Fourteen years after walking away from NASCAR Cup racing, Dodge made it official today at SEMA in Las Vegas: the brand is returning to the Cup Series for 2027, with Kaulig Racing as its anchor team and the Charger nameplate on the fender.
The partnership with Kaulig Racing is the structural heart of the comeback. Kaulig, which already established a factory-backed Stellantis presence in NASCAR through a Ram program, will field a two-car Dodge Charger effort starting at the Daytona 500. Dodge is bypassing the usual engine-development runway by partnering with Earnhardt Childress Racing to build Dodge-spec powerplants alongside existing Chevrolet operations, an arrangement the other manufacturers allowed because a fourth brand is broadly seen as good for the series. That’s an unusual shortcut in a sanctioning body where powertrain homologation typically runs on a multi-year clock, and it reflects both how late the program is starting and how aggressively Dodge moved to compress the timeline.
Tim Kuniskis, who runs American Brands, SRT Performance and the Direct Connection division for Stellantis North America, framed it without subtlety at the SEMA reveal: “Everyone said it was impossible to get back in one year. We said, ‘watch this.'” The development-on-the-fly approach is either bold or reckless depending on your tolerance for first-season attrition, and Kuniskis acknowledged the difficulty while treating it as a selling point.
The milestones between now and Daytona are already scheduled. At NASCAR Championship Weekend at Homestead-Miami Speedway, Kaulig will announce its 2027 driver lineup. The next event is the 59th Snowball Derby at Five Flags Speedway in Pensacola on December 4, where Dodge will hold what it’s calling the Dodge Sno-Brawl, a celebrity head-to-head in equally prepared Dodge Charger late-model stock cars. More importantly, that weekend is when Dodge will reveal the actual race car. Fans can catch the reveal via livestream on FloRacing and the NASCAR Channel.
The Cup return gives NASCAR four manufacturers for the first time in years, with Dodge joining Chevrolet, Ford and Toyota. Dodge’s last Cup win came in 2012, the season Jimmie Johnson took the championship in the No. 2 Blue Deuce Dodge Charger. The brand’s history in the series goes back to its first Cup win in 1953, and a 14-year absence is long enough that the engineering and technical community at Kaulig will be doing this largely from scratch, ECR partnership or not.
On the street side, Dodge used the SEMA platform to restitch the performance narrative. The 2027 Charger Super Bee Launch Edition, rated at 600 hp, sits at the top of a Charger lineup that also includes the 420-hp R/T and the 550-hp Scat Pack powered by the 3.0-liter twin-turbo SIXPACK high-output engine. Every Charger ships with all-wheel drive and is available in two-door coupe or four-door sedan form. The Durango SRT Hellcat, at 710 hp, carries the SUV end of the performance argument. Radford Racing School driving instruction is bundled with the Super Bee Launch Edition, the Scat Pack and the Durango SRT Hellcat.
Dodge SRT Racing will lead all North American motorsports operations from here, covering NASCAR, NHRA and additional series. On the NHRA side, Stellantis already has a presence through Tony Stewart Racing, which swept Top Fuel and Funny Car at Bristol earlier this year with Leah Pruett and Matt Hagan.
Kaulig Racing’s driver lineup announcement at Homestead will be the first real test of how seriously the paddock is taking Dodge’s comeback timeline. Who’s in the car matters as much as what’s under the hood, and on both counts, the answers are still weeks away.
Source: Stellantis. Images courtesy of Stellantis.
