In what will be his first start in the main ARCA Menards Series, 24-year-old Hunter Wright from Lebanon, Tenn., will pilot the #95 Toyota for MAN Motorsports owned by Mark Noble. This will be his fifth appearance across ARCA as he already has four starts in the ARCA Menards Series East, which were also for MAN Motorsports. Wright will receive sponsorship from Cedar City RV and Wilson County Convention & Visitors Bureau, which have both partnered with Wright and MAN previously. Wright will also be joined by a teammate in Jackson McLerran, who will again pilot the #96 Toyota for MAN like at the Nashville Fairgrounds in May.
Wright has been racing since he was seven years old and has raced at the Nashville Fairgrounds yearly ever since, especially in their Pro Late Model division. He has also raced Pro Late Models at various other short tracks such as Montgomery Motor Speedway in Alabama and New Smyrna Speedway, among many others. Wright, this February, also became the first driver to win the World Series Pro Late Model championships two years in a row at New Smyrna. Wright has also made three starts in the All-American 400 at Nashville, where he’s scored a best finish of 17th in these starts. Wright has also competed in various ASA-sanctioned series, such as in the ASA STARS National Tour, where he’s made three starts since his debut in 2023.
Wright would make his first ARCA East start in 2024 for MAN Motorsports at Five Flags Speedway, where he would qualify in sixth and finish fifth two laps down. He’d then return at Nashville qualifying in eighth and finishing in ninth, three laps down. He would return for both of these races in 2025 with a ninth-place run at Five Flags before an impressive third-place finish and his first lead lap finish in ARCA competition at Nashville. Wright was also the second fastest in practice at Nashville as well. For Indy Raceway Park, this will be Wright’s first-ever race at the 0.686-mile oval in Brownsburg, Ind. Wright recently promoted his planned start there in the fan zone this past weekend at Nashville Superspeedway during NASCAR’s race weekend at the track.
MAN Motorsports, based in Watertown, Tenn., owned by Mark Noble, began competing in ARCA in 2022 with Tanner Arms debuting for them at Nashville to a sixth-place finish. Since then, they’ve also had Dylan Fetcho, Christopher Martin Jr, Conner Popplewell, Andrew Patterson, and the aforementioned McLerran and Wright all compete in the teams’ #95 and #96 rides ever since in ARCA. MAN also brought both cars to Indy last year as well, with Patterson in the #95 and McLerran in the #96. For 2025, however, the race at IRP has been shortened to 150 laps, unlike the scheduled distance of 200 laps in last year’s event and many years before that. The last ARCA race at IRP to be 150 laps was on August 3, 1985, when Bob Schacht took the checkered flag. The ARCA Menards Series will combine with the ARCA Menards Series East at Indy Raceway Park for the Circle City 150 presented by Dutch Boy on Friday, July 25, 2025, at 5:30 PM EST/4:30 PM CST. The race will air on Fox Sports 1 live and will be the 11th race on the ARCA Menards Series calendar and the sixth race on the ARCA Menards Series East calendar.
Image Credit: Hunter Wright Racing