“I think we’re underrated this year,” Kaulig Racing president Chris Rice said at the start of 2024. Entering its third season in the Cup Series, the team has barely scraped the front row. Daniel Hemric has been the poster boy of their Cup efforts but has had a flimsy performance so far. The No. 31 driver stands way behind his Chevy mate Chase Elliott and occupies the 30th spot.

This has brought the axe down on a team that made some crucial decisions last year. Rice invited severe criticism from fans and peers alike for his team’s trajectory. However, the president trusts his goals, as he expresses confidence in his team’s efforts.

Are any tricks left up Kaulig Racing’s sleeve?

The team is barely eight years old and yet holds a blazing trail of victories. But that is true only in the Xfinity Series and with select drivers. Since 2019, Kaulig Racing has picked up 26 wins, 295 top-ten finishes, and 129 top-five finishes. Those wins came mostly at the hands of AJ Allmendinger and Justin Haley. The team’s lone two Cup victories arrived at the hands of Allmendinger as well. However, both drivers went through changes last season.

Allmendinger was demoted to the Xfinity Series after competing full-time in Cup last year. Also, Justin Haley jumped ship to Rick Ware Racing. Both these incidents drew a lot of criticism from fans and peers alike, as Kaulig Racing cited sponsorship issues. Now with Daniel Hemric‘s faltering performance and Allmendinger’s lack of wins in Xfinity, Kaulig’s future looks a little bleak. The only sliver of hope seems to lie with Shane van Gisbergen, who won three wins this season – but even then he works for a Trackhouse-Kaulig alliance.

A Kaulig Racing fan page voiced its concern on X recently. “No doubt but this isn’t an overnight situation anymore it’s been happening for a couple of years and constantly going to the media saying your going to have something announced in X amount of days and that time passing (like last year) is a bad look. They have ZERO blue chip.” 

Yet even amid mounting pressure, the team president chooses to remain calm. Chris Rice replied with a short, cryptic reply: “Hang tight and stop not believing!!” Peculiarly, Rice has adopted a similar approach throughout this season. At the start of 2024, he slipped whispers about a new strategy by taking up the wheel himself. Then he dismissed rumors of facing possible shutdown as Kaulig Racing was apparently doing something new.

He even harbored some high hopes going into this season, aiming to stick to Kaulig Racing’s goal to win.

The presidential ambition soars high

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Last year, AJ Allmendinger carried Kaulig Racing to the heights of success. He lived up to the highly trumpeted team goal of ‘trophy hunting’ and clinched his second Cup Series win at the Charlotte Roval. Besides that, he owned 4 top-fives and 7 top-tens and also owned two Xfinity trophies. Soon after that Allmendinger lost his Cup ride due to sponsorship constraints. Yet Chris Rice chose to be optimistic. “We are good enough to win,” he said. “The cars are good enough to win, the motors are good enough to win, the drivers are good enough to win. Those are the facts,” Rice said at the cusp of 2024.

He shrugged off doubters who predicted a bad streak for the team. “I think everybody’s put us off to the side because we are rebuilding. We got a lot of new people in our shop, and I think everybody’s like, ‘Oh, they’re just going to throw people in there, and they’re just going to do this.’ We’re the underdogs again. Here we are going into the race underdogs again. Nobody’s looking at us saying we have a chance to win, so let’s go out and prove everybody wrong.”

Yet Rice and his Cup teams are yet to prove people wrong. Unless Kaulig Racing has some novel trick up its sleeve, the team’s future looks bleak.