If 2019 was the breakthrough season for Kaulig Racing, this year has been the coming of age for the team.
Haley, who has won twice, and Chastain were both in contention for the title at press time, while Allmendinger had a victory and several top-five finishes while running part time in a third car.
“When you think about it, we’ve never been outside the playoffs, but we’ve steadily gained on that second round and this year, I think we have a legitimate shot at putting both cars into the championship race at Phoenix,” Kaulig noted. “We’ve come from nothing and now, I feel like, everyone knows we’re here to contend on a weekly basis. It excites me just talking about it.”
When Kaulig says he built the entire operation from the ground up, he means it. It wasn’t just race cars and personnel — it included a full shop building on the Richard Childress Racing campus in Welcome, N.C.
“We built our race shop … it wasn’t a race shop when we started. It was an old go-kart parts store,” Kaulig recalled. “It looked like a NAPA or an AutoZone. We cleaned that thing out. It was about 40,000 square feet. We put new lights in and painted it up … put all the air guns and electric in that we needed and built a race shop. And then a few years ago we added another 50,000 square feet, so now we’ve got a 90,000-square-foot, state-of-the-art race shop. And even that, we built from scratch when we first started, that previous November and December before our first year of running.
“We didn’t even have a race shop when we started, so we just started hiring employees and we used Kevin Harvick’s old truck shop just to work out of until we could build our race shop,” he added. “Now we’re here.”
Though Kaulig’s name is on the front door and adorns the main office, the successful businessman claims his trump card within the organization is Rice, who runs the day-to-day operations at Kaulig Racing.
“Chris really built it. It’s my race team, it’s Kaulig Racing, but it’s our race team,” said Kaulig. “Obviously, I couldn’t have done it — and wouldn’t have done it — without Chris. If I hadn’t found him or we had to build it along with Blake Koch (but without Chris), I’m not sure this is what it is today. Really, Chris is the one that had all the relationships. He was the one that knew people in the industry and got us going.”
Though Kaulig Racing has established itself as a week-to-week threat in the NASCAR Xfinity Series, many have speculated about the potential of the team to jump up into the NASCAR Cup Series, particularly after Haley put the team into the Daytona 500 in February and finished a respectable 13th.
Kaulig was quick to quash that line of thinking, however, noting he’s happy competing in the Xfinity Series.
“We love the Xfinity Series. Let me say that very firmly,” he said. “It’s fun racing on Saturdays with the family. My daughter is 12 years old, so it’s not the long weekend grind that you have on the Cup Series. But we’re focused on building cars and building toward championships and winning trophies in the Xfinity Series right now.
“When we have an opportunity to go to Daytona or Talladega with a Cup car, or perhaps to run some road courses or some races with sponsorship in the future just for fun, then you may see us take the opportunity to do that.”
That doesn’t mean, however, that Kaulig doesn’t have potential long-term thoughts of taking his team Cup Series racing one day.
“Eventually, somebody’s got to take over, right?” noted Kaulig. “Somebody’s got to take over in NASCAR as the current guard looks ahead, and we’re young. I’m 47 years old; Chris is, I think, 45 or 46 years old. But we’re young, we’re excited and we hope to be around for a long time to come.
“The race team is one of our businesses; I have several businesses, and I really believe in growth and I really believe in continuous and never-ending improvement. So with that in mind, that’s why we keep adding cars,” Kaulig explained. “Really, what we’d like to do is have four cars in the Xfinity Series and run four cars for the championship. That gives us a better chance of winning and it makes our organization bigger, better and stronger.
“People like to work for companies that are growing and getting better and have momentum, and philosophically, we take that to the race team, just like we do our other businesses.”
It’s been a long road for Kaulig, but it’s one that he claims has been very rewarding for him, his team and his employees.
“For a team that grew the way we did to now be winning races and having fun, it’s really been a great story, I feel like,” Kaulig said. “We’ve enjoyed every minute of it.
“Hopefully, there’s a lot more chapters left to be written for us.”