WELCOME, N.C. – It was audacious, ridiculous and outrageous all at once, and Matt Kaulig knew it.
Kaulig stood on pit road in the minutes before the start of the Feb. 13 NASCAR Craftsman Truck Series opener at Daytona International Speedway, the track’s lights high atop the frontstretch grandstands illuminating the 37-truck grid. Kaulig’s new Ram truck team had yet to run a lap in anger, and already he could enjoy a moment of major accomplishment.
Five shiny Kaulig Racing trucks were scattered across the starting field. Only a few months earlier, the team had not even a truck fender, with the upcoming season an onrushing bull and the clock ticking.
“It was very, very, very surreal,” Kaulig said. “For us to build five trucks – we didn’t even sign the Ram deal until the summer – it was an epic undertaking. Some people in the racing world understand what we did to accomplish that, but they don’t really understand how we did it. I mean, we had nothing.
“Daytona was an awesome moment.”
Now the Truck season is three races old, and teams have been enjoying a three-week break before Race No. 4 on March 20 at Darlington Raceway. At Kaulig’s shop down the hill from Richard Childress Racing’s huge NASCAR complex (on Austin Lane, named for Childress’ racer grandson Austin Dillon), there has been some time to catch up on building new trucks.
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Also, Kaulig and team principals Chris Rice (president) and Ty Norris (chief business officer) have been able to reflect on results of the first few weeks of a racing endeavor so new it seems right out of the box. Although the 15 Ram entries through three races have resulted in a best finish of seventh (Brenden Queen at Daytona), at Kaulig the season already is considered a “win.”
Perhaps it can be compared to another sports effort by Matt Kaulig decades ago – precisely November 19, 1994. Kaulig was the quarterback for the University of Akron Zips, and they were playing the final game of their season against Ohio University. It was a unique game, but not in a pleasant way. Remarkably, both teams entered the season finale with 0-10 records. On the air, ESPN had dubbed it the Toilet Bowl.
“We ended up beating them,” Kaulig said of the 24-10 Akron triumph. “So I guess that was a little victory. I don’t know. It was weird.”
Virtually since that moment, Kaulig has been winning. A successful business entrepreneur, he started LeafFilter, a company specializing in leaf guards for home and building gutters, in his Ohio home and across the years has expanded that operation to more than 150 offices. Well-known in the Cleveland area through business operations and widespread philanthropy through Kaulig Giving, his organization’s charity arm, Kaulig also is a minority owner of the Cleveland Guardians Major League Baseball team.
He tiptoed into NASCAR in 2014 by sponsoring cars in two races, saw stock-car racing as another field in which he could succeed and started an O’Reilly Auto Parts Series team in 2016. He moved into the Cup Series in 2020 and now owns two Cup wins and 27 O’Reilly victories.
Kaulig’s fleet-like assault on the Truck Series began with conversations with officials from Stellantis, the car builder anxious to make a return to NASCAR after former involvement with its Dodge brand. Stellantis chose its popular Ram truck model as the advance guard for its new NASCAR journey, and Kaulig emerged as the company’s choice to jump into the Truck Series this year. Kaulig Racing had no experience in the Truck Series, so everything was new.
Three races in, Kaulig executives are pleased to have had a top-10 finish in each race but are more excited by the fact that they “won” the rushed preseason construction process and have dominated much of the current talk about the Truck Series, in particular Ram’s big splash at Daytona.
Kaulig signed on with Stellantis last summer and announced its Truck Series plans with Ram in August. Kaulig’s employee numbers steadily increased as the drive toward a 2026 launch began. New engineers, fabricators and body-hangers rolled into Welcome.
There was no template from which to work. Kaulig was racing in Cup and O’Reilly with the assistance of Richard Childress Racing, with which it had an alliance. The new deal with Dodge ended the affiliation with General Motors and Childress, although Kaulig continues to race Chevrolets in the Cup Series because of the prestige and publicity of racing on Sundays and because of the fact that Kaulig owns valuable charters in Cup. So Kaulig is competing in Cup on an island of sorts.
