The driver of the No. 14 Ram won his ride on television.
That is not a figure of speech. Timothy Tyrrell, who goes by "Mini," earned his seat in the NASCAR Craftsman Truck Series by winning "Race for the Seat," an eight-episode Fox competition in which fifteen aspiring drivers spent a season fighting for one ride at Kaulig Racing. The show was produced by Dana White, hosted by an actor from "Landman," and judged by Kaulig executives. The prize was a truck.
It is a strange way to become a race car driver, and it is also, on closer inspection, the least remarkable thing about Tyrrell. At ten years old he became the youngest driver ever to win a Late Model Stock Car race in America. He has run a nonprofit, Mini's Mission, since he was six, and it has raised more than $820,000 for children with cancer and other serious illnesses. He is a rookie because he won a TV show. He is a racer because he has been one nearly his entire life.
Tyrrell is the most made-for-television member of a Kaulig truck team that is, underneath the branding, a collection of short-track kids. This weekend the schedule hands them the kind of place they actually come from. North Wilkesboro Speedway, the 0.625-mile bullring in the North Carolina foothills, hosts the FaithFest 250 on Saturday. For most of the Cup garage it is an oddity. For the late-model graduates in the Ram trucks, it is a homecoming.
The rookie fight nobody scripted
The one setting the pace may be Tyrrell's own teammate. Brenden "Butterbean" Queen, a 28-year-old from Chesapeake, Virginia, with a mullet and a habit of celebrating like he means it, drives the No. 12, and he leads the Rookie-of-the-Year standings that Tyrrell is chasing. The two are running the same intra-team race twice: once for the rookie award, and once, this weekend, at a track they both know cold.
Queen knows it better than most. He won a CARS Tour race at North Wilkesboro in 2023, a top-five there in 2024 helped clinch a Late Model Stock title, and he finished fourth in his Truck Series debut at the track.
"North Wilkesboro is a really special place to me because this is the track that kind of put my name out there after I won in a late model," Queen said. He is aiming to use the short tracks in the next few weeks to push toward the playoffs.
Tyrrell says roughly the same thing in different words. "I'm definitely more excited to head to a short track, because that's what I came from," he said. "That's my bread and butter, and North Wilkesboro is a place that I've been to many times in a late model stock car." He is running Friday night's pro-late-model race at the track too, partly for the extra laps and partly because that is simply what he does.
Where the rides come from now
The rest of the lineup fills out the picture. Corey LaJoie, a 34-year-old from Concord and a third-generation racer, drives the No. 10 and has run the CARS Tour and modifieds at North Wilkesboro since the track reopened. Justin Haley, who won a Cup race at Daytona in 2019 and has won in all three of NASCAR's national series, is in the No. 16 and doubles as Kaulig's Cup alternate. The fifth truck, the No. 25, is a rotating door.
What ties them together is not resources, of which Kaulig has fewer than most, but background. These are drivers who came up the way drivers used to, on Saturday nights at short tracks, winning late models before anyone was watching. North Wilkesboro is the rare weekend where that résumé is the relevant one. It rewards car control and nerve and a feel for a place, not a wind tunnel, and everyone in the Kaulig stable has a real answer for it.
Whether any of it produces a good Saturday is a separate question. Queen has already seen a street-course start end in a last-lap wreck this year, and Haley has watched two likely top-tens disappear the same way. Racing owes nobody a clean ending. But if you want to know what it takes to get a NASCAR ride in 2026, the No. 14 is a decent place to start. Sometimes it takes a lifetime at a short track. Sometimes it takes a television show. This weekend, at least, it takes both to the same place.
The FaithFest 250 runs Saturday at 12:30 p.m. on FS1.