CONCORD, N.C. - Perhaps it's fitting that Adam Wall's first sitting atop the pit box for Hendrick Motorsports' Xfinity Series program in 2025 will be at the Circuit of The Americas and will come with a reconfiguration.
See, like the car and the plan for Austin, Texas, this weekend, Wall is going to have to be versatile and welcoming to change.
Cup Series driver William Byron gets the first nod in the No. 17 this weekend but will be just one of five drivers to take a turn in the Xfinity ride. And they range in experience and success from Cup Series veterans Kyle Larson, Alex Bowman and Chase Elliott all the way down to Corey Day, the organization's newest signee at 19-years-old. He'll make the first Xfinity start of his career at Martinsville Speedway on March 29.
Five drivers, five different sets of skills, car preferences and communication tendencies. However, Wall will one common factor across all of those starts.
"That's definitely going to be a challenge," said Wall, who served as a crew chief for JR Motorsports in 2024. "I know they've had the fourth or fifth car over at JRM and its been a cycle of drivers, so, it's something other guys have gone through in the past but it's not something I've had to deal with before. We have really good setups and notes to lean on for a lot of these places, so a lot of it is just going to be fine tuning."
For Larson, Bowman, Byron and Elliott, that may be true. After all, Hendrick Motorsports' four Cup Series crew chiefs are right down the hall and a wealth of information when it comes to setting up cars tailored toward the four drivers' individual abilities.
Wall anticipates those conversations happening throughout the year, much like they did this past week.
"This week for William, we sat him in the car on Monday and had a little conversation. Then I talked to (24 crew chief) Rudy (Fugle) throughout the week and we'll have a driver pre-event meeting usually when they're done with their Cup meetings," Wall said. "We'll grab them for 30 minutes or an hour and talk through what's different for our weekend. Within all that conversation, we can kind of determine where they feel they want to be on balance."
But when Day is in the car for one of his 10 starts, Wall will have to change up his approach dramatically, at least at first.
"He’s not only young but very new to these cars, he's never been in an Xfinity race at this point," Wall said. "Just knowing I kind of need to be the wisdom for him to lean on. I’m not old either but I’ve been around and been at the race track for a few years now to give him some background on some things.
"His feedback isn't going to be as strong at this point because he hasn't been through 10 races at Dover (Motor Speedway) to know what the track is going to do by stage three. He doesn't have the context for a lot of those things to know what he wants from the car, so that's definitely a different level of conversation and what I need to bring to the table to fill in those gaps for him to know what to expect by the time the end of the weekend comes around."
The two have already begun working on the communication that will be crucial in Day's development over the course of the year. That included a test at Rockingham Speedway in January.
As he has with so many already, Day left Wall impressed and the crew chief believes the young driver is headed for great things.
"He's got the speed," Wall said. "We got to do that Rockingham test and I've watched his sprint car races and he's got the raw speed, it's just going to be working on the race craft and working on the finer details of how to execute a full weekend and how you have to manage tires more so than a 20-lap, sprint-car feature. It's just going to be things like that we have to work through as we get going but I'm excited. I think he's going to live up to all the hype. I know there's a lot of hype around him but he's the real deal."
For Wall, no matter who's behind the wheel of the No. 17 from week-to-week, the 2025 season, though challenging, represents a culmination of sorts to his own journey within motorsports. Only 35 himself, Wall began at Hendrick Motorsports in 2011 in a part-time role, sweeping floors and cutting tubing in the chassis shop.
From there, it's been a journey with multiple job title sand stops along the way. He's done work in the fabrication shop, on postrace teardowns and setup plates and then moved up to third engineer for Dale Earnhardt Jr. and crew chief Greg Ives in 2015. The steady climb continued from there and that included winning a Cup Series championship with Kyle Larson and the No. 5 team in 2021.
"It's a huge opportunity for me," Wall concluded. "I've been a lot of places in this organization, kind of worked my way up through it, so to get to this point, it's the whole goal of my journey through this place was to get here. It's a cool spot to be in."
This weekend will provide one heck of a chance at a first impression in his new gig. Byron won the Cup Series race at COTA last year while the No. 17 car went to victory lane in the Xfinity Series event with Kyle Larson behind the wheel. A prolific driver and superior equipment, Wall said that combination has helped put him at ease heading into his first race.
"It helps me from the car side knowing we're not searching for anything," Wall said. "William, I don't need to put in a ton of work teaching him where he needs to be this weekend, he knows that kind of stuff. So, yeah, that definitely takes some of the pressure off of me."