NASCAR getting back a former full-time team in 2024?

In their July announcement that they would stop competing full-time in the NASCAR Xfinity Series, MBM Motorsports noted that they could return to the Cup Series. But they have yet to do so.

For the first time since they entered the NASCAR Xfinity Series full-time in 2015, MBM Motorsports did not field an entry for the July race at Atlanta Motor Speedway, and they have missed a couple more races since.

There have been a number of instances over the last nine seasons during which MBM Motorsports had entered a race but failed to qualify, including several in 2023 alone. But they had not previously gone into a weekend without at least one car and driver on the entry list since 2014.

While their future plans at the time of this announcement remained largely unconfirmed, aside from a handful of race weekends, they did sill end up competing in the Xfinity Series on a fairly regular basis throughout the rest of the 2023 season.

And in the announcement, MBM Motorsports added that they may return to the NASCAR Cup Series.

However, Carl Long’s team did not return to the Cup Series in 2023. From 2017 to 2022, MBM Motorsports competed in the Cup Series on some level each year, so the 2023 season became their first without any starts since 2016.

In 2020, they ran a car full-time, and they set out to do the same in 2021 before needing to scale back. In 2022, they failed to qualify for the Daytona 500 with both of their cars but did end up fielding a car both at Circuit of the Americas in March and Talladega Superspeedway in April.

There were rumblings that they were looking to return for the race at Circuit of the Americas this past March, but that entry did not come to fruition.

Nothing is confirmed regarding a potential Cup Series return, but before the season, it was said that their Cup car had been prepared and that the team were “still working on securing sponsorship”.

With this July announcement, it appeared that this remained true, but the 2023 season concluded without any appearances from the team.

Notably, unlike the Xfinity Series, there generally aren’t nearly enough cars on a Cup Series entry list to result in DNQs, so a Cup Series return might be even more appealing for the team that decided to sit out of a number of Xfinity Series race weekends for the first time in nine years because of the fact that they likely wouldn’t qualify, given the lack of simulator time and practice.

We’ll see what happens here, but in the meantime, you can score an INSTANT $200 bonus from BetMGM for any $10 bet today! Sign up here and bet $10 or more on anything right now and you’ll immediately receive $200 in bonus bets. Sign up for BetMGM now!