NASCAR spotter Joe White shared Wednesday that he has been fired following a major accident involving Ty Dillon, the driver for whom he spotted, and Cup Series playoff contender William Byron late in Sunday’s race at Las Vegas Motor Speedway. White worked for Kaulig Racing as the spotter for their No. 10 Cup Series team as well as their No. 11 Xfinity Series team.
With 31 laps to go in Sunday’s opening race of the Round of 8 at Las Vegas, Dillon — who had been running laps down with a car that he had been struggling with — was called to pit road for a green flag stop just after the leaders finished their cycle of stops. Normally, there is an expectation for a team coming to pit road to alert traffic behind them that they are slowing down to come to pit road, whether it be by the spotter alerting the spotter for the car running behind them or by the driver delivering a hand signal to traffic behind them. This is especially true in cases where a lap down car is coming to pit road in front of lead lap cars.
Dillon was called to pit road just after being put a lap down by race leader Kyle Larson, and he began to slow in Turns 3 & 4 in order to make the entry to pit road a short distance ahead of William Byron, who just lost the lead and remained second. But apparently, Byron’s team had not received a message from Dillon’s team that they were going to pit: Byron had only been informed to expect Dillon to run in either the second or third lane, leaving him completely unaware that the No. 10 in front of him was coming to pit road.
The result was a violent collision that took both Dillon and Byron out of the race, and one which has severely hampered Byron’s championship hopes. Prior to the crash, Byron had possessed a 23 point advantage over the cut line to make the Championship 4, and still had a chance of earning a spot in the final round outright by winning. Instead, and despite having led 55 laps, Byron left Las Vegas with a 36th place finish that has left him 15 points below the cut line. Byron will now have to either overcome his points deficit or win at either Talladega or Martinsville to advance to the final round of the playoffs and have a chance to win the Cup Series championship in the season finale at Phoenix.
“I never saw him wave. I didn’t see any indication that he was pitting, and it was probably 12 to 15 laps after we had pitted, so I thought the cycle [of green flag stops] was fully over,” Byron told USA upon exiting the infield care center. “Nobody said anything to my spotter from what I know. I had zero idea. … I was watching him thinking ‘okay, he missed the bottom a little bit here’ and then he just started slowing, and I had no idea what was going on.
“I’m just devastated. I had no indication, so I obviously wouldn’t have just driven full speed into the back of him like that.”
On Wednesday afternoon, White shared that he had been fired upon arriving in Talladega for this weekend’s race and that he was heading to the airport to return home. While White had not been slated to return as Dillon’s spotter in 2026, it was expected that he would remain with Kaulig prior to his mid-week dismissal.
With White no longer with the team, Frank Deiny Jr., who had been the spotter for Kaulig’s No. 16 team and A.J. Allmendinger, will move over to the No. 10 team to be Dillon’s spotter for the final three races of the season. Former NASCAR driver T.J. Bell will take over as spotter for Allmendinger and the No. 16 team.
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