The Ram NASCAR Truck Has An August 15 Deadline To Meet
The clock is ticking for Ram’s return to the NASCAR Truck Series.
Ram CEO Tim Kuniskis announced the effort before the NASCAR Cup Series race at Michigan International Speedway and said the brand would be on track for the next Daytona 500 on February 16.
It doesn’t have any teams or drivers lined up yet, but that’s not all it needs to do.
The NASCAR Truck Series uses a spec chassis and engine, so the manufacturers only need to design a body that meets the aerodynamics rules. Even the, it’s just the nose, hood, fenders and tail that need to be unique to the brand.
During an appearance on this week’s “Hauler Talk” podcast, NASCAR managing director of event experience Michael Verlatti said that Ram needs to get its body approved in the wind tunnel by August 15 before it can move onto the next steps.
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Ram has already shown it being tested in its own wind tunnel, but tweaks could be required once NASCAR gets a look at it. If it fails the first time around it has until October 1 to get a do-over, but that’s cutting it close to the start of the 2026 season.
Verlatti said NASCAR is confident Ram will meet the deadline, but there’s another one that its friends at Dodge needs to start thinking about if it wants to follow up with the Cup Series program that Kuniskis said was under consideration.
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That’s a far more involved 18-month process 28 pages worth of steps that Verlatti said starts with an application, which NASCAR has not yet received and would probably need to get this month if Dodge wanted to be on track in 2027. The 2028 season is more likely, so there’s plenty of time to see how the Ram project is going before committing.
The Cup Series car uses a lot of common parts across the brands, but the body design is differentiated more and each manufacturer needs to supply their own engine. Fortunately for Dodge, NASCAR is still using a version of the same generation engine that was in use when it last raced in the 2012 Cup Series season and won the championship.
It will need to be brought up to the current specifications and tuned to produce the 670 hp and 550 hp outputs used by the various track packages, but that should be relatively simple to accomplish in the allotted time.
A more difficult challenge may be finding chartered teams that want to switch manufacturers, which isn’t a very common occurrence among the top operations.
Dodge won the championship with Team Penske, but it’s won four of the past seven with Fords, including the most recent three in a row.