Today, he looks for what he calls “diamonds in the rough,” who may have never had the opportunity to participate in the sport.
“It’s our birthright to be around hot rods,” Daugherty said, speaking in broad strokes for all races and ethnicities.
After Daugherty’s playing career ended, he was involved in the fledgling days of the NASCAR Craftsman Truck Series as an owner of Liberty Racing in partnership with Cleveland area auto dealer Jim Herrick. Butch Miller was the team’s first driver, with Kenny Irwin Jr. eventually scoring two wins for the organization. Wayne Anderson and Kevin Harvick also spent time behind the wheel of Liberty’s trucks.
In a full-circle moment — as so often happens in the racing world — in the late 1990s, Pressley was driving for the Geschickters, with the team then known as ST Motorsports. That relationship continued in the next decade and Daugherty first met Tad and Jodi Geschickter socially through Pressley. The trio immediately hit it off.
Ultimately, they pooled assets and in 2008 JTG Daugherty hit the track with Marcos Ambrose behind the wheel. The team’s first win came at Watkins Glen (N.Y.) Int’l with A.J. Allmendinger in 2014.
Tad Geschickter, a native of Lorton, Va., played baseball in college, which helped he and Daugherty find a common bond.
“After my time in college and my sports career was over, I really missed that,” Tad Geschickter said. “My first job out of college was in marketing and sales for Procter & Gamble and I really enjoyed that as well. (Racing) seemed to be kind of the perfect combination of my two passions.”
He and Jodi — who hails from Knoxville, Tenn. —met on a blind date, and with her family coming from a line of entrepreneurs, helming a race team was a perfect fit. The team began in the Xfinity Series in the mid-1990s and the couple have performed a variety of jobs along the way, including Tad going over the wall on the pit crew, Jodi scoring the car and the pair hauling the show car together.
They have made it a point to hire people who are technically savvy, all while building a brand. Indeed, the organization has always been known for its marketing prowess. That fact was further exemplified before this season when the team announced a massive slate of sponsors for its No. 47 Chevrolet.
“I think Tad’s very insightful and he’s a visionary, so he’s great at casting a vision and a direction that we’re going,” Jodi Geschickter explained. “I am less on the creative side and more detail-oriented. So, a lot of times if we’re working on a project, Tad is the vision caster and I assist in putting things in motion.”
As for Daugherty, he not only hit it off with the team owners, but can relate to professional race car drivers, having competed at the highest levels of a sport.
“Ricky (Stenhouse) is just a fantastic athlete, he trains extremely hard,” Daugherty said. “I think the thing you learn as a professional athlete, especially as you mature, is it is really about the process.”
For Stenhouse, a native of Olive Branch, Miss., the close-knit nature of the team reminds him of the time when he was cutting his teeth as a sprint car driver.
“I grew up racing with my dad as a single-car team,” Stenhouse said. “(JTG Daugherty) is kind of a tight-knit family, I really enjoy that everybody in the shop is there working on one car and that’s the car I drive. So, for me, it’s knowing that all of us are on the same team, we’re all pulling for the same thing, and we all believe in each other.”
Because of that mindset, winning the Daytona 500 wasn’t necessarily a surprise.
“We weren’t there to prove everybody wrong, we were just there to prove everybody around us right,” Stenhouse said.
That “everybody” on the team now includes Gordon Smith, a native of Honolulu who has built a career in the maritime business. He raced dirt bikes and bomber cars in his youth and has long been a NASCAR fan, seeing the inner workings of the sport in the 1990s through a business relationship with Caterpillar.