Chase Briscoe loves the scuttlebutt. During his seven-year stint with Stewart-Haas Racing, he earned a nickname within the four walls of the organization for his knack of digging up insider talk.
“I’m all about the rumors. I love reading them,” Briscoe said with a chuckle. “[Richard] Boswell, when he was my crew chief, would always call me Chaseski because I always knew all the rumors and where this guy was going to go.”
Jayski is celebrating its 30th anniversary today, first launching on Aug. 26, 1996. It began as a place where founder Jay Adamczyk had no intention of being among the most-searched racing websites in the industry.
Adamczyk was a hound for gathering information, oftentimes doing it much quicker than his colleagues in the United States Air Force while working as an FAA programmer. He had a passion for racing and created Jayski as a tribute page for his favorite racer, Ernie Irvan.
When sources began sending him information on other drivers in the field, however, the true Jayski was born.
“There was no freaking goal,” Adamczyk said. “I never planned it to be anything. It was just for fun, and I was working two jobs and going to school at the time and then squeezing this stuff in.”
Back in its heyday, Jayski often eclipsed 1 million views per day. That led to Adamczyk needing to find different partners “because bandwidth was a whole lot different ballgame back then.” Often, reliable sources would email him to post their information.
“I always wished I could click anonymous source and see the name,” Ross Chastain said with a laugh. “Back then, there was a lot of tidbits that flew onto that [website]. Just seeing stuff that would end up coming out later but saw it there first. Now that I’m in the sport, I don’t like that as much, but as a fan, I loved it.”
Jayski quickly became an industry insider for drivers and teams within NASCAR that turned into the sport’s encyclopedia.
“All the teams back in the early to mid-2000s, that’s where they got their information. It was not from NASCAR, it was from Jayski’s site,” 2020 NASCAR Cup Series champion Chase Elliott said. “I looked at it more as an information source for the teams than it being a clickbait-type website. I always thought it stood out, has a unique name and the teams used it, which is funny.”
Soon after launching, Adamczyk found interest in posting various paint schemes, a focal point of the website to this day that houses roughly 64,000 paint-scheme images.
“I would go in there and look at the paint schemes to try to figure out what paint scheme everyone was running that week,” Byron said of his earliest memories visiting the site while competing on iRacing, “and I would change my paint scheme to my favorite guy or the one I thought was the coolest that week.”
Brad Keselowski, the 2012 Cup Series champion, remembers the site’s early days. The Keselowskis didn’t grow up with internet access in their household, so when the eventual 36-time Cup winner discovered Jayski while attending school, it opened up an entirely new universe.
“Core memory: sixth-grade computer class at school, first time I was exposed to the internet — we didn’t have internet at my house, couldn’t afford that,” Keselowski said. “I logged in, and I’m like, ‘Where do I go?’ I found Jayski. I will never forget that, and I was like, “Whoa, this whole world exists.’
“What I really remember is in the early 2000s, it was my homepage. You turn your computer on, open up the internet, and my homepage was Jayski. Whenever there was an update, you would be like, ‘Oh, oh.’ Nowadays we’re so spoiled because you just open up X or whatever and all the news you could want at the tip of your fingertips. Different world.”
Fellow Michigander Carson Hocevar, a once diehard Dale Earnhardt Jr. fan, has a similar story. His search engine of choice as a youngster was Ask.com, where he oftentimes didn’t even realize what he was clicking. But he stumbled upon Jayski and was hooked by the paint schemes and where each driver stood in the championship standings.
“I remember looking to see what the points were every week and trying to understand,” Hocevar said. “I think Junior was struggling in those years, so I had to do a lot of scrolling to see where he was at and trying to figure that out. I didn’t live online as a kid. I didn’t even know what YouTube was for a while. Ultimately, I mainly visit it for schedules to figure out where I’m going to be.”
Over the last three decades, Jayski needed to evolve with the invention of social media. After a 12-year run with ESPN, it was picked up by NASCAR Digital Media in May 2019, and the approach remained the same. It is a one-stop shop for everything NASCAR across the top three national touring series.
After racing for three-plus hours, Jayski is often the first place drivers turn to see where they stand in the championship standings. That’s become even more important with the return of The Chase in 2026.
“It’s the first thing I open after the race and hit refresh, refresh, waiting for results and points to come out,” two-time Cup champion Kyle Larson said. “I don’t read articles or anything, I just use it for that.”
“That’s where I still continue to get my practice information, qualifying, old news,” Ryan Preece said. “For me, I know we all go to Bob [Pockrass] or you guys for a lot of your stuff, but I continue to go on [X], and I look at Jayski for my post-race points update. For all my information, I continue to go to Jayski as far as that. The website itself: paint schemes, there’s a lot to it.”
Eleven of the current full-time Cup Series drivers weren’t even born when Jayski launched. Erik Jones, born May 30, 1996, is the youngest full-time Cup driver who was alive when the site debuted. His Legacy Motor Club teammate, John Hunter Nemechek, had a Jayski article published about him the day he was born, June 11, 1997. NASCAR COO Ben Kennedy was 4 years old.
Three-time Cup Series titlist Joey Logano is a frequent visitor of the historical database. Every week, he visits the site to see where he sits in the qualifying order, and which numbered pit stall his crew chief Paul Wolfe selected on a particular weekend.
Logano, who wondered aloud if he had ever met Adamczyk in his nearly two decades of racing the NASCAR circuit, gives the founder all the credit for keeping Jayski alive and preserving the site’s place within NASCAR, ensuring its legacy continued well beyond its original era.
“Austin Cindric laughs and makes fun of me all the time because that’s how I find everything – I go to Jayski,” Logano said. “If I want to see points, I just click it and boom, it’s all right there. I wonder who this Jayski guy even is.
“It’s amazing that he’s built a brand off of Jayski that says nothing about NASCAR in it. Only insiders would go that direction. It’s got good information. It’s got all the stories that you guys write, boom, pops up on there. It’s the easiest way to find it.”
Admittedly, Adamczyk knows Jayski isn’t the same site it once was. But its influence within the NASCAR bubble remains undeniable as drivers, teams and fans continue to turn to Jayski as a trusted source for the latest news and information.
To be around 30 years after the initial rollout and helping provide for the families of three employees is something Adamczyk never could have imagined. The journey was worth it for him, especially after hearing kind feedback from current drivers.
“It means a lot because of the way things have gone. A lot of people say I was the Twitter of NASCAR before Twitter,” Adamczyk said. “To see the site doing so well, and that there are three great people running it and doing such a great job with it. Is it the same that it was? No, NASCAR’s not the same; the world’s not the same as it was. You have to grow, or you’re not going any place.”