RFK Racing coming up empty on its charter hunt

RFK Racing might be in the market for a NASCAR Cup Series charter, but there's no listed inventory.

“As it stands today, there are no charters that I’m aware of that are for sale,” team co-owner Brad Keselowski said. “If there was, we’d certainly talk to everyone we’d think could potentially sell one, and they know our interest.”

The three-car organization needs a charter because it only owns two. For the last two years, the charter used by Ryan Preece’s No. 60 team has been leased from Rick Ware Racing. RFK Racing and Ware had a deal where one charter was leased out for 2025 and then switched with the other charter for 2026.

A charter can only be leased for one year. But next season, one of the Ware charters will be with Legacy Motor Club. As it stands, Legacy already owns the charter (having reached an agreement with Ware last season) but is honoring the deal Ware had in place with RFK Racing.

Legacy Motor Club will expand to three full-time cars in 2027. RFK Racing, therefore, needs to find a charter to keep things status quo with its line-up of Preece, Keselowski and Chris Buescher.

“We’ll have to see,” Keselowski said. “It’s still May. We really don’t need a charter until February of ’27. With that said, we really need a charter, and we know that.

“What we can’t control is that there is a finite amount of them; they’re not making more charters, so we can’t control the fact that somebody has to be willing to sell it first. So, we have to let the cards play out.”

NASCAR handed out 36 charters when the system was introduced in 2016. Any additional charters that were to be introduced would have to be approved by existing charter teams. And they would likely be issued if a new OEM were entering the series.

The charters were made permanent in December. It was one of the settlement agreements between 23XI Racing and Front Row Motorsports in its antitrust lawsuit against NASCAR.

If a charter does become available for RFK Racing in the coming months, Keselowski expects that the current selling price could be somewhere “between 40 to 80” million dollars.