Ram and Kaulig Are Getting Into Some Serious Antics

I suppose that if you are an OEM with solid brand affinity trying to return to NASCAR and also the public consciousness, you would be dumb not to spend as much money on it as you possibly can. One must make headlines to succeed at these things. In the new year, Ram has made two.

One is that they are awarding one of their Truck Series seats to the winner of a reality show. Now, people will scoff at this. I have seen nothing but people scoffing at this. But I will reserve judgment until it comes out, because I would like to remind everyone that making motor racing into a reality show has been fairly successful recently. To be good, this show would have to both successfully pick a competent NASCAR Craftsman Truck Series driver and actively increase a large audience’s engagement with and literacy in motorsports. Could it do all that? Sure! Let’s see if it does.

The other headline is that Tony Stewart is coming back to NASCAR racing to drive one of these trucks AT DAYTONA. Maybe this is shocking because Smoke has been doing anything other than NASCAR for 10 years and seemed to be totally, permanently fed up with it. In other words, this was probably a very large line item in Ram’s NASCAR budget.