Kaden Honeycutt is good, and may one day be great but is wholly aware that the greatness of his crew chief at Tricon Garage is why they closed out on the NASCAR Truck Series championship on Friday at Homestead.
Immediately upon climbing out of the truck, having won the race, Honeycutt called Zipadelli the GOAT, a Hall of Fame crew chief and a Hall of Fame man.
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While this is the first major NASCAR resume builder for Honeycutt, Friday gave Zipadelli 41 wins and his third championship, but also back-to-back titles, having finally won in the Final Four format with Corey Heim last year.
This is the same team that Zipadelli has assembled with him for almost a decade. They won a championship with Brett Moffitt too. They won 12 races together last year and the pressure on Honeycutt to match that was immense.
Honeycutt was immediately fast but was not closing out on wins in the first quarter of the season. He is inherently an emotionally driven youngster but it was clear that the near wins were wearing on him.
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“Like I put myself on a pedestal that if you’re not perfect, then you need to get your butt to work and figure out what it takes to win,” Honeycutt said during his post-race press conference. “Even if with have a fifth place truck, figure out how to win with a fifth place truck.”
Then came Watkins Glen in May and from that point forward, the pressure was off, and it was a true heavyweight duel with Layne Riggs and the Front Row Motorsports No. 34. Honeycutt needed the guidance that only Zipadelli could offer.
For Zipadelli, it was purely a matter of patience and empathy.
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“I mean, you have to just kind of take the pressure off of Kaden,” Zipadelli said during the press conference. “I think anybody coming into that situation would have automatically had a lot of pressure on them, right?
“I put myself in his shoes saying, ‘what if I was the crew chief coming into that team, the prior team had won 12 races, same driver, new crew chief.’ That would be a lot of pressure.”
Zipadelli told Honeycutt they were going to win and once they did, it would be the first of many, which proved prescient.
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“As a group, once we knocked Watkins Glen, we checked that box, I think I saw a difference in the weight that he carried on his shoulders,” Zipadelli said. “I think collectively it just kind of fell into place.”
Lost in this narrative is that Zipadelli actually missed the first three races due to an off-season dirt bike injury that shattered the top of his tibia and dislocated his knee.
“I mean, honestly, yeah, it’s pretty bad,” said Zipadelli.
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Honeycutt said, referring him to himself, that ‘this kid has never seen his leg facing the wrong direction,’ and it was a brutal thought.
“When you see your leg facing the wrong way, it’s really not a good day,” Zipadelli said. “My personality is, ‘Yeah, it will be all right. Put a couple screws in it, I’ll be okay.’ Six-to-eight months later, I still can’t walk. It’s a little more serious than that.
“I’m looking forward to doing these festivities this week. You know, that’s going to be a big deal for all of us. And then I’m looking forward to taking some time off and working on getting my health back 100 percent, getting my strength back.
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“It’s really hard to do both. It’s hard to do physical therapy and work 12-to-14-hour days. When I did physical therapy in mid-summer, I made the mistake of doing it for months and then trying to go to the racetrack (and) it was brutal.”
So, in some ways, Honeycutt wasn’t even able to get a full dose of Zipadelli until the late summer, which is when they started to go on their run. That was no coincidence.
Zipadelli says working with Honeycutt has been different than Heim. For one, Heim was much further along in his Toyota development than Honeycutt, being used to the Performance Center and having raced in the Venturini and Kyle Busch Motorsports ARCA and Truck programs, but Heim is also a more naturally gifted racer.
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At the same time, Zipadelli says Honeycutt is the most determined and strong-willed racer he has ever worked with, and that goes a long way and will serve him well.
This is also what Toyota Racing Development president Tyler Gibbs saw.
“We had a good feeling I guess I’ll say about Kaden,” Gibbs said. “I don’t want to say that we knew. There were some good indications there. The way he just carries himself, the work that he does. There’s just a lot there. There were some things we could help him with, we worked on with him, he continues to get better and better at.
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“But he was one that we had watched and we kind of liked, and then we had an opportunity. Hey, look what we’ve got. Again, he’s put a lot of work in to get to where he is.”
That work including being the son of a grassroots Texas dirt racer Kirby Honeycutt. He is a racer that routinely has worked on his own equipment. When he first signed a NASCAR Trucks deal, it came with Niece Motorsports, and it required him to work full-time in the shop in exchange for starts behind the wheel.
“I had a phone call, I remember, an agent called my dad,” Honeycutt said of Phil Smalley of MMI. “He was like, ‘Well, you realize that this is a one in a million shot someone like you that has no money, nowhere to go other than work on the truck and figure out how to drive, that can do this.’
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“When he hung up the phone, I told my dad, I said, ‘Well, I guess we’re going to have to be that one because we don’t have a choice.’ Just looking back on it, man, it’s just been unbelievable.”
So what now?
Immediately, Honeycutt is going to run it back with Zipadelli and the Tricon No. 11 team next year. Honeycutt wants to be a Cup Series racer but it’s also clearly obvious that the Toyota pathway is jammed up at both the Cup and O’Reilly Series levels.
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Gibbs said there are multiple pathways.
“Like we do with most of the drivers that we have a long-term relationship with, we have some obligations on our side and he has some with his,” Gibbs said.
“We have rights to certain things, if we do certain things. We outline those early on. It’s in our mind very fair. We’ve given him that opportunity. He certainly has exceeded what our expectations would be. We expected him to win races this year and to run for a championship. He’s won a championship.
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“We continue to watch that road play out. I’m not going to go into the details of what our terms are. We are comfortable with where we are and excited to have him going forward.”
And winning this championship is not going to change his work ethic either.
“I just never want to stop working,” Honeycutt said. “Hell, I’m going to go race and race the week after, the week after, the week after. It’s going to be fun to celebrate this, but I still have races to win and perfect my craft if I want to move up to the next level.
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“We’re going to celebrate this and have fun. Still got some things to work on for next year, and we’re looking forward to that.”
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