exclusively on both of those Cup teams (in 2019) and realized we needed to allocate all of our resources there. We’ve fluctuated on the number of the teams in the Xfinity Series and a lot of that has been based on need. We’ve been four, we’ve been one, and I think (2019) we’ve decided on how we’re positioned we’ll step out of that for a year and see how that goes and just focus all the resources, all the engineering, all the wind tunnel on making sure that we perform to our expectations at the Cup level.“There’s no doubt that sponsorship plays a factor in everything that we do. For better or worse that’s the way NASCAR is structured right now and sponsorship is the lifeblood for the teams. My hope is that at some point in time we continue to evolve to a model that moves a little bit way from that. But that was just a factor. We had a great run with Lilly Diabetes, five full seasons, we handled the Ford driver development program last year and the Xfinity Series is something that Jack (Roush) has always been passionate about.“But when we look at where we are and what we needed to focus on, we just felt like that all the resources should be dedicated to Cup. We’ve always used Xfinity as a feeder series…for Cup, and when we look at our drivers, we’ve got those guys locked up and we think that they’re going to be with us for a number of years. We look at the engineering talent, we look at our crew chiefs, and we kind of felt like we had all the pieces of the puzzle in place and so really what we need to do is go out and execute at the Cup level and we’ll see where we end up in Xfinity in the future.”"

In the 2018 season, Ty Majeski, the driver who hinted that Roush Fenway Racing would be shutting down before the 2019 season last month, drove in 12 of the 33 races on the schedule behind the wheel of the #60 Ford.

Aside of Majeski, two other drivers competed part-time for the team behind the wheel of the #60 Ford in the 2018 season while Ryan Reed drove the #16 Ford on a full-time basis. Chase Briscoe and Austin Cindric were the other two part-time drivers of the #60 Ford. Briscoe drove it in 12 races while Cindric drove it in nine.