If you didn’t know it, it might surprise you that Ryan Ellis first broke on to the NASCAR scene in 2012. Eleven years later, he finally has the chance to consistently be competitive.
After running a partial Xfinity Series season with Alpha Prime Racing in 2022, Ellis knew he wanted to return to the team for 2023. The issue? Sponsorship. But unlike previous seasons, he got a head start and announced a 24-race schedule with the company’s newly formed No. 43 team.
“It came together, and I wanted to do more races, so I really started to dive in on the sales side, not that I hadn’t before but really go crazy on it,” Ellis told NASCAR.com last month. “But I saw some traction and it’s been like deeper and deeper diving into it, trying anything.”
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Since joining Alpha Prime, Ellis has welcomed partners like Four Loko and Heartbeat Hot Sauce, among a plethora of other sponsors to the sport. It can also get confusing as he’s had a different primary sponsor for all seven races to start the 2023 Xfinity Series season.
“He’s a one-stop shop that can do all of his own sales, marketing and sponsor work because he’s done it for other teams,” David Schildhouse, vice president of Alpha Prime Racing, said of Ellis. “Beyond being a good race car driver for us, he’s done his career a huge favor, especially this year, with the amount of races that he’s sold from the original agreement.”
Managing all the different partners can be stressful. Ellis jokes it’s why he’s up all hours of the night but has to leave one hour for playing video games. He’s sending out thousands of emails per week, just hoping the right partner says yes.
That grind comes from having recent day jobs. Before his opportunity with Alpha Prime, he had a role at a company called Lead Coverage. There, he was the lead generation engineer, which helped build a marketing and sales pipeline for supply chain and logistics companies. Without having that gig, he doesn’t believe he’d be in his current position as a race car driver.
“All day, every day,” Ellis said of his persistent grind of finding sponsors. “I treat it like a normal 9-5 because the second I don’t, I’m not going to have it anymore.”
The results are paying off. Ellis is scheduled to compete in every Xfinity Series race up until Portland in early June. But the conversation of getting additional partners to run the duration of the schedule has come up internally at Alpha Prime.
“I believe if he was given the green light to sell them all, he would,” Schildhouse said. “He’s proven so far that he can. The question is do we have the availability to do that. He’s in line to become a second full-time driver if it works out correctly.”
Being in a competitive scenario is something Ellis could have only hoped for. Until now, he’s never had a constant shot of being in worthy equipment, and the most races he’d run in a single season is 16. To have that 11 years into his career means more to the Virginia native than having this opportunity come instantly.
“I hope that it makes me more of an established name in the sport,” Ellis said. “This is like my last hoorah. I’m sure I’ll have like 10 of those, but I want to dive in deep and not lose what I have right now.”
The season didn’t start off ideally at Daytona, breaking a transmission in practice and wrecking early in the race. The No. 43 Chevrolet was trapped laps down at Auto Club and Las Vegas before picking up its first top-20 result at Phoenix. Including Phoenix, Ellis has three top-20 finishes in the last four races and is coming off a season-best 15th at Richmond.
His primary goal is to, at some point in 2023, crack the top 10 in the finishing rundown.
“I want a top 10 so bad,” Ellis noted. “It’s the most embarrassing statistic of my life that I don’t have one right now. Talladega is coming up, Road America is going to be huge. Just taking it race by race, and I hope we get a top 10.”
Alpha Prime believes Ellis will get that top 10, particularly because of his instilled work ethic.
“I look at it as the reward for all of his hard work,” Schildhouse stated. “There are finishes that are probably better than he expected and better than what probably a lot of other people expected. He’s not a bad race car driver, and I think he can go out there and prove it.”
What Ellis has learned in his Alpha Prime tenure is he never wants to compete with a team with lesser equipment. As he stated, this is the new standard.
In a perfect world, he will be back with Alpha Prime in 2024 for another stab at a full schedule.
“It’s so refreshing to see somebody work that hard to get what they want instead of expecting it to come to them,” Schildhouse said. “I think with that comes the experience and wisdom to know that he has to work harder than other people do to accomplish what he wants. If he just wanted to race 13 to 15 times per year, I’m sure he could do that and not work as hard. But that’s not what he wants. He wants to race full-time, and he knows he must put in the work to do that. He doesn’t make excuses.”
With the Xfinity Series heading to Martinsville on Saturday (7:30 p.m. ET, FS1, MRN, SiriusXM NASCAR Radio), Ellis is hoping for redemption this weekend as last year he failed to qualify for the spring race with Alpha Prime.