Kaulig Expands to Cup and Creates a Charter Stir

'Round and 'round the NASCAR Silly Season carousel goes and where it stops, nobody knows.

Kaulig Motorsports revealed on Friday at Nashville Superspeedway that it had acquired two ownership charters for the 2022 Cup Series season, which was surprising news to one of the team owners currently leasing one of them.

The team owned by Xfinity Series contenders Matt Kaulig will expand to Cup next season fielding two full-time cars. One of them will be driven by Justin Haley and the other will be split between multiple drivers including AJ Allmendinger.

Kaulig obtained the charters from Spire Motorsports, which currently fields two Cup Series cars for Haley and Corey Lajoie. The organization also owns a third charter, which is currently leased out to Trackhouse Motorsports for the No. 99 team and driver Daniel Suarez, and that is one of the charters being sold.

Ownership charters permit the holder automatic entry into every Cup Series event and increased financial benefits but can only be leased out once per five-year period.

In other words, Spire Motorsports needed to operate what is currently the Trackhouse No. 99 charter themselves next season or be required to outright sale it if unable. Of course, the team could have chosen to lease its No. 77 charter but opted to retain one charter to field a car full-time for Lajoie next season.

In any case, Trackhouse team owner Justin Marks wasn’t notified of Spire’s transaction with Kaulig until it was revealed to the public on Friday -- notable because Marks is hopeful to purchase at least one charter before next season and either lease or purchase another to expand his team.

Meanwhile, the announcement on Friday was the culmination of three years worth of effort from Kaulig and team president Chris Rice, who have both aspired to take this step from the moment their Xfinity Series team started to contend for wins and championships.

"It's a really big day for me," Kaulig said. "It's a really big day for Chris and our whole Kaulig Racing team to even be able to announce this.

"As you guys know, there's so many people that (have been) hunting charters over the last a year or so, and we got two of them, So Chris Rice did an unbelievable job heading that up."

Haley is the nephew of Todd Braun, owner of former NASCAR Xfinity Series team Braun Motorsports, which also has charter significance these days.

One of the three charters owned by Spire Motorsports this year is actually held by Braun, who acquired what is now the No. 7 charter from Front Row Motorsports, when that now defunct organization sold its No. 77 team in 2018.

Braun had taken that charter to JTG Daugherty Motorsports and linked it to the No. 37 over the past three years until it was brought to Spire this past winter -- which is why Ryan Preece is currently entering races as an open driver.

No doubt, Braun was instrumental in making this deal materialize and Rice recognized him during the press conference at Nashville.

"I'm glad that cat's out of the bag," Rice said. "It took a lot of people to make this happen (and) a lot of friends. You see Todd standing over here. A lot of people behind us have been with us (and) have put a lot of effort to us to be able to get these two charters.

"We're really excited, um, to be able to have two charters."