“I never thought I had a full-time future in NASCAR,” Laster said. “I always thought I’d be a part-time team hopper. That’s my reputation. I’m known as the low dollar guy when a low dollar team needs a driver that won’t tear up the car and (will) give them a good finish.”
The lack of a consistent ride has made for plenty of quick turnarounds for Laster, who says that he would usually have less than a week in between being offered a ride to the drop of the green flag.
“This year, I got a call on a Monday night. They said ‘hey, we need you in Phoenix Thursday night’. It was a 30-hour drive. My girlfriend and I drove out there. I had to call in to work (that week).”
It was one of Laster’s home tracks in the Indianapolis Raceway Park that he and Wayne Peterson first met. Little did Laster know at the time that a 19th-place finish at IRP on July 19 would be the catalyst for the big break he was searching for.
“We put a deal together for IRP and had a great run,” Laster said. “That next Monday, I got a call from Wayne saying ‘we’re going to Salem (Speedway) this week. We don’t have a driver if you’re able to come down.’ I said, ‘give me an hour.’ I called up all of my sponsors and we put the deal together in a couple hours. We went down to Salem and got Wayne his best finish since 2021 and only his eighth top-10 finish since 1984. Our ninth-place finish actually tied his best finish since 1984.”
Laster says he took a couple weeks off before calling Peterson about the possibility of running the entire 2025 schedule.
Laster is keeping his expectations for the 2025 season “realistic” — a product of the massive gap between the top teams in the ARCA Menards Series and those on the lower rungs of the ladder. Still, there’s a lot for Laster and the team to accomplish in 2025, which will officially be Laster’s rookie season in the series.
“Top 10 in points, at least second in Rookie of the Year points would be nice,” Laster said. “I think realistically, a minimum of two or three top-10s, I think if we got five or six we’d be ecstatic.”
At the end of the day, Laster’s story reaches far beyond a shop, a racetrack or a stat sheet. It’s a story that serves as both his American and Hoosier dream.
After 13 long years, all of Laster’s seat time and days in the shop have paid off.
Now, he’ll follow in the footsteps of fellow Hoosiers in Tony Stewart and Jeff Gordon, who took their own paths from Indiana to the highest levels of stock-car racing.
