Elliott Sadler walked away from racing in 2018 with a clear reason. He wanted to be home. After two decades of weekly racing, he chose to coach his kids’ baseball and softball teams instead. For six years, retirement held. Then, on July 18, 2026, Kaulig Racing made one post that changed that.
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“Retirement is on hold,” the team announced. Elliott Sadler will drive the No. 25 Kaulig Racing Ram 1500 in the Craftsman Truck Series at Richmond Raceway on August 14. Kaulig Racing recently formed a new team to help spearhead Ram’s highly anticipated return to NASCAR as an official manufacturer. The race marks Sadler’s return to his home state of Virginia, competing roughly 75 miles from his hometown of Emporia.
It is his first Truck Series start since 2011 and his first national series appearance since 2019. He joins Ram’s rotating free-agent driver program, which also includes Tony Stewart and Ryan Newman.
Sadler is one of only 36 drivers in NASCAR history to win races in all three national series. For his 855 starts, he has had 17 wins and four Xfinity Series Most Popular Driver awards. On paper, that career looked pristine; in reality, however, it took a slightly different course.
He finished as Xfinity Series championship runner-up four separate times. He once described it bluntly as “a fancy word for losing.” Each near-miss had a backstory to it.
In 2016, Sadler lost the championship to Daniel Suárez at the Homestead-Miami finale. To make matters worse, NASCAR found two loose lug nuts on his car after the race and hit his team with a post-race penalty.
In 2017, he lost the title to William Byron after getting held up late by part-time driver Ryan Preece. Sadler confronted Preece on the track and blamed him publicly afterward. Critics called it entitlement. Supporters saw a driver who had been denied one too many times.
Between those four runner-up finishes and the controversies that surrounded them, Elliott Sadler became one of NASCAR’s most polarizing figures. He frequently clashed with NASCAR leadership, especially over how the sport treated older veterans competing in a series meant for developing young talent.
“The funniest part about being a part of that age in my group was that NASCAR hated it,” Sadler said of his late-career championship runs. “NASCAR and Xfinity hated it because I was old. I was too freaking old to win it, and they had these ‘names made here,’ right? I just scwed the whole thing up, Kenny.”
The sharpest friction between Sadler and NASCAR has nothing to do with championships. It goes back to a 2000 practice crash at Michigan Speedway, where his car became airborne and cleared the catch fencing entirely.
NASCAR officials pulled him into a private hauler, showed him the footage, confirmed the car had flown over the fence, and told him he would never see it again. The footage was suppressed. Releasing it publicly would have exposed a serious safety failure and triggered costly demands for higher fencing across the sport. Elliott Sadler revealed the incident years later on the Dale Jr. Download podcast.
He has not stayed quiet since. In 2024, he publicly called NASCAR “dead wrong” for fining Ricky Stenhouse Jr. $75,000 for fighting Kyle Busch, while the sport simultaneously used that same footage to promote events and sell tickets. He called it exactly what it was, a double standard.
The pattern across his career is consistent. Penalties at critical moments, suppressed footage, public disagreements with leadership. Yet none of it kept him from being one of the most recognized names the sport produced.
At 48, he heads back to Richmond, five miles from his Emporia hometown, in a Ram 1500. One race. One more chapter.