Justin Haley might only be 21 years old, but he has joined an exclusive club. After winning Saturday’s NASCAR Xfinity Series race at Talladega Superspeedway, he became the 32nd driver in history to have won a race in each of the sanctioning body’s three national series: Cup, Xfinity, and Gander RV & Outdoors Truck Series.
Haley, who started Saturday’s Unhinged 300 on the pole, beat out Jeb Burton in a last-lap battle for his first career win in the series. Incidentally, Haley had come close to achieving it in 2018 when he stole the win at another superspeedway in Daytona International Speedway before being penalised for going below the double-yellow line.
The Indiana native spent 2018 racing for the Truck championship, during which he won three races (World Wide Technology Raceway at Gateway, Canadian Tire Motorsport Park, and Texas Motor Speedway) en route to a third-place points finish. He moved up to the Xfinity level with Kaulig Racing in 2019, where he finished twelfth in the standings.
In 2019, he ran a three-race Cup slate for Spire Motorsports. After finishing no better than thirty-second in the first two races, he scored a surprise victory in just his third career premier series start in a rain-shortened Coke Zero Sugar 400 at Daytona. Haley’s latest Cup start was a thirteenth-place run in the 2020 Daytona 500; it was Kaulig’s first Cup start.
Haley is the first driver in two years to win in all three series. Chase Elliott and Erik Jones in 2018 were the most recent to accomplish the feat. Unlike most drivers to pull off the triple victories, Haley stands out as one of a handful to have won in the top-flight Cup Series before doing so in the lower-tier Xfinity/Truck Series. Examples include Brad Keselowski, who won Cup and Xfinity titles before his first Truck win, and 2020 NASCAR Hall of Famer Tony Stewart, who won his first Xfinity event the same year as his second Cup championship.
He is currently seventh in points with four top-five finishes and seven top tens.