The latest NASCAR Hall of Fame class is now set. This week, NASCAR announced that champion driver Matt Kenseth and crew chief Kirk Shelmerdine will lead the Hall of Fame Class of 2023. Hershel McGriff is also part of the class as he was elected from a group of five Pioneer Division nominees. Additionally, longtime NASCAR executive Mike Helton was named the recipient of the Landmark Award for Outstanding Contributions to NASCAR.
Kenseth led the Modern Era vote with 69%. He won the NASCAR Cup Series championship in 2003 and won 39 Cup Series races in his career including the Daytona 500 twice (2009, 2012) and the All-Star Race (2004). When Keneseth won the Cup Series championship in 2003 he only won one race, which led to NASCAR launching the playoff system in 2004. Kenseth also won 29 NASCAR Xfinity Series races, the eighth-most all-time.
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“It feels good,” Kenseth said during an interview on SiriusXM NASCAR Radio. “It’s obviously a huge honor just to be on a list or to be under consideration, but to be voted in really means a lot to me. It’s kind of like the bookend of your career. It’s not for anything you did today, but what you did throughout your career. Kind of like the perfect bookend. To go into the Hall of Fame when everything is said and done and all over, to kind of look back at it, it’s pretty neat.”
Kenseth also talked about his view of his career has changed over the years. “I’ve slowly been changing my view of my career the longer I’ve been away from it,” Kenseth said. “When you’re in the middle of it, I don’t know if it’s a good habit or a bad habit, but it always seemed to work for me, when you’re in the middle of it, you agonize over the losses and the mistakes a lot more than the successes and the wins, unfortunately.
Shelmerdine is one of the top crew chiefs in NASCAR history, winning championships with Dale Earnhardt in 1986, 1987, 1990 and 1991. He left his role as crew chief in 1992 and made the switch to driving. Shelmerdine made 41 starts across NASCAR’s top three national series. McGriff, who turned 94 in December, competed in NASCAR races for seven decades. His final race was the K&N Pro Series West race in Tucson at age 90 in 2018.
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DAYTONA BEACH, FLORIDA – JULY 1986: NASCAR driver Cale Yarborough sits in his race car prior to the start of the 1986 Pepsi Firecracker 400 stock car race at Daytona International Speedway in Daytona Beach, Florida.
