If you’ve recently roamed through a NASCAR garage, there’s a good chance you’ve bumped into Myatt Snider. The 30-year-old is actively hustling, playing multiple roles.
Snider has lived out his dream of racing competitively in NASCAR full time. He hopes to achieve that thrill once more, but has participated on a limited basis since the conclusion of the 2022 Xfinity Series season when he competed for Jordan Anderson Racing. Since then, he’s run a six-race slate with Joe Gibbs Racing in 2023, and has made six starts since the beginning of the 2024 campaign, with the last four coming for DGM Racing.
Until Snider finds additional funding, he will be largely sidelined. If he does compete, he has a few race tracks in mind that he wants to tackle at favorites Martinsville Speedway and Homestead-Miami Speedway at the top of the list.
“We’ve been working on sponsorship programs that have all fallen through for various different reasons,” Snider told Jayski.com. “It’s just life in racing. A lot of it was a bit out of our control. I felt we’ve always pitched good stuff and it never seems to work out. That’s part of it.”
Yet with limited opportunities, Snider continues to learn about himself. In the stint with JGR, he realized that he still has potential to pad onto his resume, with a lone victory at Homestead-Miami Speedway in 2021 with Richard Childress Racing. He proved to himself that he can succeed with a pair of top-10 finishes and three additional top-15 results with months in between starts. It was a full-circle moment for the North Carolina native, as he worked as a mechanic at JGR while attending high school.
“I was questioning my own abilities after the previous couple years of racing,” Snider added. “I feel like I had the skills to do it, but I had no proof of concept. I won a race, but couldn’t keep up with it the rest of the season and couldn’t get the team to put the car where I needed it to. Then, I went to Gibbs and I was like, ‘oh, this is all I need right here.’ They proved to me what a great race team and race car can do.”
Joining an Xfinity juggernaut like JGR for a partial season is a risk. It paid off for Ross Chastain and Ryan Preece, who both landed full-time Cup rides after they had immediate success when they joined a larger operation. If a driver doesn’t perform, they could be relegated to never getting a second chance. Snider lies in the middle of that conundrum.
“A lot of my racing career has been defined by being this close to glory,” he said. “That’s part of what you take as what might happen in NASCAR. You risk it and sometimes it doesn’t work. I still think that I can hop in one of those cars and go out and win races and even win championships.”
Achieving success with smaller operations can be even more rewarding, however. Snider rounded out the top 10 in the penultimate event of 2024 at Martinsville for DGM Racing. Earlier that season, at the same tight confined venue, he cracked the top 20 with SS-GreenLight Racing, where team owner Bobby Dotter says cracking the top 25 is overachieving against stout competition.
That triumph led to praise from some of the sport’s icons. Snider recalled Dale Earnhardt Jr. approaching him, saying he did a commendable job. His former team owner Richard Childress has given him kudos in passing, too.
“It proves a lot, I think,” Snider said. “It’s cool to get that recognition and that Cup teams are noticing me.”
During Snider’s spare time, he exerts himself in the DGM camp, helping out full-time driver Ryan Ellis. He enjoys going the extra mile if it’s beneficial for the team.
“I knew [Snider] was a great driver without him having to go to a big team to prove it,” Ellis stated. “Having been his teammate a few times this year, you know you can trust what he’s saying. It’s cool to see people that you feel like you can relate to from a work-ethic standpoint and have respect for him on and off the track.”
Snider also enjoys working on outside projects that he’s wanted to accomplish. He earned his pilot’s license in 2023 and graduated from UNC Charlotte in 2024 with a mathematics degree. His pipe dream is to fly from Lake Norman to Lake Lure in North Carolina, as it’s among his favorite places on the planet.
While at the race track, Snider can often be found on pit road as a pit spotter, a role he picked up during the 2023 season. It was an idea from his father Marty Snider, a longtime pit reporter for numerous television networks in multiple forms of racing. The job allows Snider to show his face at the race track each weekend, as he’s worked every Cup Series race since the Coca-Cola 600, and every Xfinity race since Mexico City besides the trip to Portland International Raceway last month.
“It was refreshing to see because everyone is focused on performing that it can be really intense at times,” Snider said of pit spotting. “They do their jobs and have fun and it’s more of a relaxed environment. A thing that my dad says is – for TV reporters – their results aren’t on a leaderboard at the end of the day. So if you screw up, you go on to the next race and do better next time.”
Snider has adjusted accordingly on the TV side, according to co-workers. He has spent time spotting other pit reporters, as well, including longtime industry member Kim Coon, who has the full 33-race slate of Xfinity races and works Cup events with NBC Sports and Prime Video.
“He is very driver-oriented,” Coon said of Snider. “We just have to make sure our communication is in line because he will give you hand signals that a driver would know and I’m [confused]. It actually helps me learn.”
Should an opportunity arise for Snider to race in select events, his weekly pit-spotting duties will be put on hold. He is actively searching for rides and hopes to make an additional start or two down the homestretch of races in 2025.