KANNAPOLIS, N.C. — On the brink of becoming the dean of the O‘Reilly Auto Parts Series, Jeremy Clements feels he‘s earned his place in NASCAR history but isn‘t interested in analyzing it.
“I’m just worried about the racing,” he said with a laugh.
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Kenny Wallace, whose all-time series starts record Clements will tie this weekend in Pocono then break with his 548th race next week in San Diego, California, has anointed his successor as “The Mayor” of the O’Reilly Series.
RELATED: O’Reilly Auto Parts Series schedule | Weekend schedule: Pocono
That moniker might not be the right fit for a driver whose story is overwhelmingly about dogged perseverance rather than bombastic congeniality.
“It‘s really, really cool to hear, but I don’t know if I want ‘The Mayor’ because this was never a goal of mine, and it’s really badass to do at this age,” said Clements, who at 41 is 10 years younger than when Wallace retired. “This is phenomenal. To be in a sport this long, something I always wanted to do as a kid, and to have my best opportunity right now.
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“I foresee myself racing years and years if I can keep the funding rolling in.”
Forget about “The Mayor.”
“The Businessman” might be a better label for Clements, who has chased down money to stay on track for three decades (and brokered deals to cover an extra half-million dollars for his team‘s budget this year).
“The Bionic Man” could also be an apt descriptor for Clements, whose right arm was so mangled in a dirt racing crash 22 years ago, his first O’Reilly Series start (a few months earlier) also could have been his last.
Or maybe it‘s “The Family Man,” for the doting husband who shoots social media content for his wife, Cortney (an influencer with close to a million followers across multiple platforms) while raising their 2-year-old daughter, Kennedy.
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The new face of the O‘Reilly Auto Parts Series is a bit of a Renaissance Man. But at his core, Clements is most simply defined by one word.
Racer.
Motorsports runs richly through his veins. His family has achieved significant measures of fame in the major leagues of both dirt and asphalt racing.
It‘s all Jeremy Clements has ever known, and despite a NASCAR career marked by nearly constant adversity, he never considered giving up on it.
“Oh, hell no,” he chuckled. “What else am I going to do? I get asked all the time, ‘What would you do if you didn’t race?‘ Hell, I don’t know. I never had to think about it.”
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Cortney said her husband has had to work “10 times as hard” to make it this far.
“Sometimes it’s hard for me to even watch at this point, knowing how bad he wants it,” she said. “This sport‘s truly the most brutal, and there’s no backup plan for him. He’s not going to build engines. He’s not going to work at Lowe’s. He‘s a race car driver.”
A very modestly successful one at that — which might be the most astounding part of his longevity.
Clements is on the cusp of having more starts than anyone in series history, yet still has only two wins (and one he had to fight to keep after being initially stripped for a rules violation).
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“I won everything until I got in the series, and then I got my ass put in place,” he said. “I don’t want to be good at losing, but I have learned to accept it a little easier. I don’t let it ruin my life. Man, you’ve got to shake that off. There’s another race. What keeps me driving is knowing I can do it, and if I’m placed in the right opportunity, I can definitely get the job done.”
Clements has the right opportunity this year as his family-run No. 51 Chevrolet has entered into a technical alliance with the Haas Factory Team. The leveling-up has relocated the gritty single-car team based in Spartanburg, South Carolina from a cramped, 5,000-square-foot shop to a sprawling facility of vast resources in Kannapolis, North Carolina.
Clements recently notched his first top five in four years, and his team has a goal of making the Chase for the first time since his most recent win (at Daytona in 2022).
“This is his best opportunity to win races and run up front consistently,” crew chief Matt Weber said. “It’s his time, and he‘s in his prime. It’s really kind of cool.”
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Everything seems to be coming together at a career-defining milestone.
“This is perfect timing,” Clements said. “And to do it at San Diego is going to be awesome. I‘m looking forward to taking it all in. And it’d be cool if they give you something (for the record). Maybe a little participation trophy.”
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Former NASCAR champion Rex White celebrates a North Wilkesboro Speedway victory with crew chief Lewis Clements in 1961.
The Clements family has been racking up trophies since the early days of NASCAR.
Jeremy‘s grandfather, Crawford, was a crew chief for wins by Junior Johnson, Buck Baker and A.J. Foyt. Jeremy‘s great uncle, Louis, was the crew chief for Hall of Famer Rex White‘s 1960 Cup Series championship. The brothers started in Owensboro, Kentucky, with a car called “the Flying Saucer” that was legendary on short tracks.
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“They were pioneers of the sport and super smart to come up with all the innovation to be that competitive then,” said Jeremy Clements, who recalls his grandfather “always working on something. I just remember workbenches everywhere and carburetors always around.”
