No, you’re not seeing double.
Friday’s NASCAR Craftsman Truck Series season opener at Daytona International Speedway is expected to have a very unique quirk as there are two drivers with the same name: Jason White in the #1 Toyota of TRICON Garage, and Jason White in the #34 Ford of Reaume Brothers Racing. Despite their shared names, they both hail from different backgrounds and have never competed against each other.
The White in the #1 is a 43-year-old American who was a Truck Series regular in the late 2000s and early 2010s, including running the full seasons from 2008 to 2012 for multiple teams most notably with GunBroker sponsorship. His best season came in 2010 when he finished tenth in points with a pole at Daytona and six top tens. He also made starts in the Cup and Xfinity Series before his NASCAR career appeared to end after 2014.
Seven years later, he made his return to racing by running the Xfinity superspeedway races, notching a tenth at Daytona in his first start with RSS Racing.
On the other hand, the White set to pilot the #34 is six years older and comes from Canada, where he is a regular in the NASCAR Pinty’s Series with over 100 starts, the first driver from the western part of the country to reach the milestone. While he has yet to win a Pinty’s race, he placed as high as eighth in points in 2011 and 2013.
The Canadian White has exclusively raced for RBR in the Truck Series since his first start in 2018, making his debut at Mosport in his home country. With the exception of Phoenix later that year and another Mosport start in 2019, all of his Truck entries since have come at Daytona or Talladega. He scored a tenth at Daytona in 2020.
Although a fun tidbit, it is not a guarantee as TRICON’s White will have to qualify for the race on speed, owing to his #1 truck not having enough owner points as a part-time entry. The RBR White’s #34 received the owner points of Niece Motorsports’ #45, which finished twenty-fifth in the 2022 standings with Lawless Alan and has inherited points from Niece’s shuttered #44 truck.
Obviously, drivers sharing names is rare enough while having them in the same race is even more uncommon. Such instances are usually limited to father-and-son duos with the same name, though even these cases are differentiated by suffixes like Sr. and Jr., as was the case with Dale Earnhardt and Dale Earnhardt Jr.
That being said, maybe someone should try to get NASCAR great Jeff Gordon to run a race alongside Floridian short track regular Jeff Gordon. Did we mention the latter is older by five years?
