By Jerry Jordan, Editor
BROOKLYN, Mich. – The on-again, off-again relationship between NASCAR and RAM trucks, a division of conglomerate automaker Stellantis, has rekindled the flame with RAM announcing it will race its truck in the 2026 Craftsman Truck Series event at Daytona International Speedway.
During a private call with a select group of motorsports media this past week, RAM brand CEO Tim Kuniskis unveiled a new race truck with him behind the wheel during a test session at Darlington Raceway. Kuniskis also oversaw wind tunnel testing and told the media he’s looking for a significant other, so to speak.
“Really, I’m flying with no parachute here,” Kuniskis said. “We don’t have a team. I got a truck. I got the intention. I’m writing a deal with NASCAR. I’m going to Daytona. How am I going to actually do that? What’s my team going to be? I don’t know. We’re looking for a date to the prom right now.”
Kuniskis had a litany of information to release, including news that his plans for a return to the NASCAR world wouldn’t stop with trucks. He said he has every intention of bringing one of Stellantis’s passenger cars back to the NASCAR Cup Series.
“By the way, that wasn’t green screen,” Kuniskis said, in reference to the video of him racing around Darlington. “A lot of people were super mad at me for actually driving that thing on the track, but there’s no way you’re letting me in that thing and not doing it.
“So, you know what else figured? We might as well go back to racing. Might as well go back to America’s motorsports, back to NASCAR first with truck, with the intention to go to Cup after that.”
Kuniskis also said that RAM was bringing the Hemi engine back, along with other trim designs for RAM. The plans are not new and something he said he’d been working on “for a while.” And the truck that was used in the video and unveiled at Michigan International Speedway on Sunday is the actual race truck submitted for approval to the sanctioning body.
For the NASCAR community, the return of RAM at Daytona will mean a fourth original equipment manufacturer (OEM), something NASCAR executives have been teasing for several years. Now, it appears as if it will be a reality.
“We have ongoing dialog with a lot of different OEMs,” John Probst, NASCAR Executive Vice President and Chief Racing Development Officer, told members of the NASCAR media. “Obviously, we talk weekly with the ones who are in our sport but we do talk pretty regularly with many other OEMs that are out there. There are a lot of them that are very supportive of what we do and we can rely on them for some troubleshooting now and then, if need be. So, we talk to the OEMs all the time and in this case, you know, RAM, all of them. We’ve had an ongoing dialogue with them for years. And, you know, we’ve gotten to various states of getting ready for them to come back in and you know, sometimes, for whatever reason, it wouldn’t happen. I think in this case, the most recent, the one now that’s coming to fruition, it started in earnest, probably, you know, the end of Q3 beginning of Q4 last year, and then really got into high gear, probably in the December-January time frame.”
As Probst alluded, this is not the first time that RAM or its previous iteration, Dodge, has made plans to return to NASCAR. Dodge unveiled a Cup Series car in Las Vegas in 2012 and then pulled completely out of the sport before 2013 when Penske Racing changed its fleet to Ford. Then, in 2017, Kickin’ the Tires obtained leaked documents and confirmation from multiple industry and NASCAR sources that Fiat, then the parent company of Dodge and RAM was planning a return to NASCAR. A series of corporate changes following the death of Sergio Marchionne, then-CEO of Fiat Chrysler, sidelined those plans.
When asked by Kickin’ the Tires if NASCAR had any ideas or preference on who RAM paired up with in the garage for its “date to the prom,” Phelps was noncommittal.
“I don’t have a preference,” Probst said. “I want him to have a date that he wants to have his picture taken with. I think that is completely a RAM competitive, competition-related thing. We know they are wanting to be very competitive, so I would anticipate them being pretty aggressive and getting a good team lined up in their camp to go, you know, run their banner.”
Probst said he hopes to have a final body submission and approval for the new RAM entry by August 15. Of course, that is providing the truck passes wind tunnel testing. Probst said RAM does have the option to run its own engine package but it is required to have certain other parts per the NASCAR rulebook, including the nose, a hood, front fenders and the tail.
Kuniskis said his goal is to have as many as four to six trucks ready to race at Daytona to be competitive against Toyota, Ford and Chevrolet.
