Jonathan Toney has a very distinct early memory of Cole Custer.
“He had these heely shoes that he wore, like roller skate shoes,” Toney tells RACER. “We had a ramp out of the back of our hauler, and he’d take off running down the center aisle in the truck, and he’d hit the ramp as he could on those heely shoes. I kept thinking, ‘That little kid is going to bust his nose going down that ramp.’ I told him that a couple of years ago that I was waiting on that, but he never did.
“Now, here he is, almost a face of this company. It’s funny how things come around. I never would have thought that 5-year-old kid would be a driver for this company, let alone that I’d be working with him. It’s been fun to watch him grow up.”
Toney, the crew chief of Custer’s No. 00 Ford Mustang Dark Horse in the NASCAR Xfinity Series, has indeed watched Custer grow up, and their connection is now about 20 years old. One of the most tenured Stewart-Haas Racing employees, Toney joined the organization when it was Haas CNC Racing. Cole’s father and longtime company executive, Joe Custer, would bring his son around the race shop.
Through the years, Toney watched Custer go from a quiet, shy young kid to a developing driver trying to learn how to race a quarter midget, to grassroots star and finally a sponge of a NASCAR national series driver. Then, in 2023, the two were paired professionally and won the Xfinity Series championship.
The well-deserved accomplishment received plenty of attention, and both men were bestowed with accolades. However, Custer, naturally, has been the center of attention as the driver. It was a feel-good story with Custer going from struggling in the Cup Series to reinventing himself in the Xfinity Series and becoming a champion.
Toney, on the other hand, has always seemingly flown under the radar.
Hickory Motor Speedway (North Carolina) is where it started for Toney. He remembers being 3 or 4 years old and being taken to a practice session at the racetrack by his dad. Walked into the first turn gate, dad walked Toney up the fence to see the action.
“I remember literally hanging on the fence as the cars would go by,” Toney says. “The gasoline got into my blood right then, and the racing bug bit me that day. There weren’t many Saturday nights from the time I was 3 or 4 years old until I started traveling with the Hooters Pro Cup team when I was 26 or 27 years old that I didn’t miss a Saturday night with my dad at Hickory Motor Speedway.”
Toney and his father eventually started attending Cup Series races at Charlotte Motor Speedway and Rockingham. It was leaving Charlotte one day that a teenaged Toney told his father, “I’m not sure how I’m going to do this, but this is what I want to do the rest of my life.”
Knowing he wanted to work on race cars, Toney chose engineering. It was a lightbulb moment while sitting in high school one day, realizing that a NASCAR great like Alan Kulwicki had left Wisconsin and made it in NASCAR with an engineering degree.
Toney graduated from the University of North Carolina at Charlotte (UNCC) in 1996. By 2003, Toney had experienced a championship with Shane Huffman in the USAR Hooters Pro Cup Series. Those contacts led to an introduction at Haas CNC Racing, which was building an Xfinity Series team for the late Jason Leffler. In the winter of 2003, Toney joined the company.
In 2005, Toney worked on the Cup Series team with Mike Bliss. In time, Toney worked with multiple drivers, from Leffler to Bliss to Johnny Sauter and Jeff Green. A few years later, in 2009, Tony Stewart joined forces with Gene Haas and rebranded to Stewart-Haas Racing.
It bears repeating that even though he’s been in the NASCAR garage for two decades, the 2023 season was Toney’s first as a NASCAR crew chief. The entirety of his career was spent making a difference in the background.
Among the fingerprints Toney has put on Stewart-Haas Racing’s success was as Tony Stewart’s lead engineer from 2009 through 2012. Stewart won his third and final Cup Series championship in 2011. The lead engineer role is one that Toney has spent a lot of time in for the organization in both the Cup Series and the Xfinity, even on Custer’s team, where he was the road part-time in 2017 when they won at Homestead-Miami Speedway.