In the 1970s, the family refocused on engine building. Since taking over as an 18-year-old, Jeremy‘s father, Tony, has been running Clements Automotive for 52 years. Supplying engines for many top dirt teams, its Clements Racing Engines arm has been named engine builder of the year multiple times in the World of Outlaws Late Model Series.
Tony Clements said his generation (younger brother Glenn also helps run the business) gravitated away from NASCAR toward dirt because of “a burning desire” for racing machinery. CRE develops all its intake manifolds and cylinder heads while building a lot of parts in-house. The waiting list for an engine has stood at roughly 100 teams for as long as anyone can remember.
“We’ve just had a passion growing up in the sport, and it’s been a day and night thing,” Tony Clements said. “We’ve worked 60 to 80 hours a week for almost 50 years. We wanted to be in a position that we weren’t just working for somebody and possibly be held back in that manner. If you have a big enough passion for the sport and the competitiveness and want to be not held back, I think that’s why we pursued it on our own. You put your heart and soul into it and never say never and just don’t give up.”
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In his final years, Crawford Clements took an interest in his grandson Jeremy‘s career, starting him in go-karts at 7 years old. After his grandfather‘s death, an 11-year-old Jeremy Clements had his mom drop him off at go-kart tracks so he could hustle for rides, eventually finding enough winners to amass 47 victories that propelled him into four-cylinder stock cars in 1999.
“I guess I’ve always been resourceful, and you just don’t give up,” he said. “You just go after what you want, and racing is what I’ve always wanted. You just find a way to keep making it happen.”
Tony Clements began shepherding his son‘s career through a pivotal period in his late teens. Jeremy Clements won two races in six days that paid $28,000 and sold his cars for slightly more than that after another win.
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The family then reinvested in his career, buying a Super Late Model dirt car in 2002 and dabbling in ARCA. Clements finished third in a May 23, 2003 race at Charlotte Motor Speedway on the night of his high school graduation. He made his O‘Reilly Auto Parts Series debut two months later and had feelers for a part-time ride with an established team.
But it would be more than four years until he made his second O’Reilly Series start.
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Clements was running near the back with a handful of laps left in a Late Model race on July 24, 2004 — he remembers the date well because his grandfather died eight years to the day earlier — when he heard an explosion.
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A torque arm failure launched his car’s driveshaft through the cockpit and nearly severed his right hand.
“My arm was going one way with the hand hanging off the other way,” he said. “The worst pain you can ever imagine.”
The incident happened at 311 Speedway in Pine Hall, North Carolina, which was about 30 miles from Wake Forest Baptist Memorial Hospital in Winston-Salem.
“My wife and I left that race track following the ambulance, going 100 mph on some back roads, and she was screaming,” Tony Clements said. “I said, ‘We can’t lose this ambulance because I don’t know where it’s going.‘
“It was a horrible situation. I was in the ER holding his arm, and they were washing it out and shocked at how bad it was tore up. They were saying, ‘It‘s so destroyed, we might have to cut it off,’ and I said, ‘That ain’t happening. We‘ll go somewhere else.’ “
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The first of 10 surgeries took nine hours as two large plates were inserted.
Tony stayed at the hospital for three weeks as Jeremy underwent rehab that included bone grafts from his hip (the hand was sewed to his body for a month) and tendon replacements from his right foot.
“It was a nightmare, really,” Jeremy said, pausing to joke, “I can’t get in a fight with that hand now. It would mess some stuff up in there.”
It took a year before he was able to test a dirt Late Model car. He soon finished second in his return to a race at Thunder Valley Speedway (“it looked like he hadn’t even been out of the car,” Tony said).
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The injury caused no change in reflexes, but his grip diminished. Today, Jeremy compensates with extra padding for the steering wheel. He otherwise has been unaffected by an accident that doctors said would end his racing career.
“I just thought, ‘Ahhh, they’re wrong. There ain’t no way. Just do the best you can and fix this thing up and let me see about that,’ ” Jeremy said. “They were good doctors, but they were a little negative. They’re like, ‘You’ll never race again! You’re done.’ I’m like, ‘Damn! OK. Why you even got to say that?’ I just was persistent and wasn’t going to give up.”
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In becoming the all-time starts leader, Clements has already set an O‘Reilly Auto Parts Series streak that might never be broken. Pocono will mark his 443rd consecutive start (the previous record was 383) dating to a two-race behavioral suspension in 2013.
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The past 510 starts since 2011 have been with Jeremy Clements Racing, which was founded in the same autonomous spirit of Clements Racing Engines.
“I did that so that somebody couldn’t put him out or do something different than what we wanted to keep his racing going,” Tony said. “Because if you put your eggs in somebody else’s basket, they may change their mind or do something different if somebody else has got more money. We wanted to control our own destiny.”
