SONOMA, Calif. – Tucker, Georgia’s Ryan Sieg drove the No. 39 RSS Racing Ford to a quiet 28th-place result in Saturday’s (June 10) DoorDash 250 at Sonoma Raceway.
After the race, he and his father Rod celebrated their first career NASCAR Xfinity Series victory.
It reads like the old lateral thinking puzzle about the surgeon and her son, and this puzzle has a similarly straightforward answer: Sieg and his father own the small Xfinity-only team RSS Racing, and through partnerships with Ford Performance and Stewart-Haas Racing, RSS occasionally enters an SHR-prepared car for one of the Cup super team’s drivers. A similar arrangement with fellow underdog operation SS Green-Light Racing carried Cole Custer to victory lane at Auto Club Speedway in February 2022.
Aric Almirola’s clutch performance, winning the race right out from under a dominant Kyle Larson, will go down in the record books as the first victory for the Sieg family’s operation, but it would do them a disservice to brush the accomplishment off as just another Cup interloper in high-quality equipment stealing an Xfinity win from drivers fighting to make their names.
“It’s huge for a race team like that,” Almirola told the media, including Frontstretch, from the Sonoma media center. “The points, the owners points … it is huge, and [I’m] just so thankful for that collaboration with their race team … they’re just a nice, genuine group of people.”
“[The win] pays the bills,” quipped Rod Sieg to Frontstretch’s Bryan Nolen from the Sonoma garage area.
Ryan, standing next to him, explained, “It’s pretty special to do it here, with Ford and everybody else helping out, Stewart-Haas … a great day for RSS Racing, a great points day as well … just got a lot of words to say.
“At least RSS is a winner now.”
The Sieg family’s journey from start-and-parkers to winning Xfinity team owners began a decade ago, with a part-time campaign for the No. 39 that has since become the team’s flagship entry.
RSS took the Xfinity program full-time in 2014, Sieg earning his first top five in the summer race at Daytona International Speedway, a third-place result he replicated at the same race two years later en route to an appearance (a first-round elimination, but an appearance nonetheless) in the inaugural Xfinity playoffs. That was the same year that the team expanded to run a second full-time car.
In the years since, Sieg has pointed his No. 39 into the playoffs a further three times, earning a career- and team-high 13 top-10 finishes in 2022 en route to an 11th-place championship result.
But RSS’s previous closest brush with victory came with Sieg at Iowa Speedway in 2017. A late caution in the American Ethanol E15 250 interrupted front-runners’ strategy and set up a battle between Sieg and then-rookie William Byron.
While Sieg held his own, Byron had superior machinery, thanks to Hendrick Motorsports-affiliated JR Motorsports, and ended up the victor. Sieg finished runner-up, setting a record for highest finish for an RSS car that stood for six years until Almirola broke it today.
No matter how it got there, RSS is a winner now.
Jack Swansey primarily covers open-wheel racing for Frontstretch and co-hosts The Pit Straight Podcast,but you can also catch him writing about NASCAR, sports cars, and anything else with four wheels and a motor. Originally from North Carolina and now residing in Los Angeles, he joined the site as Sunday news writer midway through 2022 and is an avid collector (some would say hoarder) of die-cast cars.