By Jerry Jordan, Editor
CONCORD, N.C. – Before the BetMGM Xfinity Series race, the best finish Ryan Ellis ever had in NASCAR’s second-tier series was 11th, which came twice, once at Talladega in 2023 and Daytona in 2024.
Since then, he has done everything he could to break into the Top 10 but it never happened … until Saturday night. Ellis now has 144 starts in the NASCAR Xfinity Series but his most recent one will forever be one that stands out for him.
And after the race, when Ellis usually goes back to his team’s hauler, changes clothes and goes home with little fanfare, the opposite was different. He was bombarded by media members wanting to get his reaction to probably the greatest story of the weekend at Charlotte Motor Speedway.
Kickin’ the Tires reached out Saturday night but Ellis was obviously preoccupied. When he called back Sunday morning, he was still excited, and rightfully so.
“I broke the curse, Jerry, I broke it,” Ellis said. “I almost bought a monkey and put it out, like just put it in all my racecars to get the monkey off my back.
“I swear I had more interviews yesterday than William Byron, I was like, this is actually good. I forgot to mention I was doing so many interviews that the haulers were pulling out and I went and tried to get changed and my hauler started pulling out with me still changing it, so I thought I was going to be riding back to Florida, like in my race suit and stuff because I didn’t have my phone on me. I was just like, well, this is a way to celebrate, I guess I’ll just be here for a day.”
Luckily, one of his sponsors was with him and was able to poke his head out the door and get someone’s attention.
After leaving the track and going home to his wife and family, the night of celebration didn’t start off like he thought it might. Ellis’s focus shifted to his youngest daughter because she wasn’t feeling well and the celebration was delayed until she felt better and his mom came over to babysit for a couple of hours.
“When I got home my three-month-old daughter had been crying for two or three hours,” he said. “I was gonna go out and grab a drink with our guys, a few people from our team and friends and I didn’t know if I was gonna be able to, ’cause I didn’t know what was going on with her.”
Ellis said at that point, all he could think about was his daughter but she was okay and said his mom eventually came over to babysit for an hour or so.
“We grabbed a few drinks and came right back home and I sat on Twitter for four hours just responding there to as many people as I could,” he said.
When asked about his thoughts on the final laps and how he managed to pull off the Top 10, he said, he hadn’t rewatched the race but he had been going over it in his head since the checkered flag.
“I really haven’t watched it back yet, I feel like I earned it, which I know is a stupid term but I am really happy that I, at least, feel that way,” Ellis said. “My thought was, ‘Don’t screw up’ which I think is why I have screwed up so much. I think driving for these small teams and knowing you have so few opportunities of being in this situation, I have always looked at it as you have to back into it. There has to be attrition. I think that has resulted in me being in a bad spot.
“I don’t know what it was about yesterday. I think I was so sick of hearing about this Top 10 thing that we were good and I was aggressive. It was nice to just look at cars and realize, ‘I think I am better than them.’ We could pass rather than trying not to lose spots.”
Ellis realized he had a fast car when he was able to pass the eventual race winner, William Byron, and temporarily keep Byron behind him.
“It was weird. I think it was just how the beginning and middle part of the race goes, kind of, sets the tone and mindset of the race, for me at least, more than it probably should,” Ellis said. “We may have only passed the 17 for maybe half a corner or half a lap and I was like, ‘wow, we are fast. That’s pretty good.’ I passed the 3 (driven by Austin Hill) and a couple of Gibbs (Joe Gibbs Racing) cars. We were legitimately fast and we deserved to be ahead of these cars. I don’t know, that is a good way to feel going to the green-white-checkered. At the green-white-checkers, I am usually thinking, block this lane, don’t get run over. Last night, I was like, I need to go forward. I was on offense and I am way better at offense than defense.”
The finish was emotional Ellis admitted, saying that he had tears in his eyes when he drove out of Turn 4 on the final lap. He could hear his spotter, Tab Boyd, yelling at him and he was all but sure he would get his Top 10 finish.
“Tab Boyd, my spotter, just started yelling at me, ‘Get to the line, get to the line.’ I tried to key up (the radio) and I didn’t think they could hear that I was crying and then I got to pit road and I heard Megan Gosselin, our PR person, saying, ‘yeah, I could hear it in his voice,’ and I was like, ‘oh no, they know.’ I sat in my car way too long, just hoping my eyes wouldn’t be bright red when I got out, and make it obvious, but they knew. I figured I was going to cry when I got out of the car so I was trying not to do it on both ends.”
It might seem to some that the Top 10 finish from Ellis is being overblown but race fans and other drivers know that NASCAR, at any level, isn’t easy. They also know that lower-budget teams, like DGM Racing, don’t have the resources to compete at the same level as Hendrick Motorsports, Joe Gibbs Racing, Richard Childress Racing, JR Motorsports, Kaulig Racing and others. As the old saying goes, money equals speed.
“Look, I don’t think we are going to finish Top 10 every week now, what was it, one in 144 starts? But I think it could be more common that we are in the Top 15 if we just find our groove and I play more on offense than on defense,” Ellis said. “But I think I have the best foundation of vehicles, best fleet of racecars, that I have ever had.”
He said he just needs to focus on results and not get distracted by a mediocre finish. Making a comparison to hockey, Ellis said he thinks he’s been “holding the stick too tight,” and he is not going to be counting cars on restarts. He said that all he used to care about was looking at why he didn’t have any Top 10s.
Ellis has a shot to notch a mark in the Top 10 column this past year at Iowa Speedway but he got too aggressive. He still ended the day with a 14th-place finish but he was running in 8th with a damaged splitter.
“That one haunts me because that was a legitimate race, too. I just changed my mindset. In reality, we are just driving racecars. I think I just overthought it so much because this stupid 144 number kept growing, at least, until last night.
“It’s okay, I don’t have to look at these exact numbers and over-math it because I am not good at math,” Ellis joked.
His wife did point out one thing when he got home and began looking through the stats column for his career results. The finish had already been entered. The world would now know that Ryan Ellis had his first Top 10.
“It looked better when it was zero. My wife pulled it up and was like, ‘look,’ but when it was zero, it looked like the website was down. It looks worse this way,” he said with a laugh.
