6/6/2025
Knoxville Raceway
Team Moro: JJ Hickle and Matt Moro
The familiar 2M sprint car has been a fixture at Knoxville Raceway for nearly three decades. The 2025 season finds two of the 2M sprint cars competing weekly, with JJ Hickle newly joining the team behind the wheel of the 410 and Ryan Giles continuing in the 360. In JJ’s third season racing at Knoxville Raceway, this partnership has a promising future.
JJ Hickle out of Quilcene, Washington, is no stranger to Knoxville Raceway. After an impressive 2nd-place finish in the National ASCS Rookie of the Year standings in 2021, he was hired by Brandon Ikenberry and Justin Giddings to pilot their new #25 410 team in their inaugural season at Knoxville Raceway. The season had its ups and downs, but the team showed great potential, especially mid to late July, when they found speed and consistency. Highlights included a 7th-place finish in the All Stars/Knoxville collaboration race and a 10th-place start in the A-Main at the Saturday night Knoxville Nationals.
Owner and crew chief of the 2M, Matt Moro has had immense success at Knoxville Raceway, competing here weekly for twenty-seven seasons as a driver himself. He’s raced 360 and 410 sprints and has thirteen feature wins and two championships behind the wheel, but when it came to hang up the helmet he decided to team up with veteran driver, Davey Heskin. Together Moro and Heskin would win the 410 track championship in 2021, but after the 2023 season, Heskin decided it was time to focus on the family business and his growing family and made the difficult choice to leave sprint car racing. 360 veteran driver, Ryan Giles had made the decision to step away from racing his family-owned team as well. Moro had been buying parts from Giles, and Moro had the conversation offering Ryan to drive his car weekly, where he continues to fill the seat of Moro’s 360.
After his partnership in 2022 with the Brandon Ikenberry/Justin Giddings 25, Hickle was ready to commit to full time 410 racing. He took on the driver role in the Ohio based Seeling #97 team for 2023 where the team ran most of the All Star races as well as some regional shows. Towards the end of that season, Hickle was hired to run the #50YR car out of Michigan, with plans to run a full 2024 schedule with that team. However, business plans changed for the owner of the 50YR, which ultimately left JJ without a full-time ride heading into the 2024 season. JJ was contacted about piloting the Sandvig family #7 weekly at Knoxville, where the team had unfortunate bad luck and the car was unable to complete the season. JJ finished out the season in a partnership with a Washington friend, Blake Cook running their own car. After a taste of being back behind the wheel of his own car, Hickle had decided he was ready to chase his dreams of having his own 410 and 360 team and released a schedule with plans of 360 and 410 racing around the Midwest, not including Knoxville. After Moro noticed there were no Knoxville races on that schedule, he began to formulate a plan to reach out to Hickle about filling his race schedule with Knoxville weekly races.
Moro said, “I am very respectful of drivers and their partnerships with other owners, and I never want to poach a driver from an existing team. I decided to approach Hickle about driving at 410 at Knoxville to see if we could make something happen”.
After Davey stepped aside in the 410, the 2M team just did some hit and miss races as well as the Nationals, without a full time 410 on the track. At the same time, Dennis Albaugh wanted to have a 360 and 410 represented at Knoxville and he asked Moro if he thought he would be able to do both. So, with more sponsorship help, Moro and Hickle committed to the 2025 season at Knoxville Raceway with Moro.
When asked about goals for the season, Matt replied, “I’m weird about goals. My main focus is that at the end of the night, I want to be able to feel like I did everything I could to keep the cars on the track, keep them reliable, keep them safe. It’s not realistic to say we will pull off eight feature wins and win the championship this season. I want to learn what my driver needs to be successful, and to tune the engine. After all of that, I do hope to win a couple of races. I would love to travel more after the end of the season. Cedar Lake is a race I’d like to run. But right now, it’s hard knowing that JJ’s schedule has changed a bit. But maybe we could look at a double duty situation with two 360 cars. It just depends on how parts go. We only had three months to put the 410 together, so we are just a bit behind on the engine program and we are at least a car short for our program. I’d love to do more. I would love to do some sprint invader shows with Ryan and some 410 shows with JJ.”
JJ said his goals for this season are to, “improve every night and get consistently better and be ready for August. I’m extremely grateful to drive for such an established top quality race team. I’m really excited with how it all fits with building my own team and how well everyone has worked together.”
If fans would like to support the 2M team, JJ has personal merchandise available HERE and you can order 2M merchandise at Shop Threads or buy both trackside!
Article Credit: Joanne Cram
Submitted By: Eric Arnold
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