Brennan Poole expects to deliver the best results for Alpha Prime Racing. The wise veteran wouldn’t want anything else despite nearly exiting the sport a few years back.
Poole is in the middle of his third season with Alpha Prime. Each year, he’s hovered near the postseason bubble, with the results continuously getting better. More impressively, he’s doing it with what the No. 44 team believes to be at best a 30th-place budget among all O’Reilly Auto Parts Series entries.
“I can’t say enough good things about [Alpha Prime] and the hard work they put in,” Poole recently told Jayski.com. “The care and belief that they have in me – it doesn’t matter what we don’t have – this is what we have, how can we figure out how to win with it. We do that every week and I think that’s why we’ve had good runs.”
Prior to finishing 27th in a weather-shortened event last weekend at Charlotte Motor Speedway, Poole was riding a streak of 10 straight top-20 finishes. He was bummed with the one top-20 outlier prior to Charlotte, another 27th-place effort at Phoenix Raceway in early March.
The key to the success within the No. 44 team has been familiarity. Veteran crew chief Frank Kerr has connected with Poole since he joined Alpha Prime, and much of the core group has remained the same. Whether right or wrong, the organization handles business in its own way.
“We focus on trying to be as competitive as we can be every week, we just don’t do it the same way that everyone else does it,” Tommy Joe Martins, co-owner of Alpha Prime Racing, stated. “That’s been the hallmark of our team. I’ve got to give all the credit to our people. When you have a team that respects each other and believes in each other, the sky is the limit. We understand that there is a limit.”
When Martins looks at the overall standings – drivers or owners – he knows the No. 44 team is a fish out of water. Poole ranks 16th in the driver’s championship, 78 points below the 12th-place cutline. On the owners side, the No. 44 car ranks 17th, the only team inside the top 28 that is fully independent and doesn’t have an alliance with a singular team or manufacturer.
“I think we’re maximizing what we have,” Martins added. “That’s a really good feeling and everyone feels encouraged by it. I think that’s a different place than what most of these teams operate in. It feels like all these affiliations, the expectations of the cars go so high.”
Poole is fighting for top 15s weekly. He has banked six of them through the opening 15 events, and made a move for the win in the season opener at Daytona International Speedway on the final lap. His lone top-10 finish was rounding out the top 10 at Circuit of The Americas, though his 17.5 average finish is nearly two positions better than 2025 (19.4) in a season where he had a handful of top 10s.
“Over the last three years, we’ve been able to [compete] and this is just a continuation of that,” Poole noted. “That part of it is really challenging when you don’t get a lot of [practice] time, you don’t get sim, you don’t get data or information. We’re doing everything more of that old school way.”
A good rapport internally has allowed Poole to maximize the No. 44 car’s potential. It also provides a leg up on the competition when a large portion of the field volleys around annually, bouncing to different teams or switching series.
But Poole knows it’s a grind.
“I just think our team is at such a disadvantage of not having any of the leased engines, no idea where our bodies are, our cars are really old. We’re at a disadvantage on all levels,” he said. “But because we have that chemistry and I have such a team that cares about what we’re doing, works really hard, we mentally overlook those circumstances where we don’t even think about it.
“I really believe we have one of the best teams in the garage, we just don’t have any of the resources or funding.”
Among the chassis Poole is using are roughly 10 years old from TriStar Motorsports, which shuttered at the end of 2018. That makes minimizing mistakes paramount.
In a perfect world, Martins would enjoy building around Poole for years to come. But he also would like for the Texan to get an opportunity to compete at the front of the field weekly, believing he can compete for race wins.
“I think he’s almost recalibrated what I think is possible for our race team and that’s probably the biggest compliment I can give him,” Martins added. “He is a guy that elevates your ceiling. He is very confident, great on every type of race track. I think he’s a championship-caliber race car driver. I think he’s a great enough driver that he should be able to have that chance again before too long.
“It feels like every year, we are pointing at the scoreboard and it’s like nobody is looking at the scoreboard. He is a guy that is completely overachieving every year and you would like to see other people be able to notice that more.”
Poole does believe he’s getting into conversations more frequently. Funding will always matter, but he doesn’t believe it’s everything. The results can do the talking, too.
“I’m grateful to be driving a race car, but of course I want more and I want to fight for wins and race for championships,” Poole said. “I’m trying to figure out a way to do that and I think there is probably going to be a team owner somewhere in this garage – or any of these garages – that has seen what we’ve been able to accomplish the last three years as a team and give me a shot.”
The immediate goal, however, is continuing to elevate Alpha Prime. The No. 44 team scored a team record 608 points last season and is on pace to score just shy of 650 markers this season.