Jeremy Clements celebrates with his No. 51 crew after his first O
The team broke through for its first win at Road America on Aug. 27, 2017 — three months after Jeremy married Cortney, who had been working in team PR and management.
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“I walked by him at the track, and he goes, ‘Uhhh, you’ve got a cute dog,’ and it was the first time he’d spoken to me,” Cortney said. “If you’re going to compliment me, a cute dog is a good one. I know a lot of race car drivers, and they’re usually not that good of a guy, so I’m like, ‘There’s no way that this is going to work out.’ Jeremy seemed too good to be true, but he was so sure. I had to slow it down because he was like, ‘Let’s get engaged,’ and it hadn’t even been a year.
“There was a TikTok trend recently, and it made me go all the way back in my text messages to see the first thing he ever said to me. It was, ‘You’re perfect for me.’ “
Jeremy has been a valuable asset as an ace photographer for his wife, who became a full-time social media influencer after getting married and leaving the NASCAR industry to live in Spartanburg. Cortney laughs about dragging her husband to quaint downtowns and picturesque Southern settings for content shoots.
New video equipment has made Jeremy‘s help less necessary, but he still gets pressed into service — sometimes minutes before a race.
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“It kills me sometimes when I see the videos,” Cortney said. “We’ll be at the track, and I’m like, ‘Well, Jeremy knows how to get the perfect picture of me, so let’s give the driver the camera.’ So it’s so pitiful, but you‘ll walk by Jeremy’s car sometimes and see me and my girlfriends with him as the photographer. He’s an OK sport about it. Having a little girl is expensive, so he has to be a sport about it.”
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Expenses have also spiked for Jeremy Clements Racing this season — and with good reason.
On a recent Tuesday afternoon, Weber, the team‘s crew chief, was overseeing work on cars that were nearly three weeks ahead of schedule. Since joining the team last year, he has noticed a change in his driver‘s demeanor.
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“Everything’s looking up and trending in the right direction, so it’s awesome to be a part of,” Weber said. “Last year, the results were so bad, that you could tell after the race, Jeremy just wanted to go hide. He didn’t interact much at the shop, and the phone calls were short. We didn’t know how to get out of this hole. And now the speed’s there. Some results are there. The sponsor interest is up. He just acts younger and is excited to go to the track.”
Seeking to replace old chassis that dated to 2019, Jeremy Clements Racing shopped for nearly 18 months before stumbling on the opportunity at Haas, which wanted to partner on new cars instead of selling them.
“All these other teams kind of screw you around, and they ain’t going to sell you what they’re actually running,” Clements said. “And (Haas president) Joe (Custer) was like, ‘I’m going to offer you this instead.’ And I was like, ‘We need this, but there’s no way we can make this work because we need more money.’ “
The new partnership would require about an extra $15,000 per race.
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To secure the extra funding, Clements brought all of his team‘s major sponsors to Haas for a tour of the facilities last fall. They hammered out the framework for a two-year contract in a Haas meeting room, turning around the deal in about a week.
Jeremy Clements and his wife, Cortney, smile for photos on pit road at Charlotte Motor Speedway
Tony Clements credits his son‘s business acumen for the game-changing arrangement.
“He has developed that skill in a way that people enjoy and respond to it,” Tony said. “I can’t necessarily use all the right methods or personality to sell them on helping us race. Jeremy’s much more capable of doing that.”
Though he didn‘t ever “want a job that I‘ve got to dress up in a suit,” Jeremy said he can be a salesman by necessity.
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“There’s been times I’ve been scared the sponsorship wasn’t there that we might not be able to continue,” he said. “You’re always got that in the back of your mind because this is an expensive sport, whether you’re racing go-karts, dirt Late Models or NASCAR. There’s been times I was worried. Hell, I’m still worried. It’s always a concern to keep the funding rolling in to do it.”
As long as the money is there, Clements wants to race into his 50s on a circuit that he relishes because it’s fun but yet still difficult to drive.
“That‘s the way it should be,” he said. “This is the purest series. I love the cars. Ask any Cup driver that races this series, they say the same thing: ‘If we got paid the same money, we would be doing this full time.’ That’s the truth.”
If he races for another decade, Clements would cross 800 starts — making his record seemingly untouchable while validating his family’s support and its legacy.
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“It’s just what we do and what we’ve always done,” Tony said. “It’s really almost kind of shocking if you stop and think back about 548 races. We’re so proud that he could follow his dream. It’s what has driven me. He’s always said that’s his whole life. He just wants to be a professional race car driver.”
Said Jeremy: “I’m just a racer. As long as I stay healthy and keep the train rolling, I’m blessed to do this.”
