Bubba Pollard has a rare teammate for the Derby and it actually makes sense

Bubba Pollard has a teammate at the Snowball Derby and this incredibly unlikely event actually makes all the sense in the world this year.

It’s Sammy Smith, the Late Model development prospect turned second year NASCAR Xfinity Series regular. The car came out of Senoia, Georgia but is engineered by Phillip Bell, Pollard’s cousin who also happens to serve as crew chief for Smith on Saturdays.

Then factor in that Pollard just became a client of Rising Star Management Group, operated by longtime NASCAR agent, Kurt Smith.

As in Sammy’s dad.  

Again, this combined operation makes all the sense in the world but it doesn’t end there. The two-car Pollard effort also has made use of Andrew Overstreet, the JR Motorsports crew chief that worked alongside the Super Late Model ace for his Xfinity Series debut in April at Richmond Raceway.

“They’ve helped me a lot,” Pollard said. “It’s not something I’m going to do all the time but with the way it has played out, Phillip has helped me a lot over the years and they wanted to race and do something together. Andrew is here and he really got me up to speed at Richmond.

“They’re all just great people and if I was going to do something like this with anyone, it’s them because they’re all good people and easy to get along with.”

Typically, Pollard is entirely focused on his own race and trying to end the much ballyhooed two-decade journey towards winning the race. On one hand, having a second car as good as his No. 26 stacks the deck against him but it also stacks the odds in his favor too.

Bell is calling it ‘divide and conquer.’

“We’ve had a really good plan here since the weekend in that we both try different things with our cars and then debrief at the end of the day,” Bell said. “These cars will have very similar feels and we might do different things come race day but we’re going to build a notebook before the weekend.”

For Smith, the timing worked out on a lot of different fronts.

He was going to work with Pollard this weekend even before his dad signed the Super Late Model star to the agency. The two families just have a really good relationship dating back to when they were racing full-time against each other.

Then, with Brandon Jones leaving JR Motorsports to go back to Joe Gibbs Racing in 2025, Smith was paired with Bell for the final races to close out this season in advance of a full-time effort together. So it just made, again, all the sense in the world for Smith, Bell and Pollard to do all of this together in December.

“It went really well when we started racing together,” Smith said. “I can’t wait for next season and it was just a no-brainer for us to do the Derby together. And really, I don’t know that I have ever as this much fun testing as I did this weekend. It’s really fun to run these cars and I really enjoy doing this with these guys.”

Are you sensing a theme?

This is the ultimate family team but on a NASCAR light scale when it comes to the engineering prowess being added to the foundation started by the Pollards and Mark Buckner.

Who gets what car?

The original plan for Pollard was to bring back the car that nearly won the race last year if not for the incident passing Stephen Nasse for the lead with eight laps to go.

Pollard re-clipped the car and was prepared to run it back, overriding a longstanding policy of bringing the latest and greatest, but without a notebook. Now, with Smith coming aboard, that car went to his new teammate and Pollard is once again in a brand new Senneker.

“Well, bringing that car didn’t work out last year,” Pollard said with a chuckle.

You could argue it did … until it didn’t.

“I feel like we do a good job of keeping notes and doing the things we need to be more consistent,” Pollard said. “These cars are feel very similar and they all do the same things and with Sammy coming aboard, we got to six or seven months into the cars sitting there and it’s like, we have to make a decision and now it was time.”

As for these cars being branded as ‘Senneker by Pollard,’ the veteran racer says there’s no real stake in the business beyond them building some of these chassis in Georgia as opposed to getting them directly from Terry Senneker in Michigan.

“We were taking some chassis on and trying to help Terry out,” Pollard said. “Maybe one car at a time and help with his customers, things like that. We were trying to do some things differently and put our own little touches on things, maybe try some different things with our cars too but I don’t know that it’s really anything different.”