Overtime hours and Christmas holiday work at the shop resulted in trucks being ready for preseason testing and for another unique twist to the Ram effort – a competition in which candidates raced for a chance to fill one of the Kaulig truck seats for the season. Timothy “Mini” Tyrrell won that spot, and the televised competition lifted the profile for Ram and the team. Stellantis, eager to spread the Ram name across a wider palate, also wanted a fifth team truck – a “free agent” entry – to be driven by a mix of up-and-coming drivers and accomplished veterans.
“So we went from zero trucks to five,” said Norris, a veteran racing executive who has run NASCAR operations for Dale Earnhardt Inc., Michael Waltrip Racing and Trackhouse Racing. “We didn’t get parts until December. We didn’t get our fab shop set up until November. We were still hiring people around Christmas. We had people working Christmas Eve and New Year’s Eve. At that point, the idea of leading laps wasn’t even a question. It was all about getting trucks to the track.”
So it was reasonable that Matt Kaulig would take some time pre-race at Daytona to absorb the moment. He and the team’s other leaders had no idea what to expect performance-wise. “It was my 36th time walking into Daytona in an official capacity, but the first time I ever walked in totally blind to what our level would be,” Norris said. “I didn’t know if we were going to be first, second, third, fourth and fifth and lap the field or finish at the bottom. No idea. Zero.”
The finishes were respectable for a team toddling into the competition. Queen gave Kaulig its first top 10 with a seventh. Daniel Dye was 17th, Tyrrell 19th, Justin Haley 22nd and “free agent” Tony Stewart 36th after being involved in a crash.
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The “win,” in the team’s eyes, had been scored with preseason buildup, the attention gained by the television series and a generally successful first week of competition.
“All in all, this is a marketing platform,” Norris said. “When you look at what Ram did in Daytona, leading up to Daytona with the show that we did, with the announcement of Tony Stewart driving and showing up with five trucks with beautiful paint schemes and getting partners like Cummins and Mopar and Celsius, it was all a win. And our merchandise trailer was busy all week. I think we made the most noise at Daytona.”
Rice has worked for Kaulig in developing his NASCAR program since December 2015. Solid success in the O’Reilly Series followed, and AJ Allmendinger has won two Cup races for the team on road courses.
“But I knew if we didn’t get solid OEM support (assistance from a car manufacturer as a featured team) that we would die,” Rice said. “If you don’t have that, you don’t get the money and the resources you need to compete. Matt and I spent three days on a retreat and talked all things NASCAR. We went aggressively after that. We were able to get in the door and talk with Stellantis and get a relationship going.”
Rice has built a reputation as one of the most gregarious, positive people in the NASCAR garage. “I was a gas man in the Busch (now O’Reilly) Series at the age of 14 in 1989, so I’ve been around this for a long time,” Rice said. “NASCAR has given me a good lifestyle and done things for me that I would never have been able to do in a sock factory. So I’m passionate about NASCAR. That’s the passion you see from me.”
Rice also is the guy at Kaulig who counts the pennies. “People think we spend an abundant amount of money, but we watch everything,” he said. “We look like we’re bigger than we are. So, we’re just different. We’re one team fielding seven vehicles.”
The two biggest assumptions in NASCAR garage circles at the moment are that Stellantis and Dodge eventually will race in the Cup Series and that Kaulig will be the vanguard of the move. That announcement is yet to be made.
Rice said the team would prefer advance notice of 18 months to field Dodge Cup entries. “Eighteen months is the rule of thumb,” Rice said, “but I would say if we got six months, we would be happy.”
Kaulig Racing currently employs 157 people. An expected move to Cup will require many more.
“Realistically, it would take years to be absolutely 100 percent ready to be able to compete with the manufacturers that have been in the sport for decades,” Kaulig said. “But we can do it. We just proved it with the trucks.”
