Ram’s Goin’ Racing Again After More Than A Decade

Ram recently announced it’s bringing back a Hemi V8 engine option in its trucks, but if you thought that would be the end of the news from the brand that basically makes just one truck and a van, you couldn’t have been more mistaken. Ram also chose this weekend to announce that, after 13 years of watching from the sidelines, it will return to racing in the NASCAR Craftsman Truck Series. And with that announcement came the reveal of the Ram 1500 NASCAR Concept that you see here. 

According to the press release, the announcement also had plenty of “jaw-dropping moments” that “included a Ram 5500 hauling a custom trailer built specifically for smoky donuts, courtesy of Ram’s NASCAR concept truck.” Additionally, “Anderson Silva, Hall of Fame MMA icon, took to the track to shoot HEMI®-branded T-shirts into the crowd.” So that was probably pretty exciting for all the seven-year-olds in the crowd, even if their parents were silently fuming that Ram dared hire a (naturalized U.S. citizen) immigrant. 

“For more than a decade, customers and our dealer network asked about getting back into NASCAR. The desire was always there, but we didn’t have a plan that delivered the last tenth and following just didn’t fit our DNA,” Ram CEO Tim Kuniskis said in a statement. “Now we have a solid plan that will set us apart from the field and will bring fresh new interest and engagement to America’s motorsport.”

Ram won’t actually make its return to racing until the start of the 2026 season, so fans will have to wait until February to see how well that actually goes, but the concept revealed along with the announcement should be pretty close to what you’ll see on track next year. According to the release, “The concept resembles a production truck, adopting elements from the Ram Truck Sport lineup (Warlock, Rebel and RHO), but honed with an aerodynamic signature to slip through the air efficiently, yet with enough airflow to cool a race engine that revs over 9,000 rpm. Body lines around the fenders and grille carry a familiar appearance, framing a large Ram logo that separates this truck from the pack.”

And while a lot of press releases are full of PR speak, from the front the new Ram race truck really does look a lot like a production Ram, at least by NASCAR standards. It obviously sits lower to the ground than a real Ram 1500 and hasn’t been crashed into a pole after a night of drinking gone wrong, but you’ve got to admit they did a good job of translating Ram’s current design language into a race truck. Heck, from that angle, you might even think you were looking at the return of the long-rumored Ram Dakota. 

View it from any other angle, though, and it’s very clearly more “race” than “truck.” Not that that’s a bad thing. It’s a race car with a truck-like body, after all. And it isn’t like Ford, Chevrolet and Toyota’s NASCAR race trucks look that much more like the production versions of the trucks they’re built to imitate. Whether Ram will prove competitive or not still remains to be seen, but the real question is, how long will it be until Dodge returns to Cup racing?

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