About
RAJAH CARUTH – DRIVER – SPIRE MOTORSPORTS NO. 71 CHEVROLET SILVERADO
Rajah Caruth, the 2024 NASCAR CRAFTSMAN Truck Series Most Popular Driver, drives the No. 71 HendrickCars.com Chevrolet Silverado for Spire Motorsports in pursuit of CRAFTSMAN Truck Series championship honors.
The 2024 season marked a career year for the Washington, D.C. native. He earned his first career NCTS pole position and victory on March 1 in the Victoria’s Voice Foundation 200 at Las Vegas Motor Speedway. The win positioned him amongst exclusive company including NASCAR Hall of Famer, Wendell Scott and current NASCAR Cup Series regular Bubba Wallace as one-of-three African-American drivers to win a NASCAR National Touring Series race.
In total, the 22-year-old tallied one win, a pair of Cometic Gasket Pole Awards and five top-five finishes in 2024, all of which are the first of his young career. The 12 top-10 finishes on the season triples Caruth’s total of four in 2023, while his average starting position of 10.7 is four positions higher than 2023 and his 11.6 average finish is an impressive seven positions higher. The No. 71 team qualified for the CRAFTSMAN Truck Series playoffs via their victory at Las Vegas and finishing the regular season fifth in the point standings. Caruth and Co. reached the Round of 8 before a mechanical failure in the season’s penultimate event prevented the crew from advancing to the Championship 4. Caruth capped off the exciting calendar year by collecting a Bachelor of Science in Motorsports Management from Winston-Salem (N.C.) State University.
Caruth competed in his rookie season of full-time CRAFTSMAN Truck Series competition in 2023, earning four top-10 finishes and coming home 16th in the division’s season-ending point standings. He also entered 19 NASCAR Xfinity Series events between the 2022 and 2023 seasons, earning a career/series best 12th-place finish at Martinsville Speedway (Oct., 2023).
In addition to winning the 2024 CRAFTSMAN Truck Series Most Popular Driver award, Caruth was named the 2021 Wendell Scott Trailblazer Award recipient in the NASCAR Advance Auto Parts Weekly Series, an award based on a driver’s final Weekly Series national standing and on-track performance, sportsmanship and community service. He is a graduate of the NASCAR Drive for Diversity Driver Development Program (2020-21) alongside teammate Andres Perez de Lara (2021-24).