Nick Anglace, UConn Looking At Step To NASCAR Truck Series Through Unique Expanding Partnership

Sponsorship relationships in motorsports come in all sorts of shapes and sizes and plans. 

For some teams sponsorship might just mean bartering of products with a business, for others it might simply mean a massive infusion of financial support. And every sponsor has different levels of expectation for activation and growth of a sponsorship relationship.

In 2025 Stafford Speedway SK Light Modified driver got plenty of heads turning at the track when he showed up at the start of the season sporting the very familiar colors of UConn as his sponsor. The sponsorship of a race team was a new style of marketing endeavor for UConn. 

“From our perspective, it was everything that we could have hoped for,” said Kyle Muncy, UConn’s Director of Brand Partnerships. “He had success on the track, which I think was really really important for him I think because he put a lot of pressure on himself to want to be successful. I can tell you that was a great byproduct of his hard work and dedication, but from our perspective, we weren’t going to view this as whether is was successful or not based on whether he was winning races. That’s obviously awesome and we expect and believe that he’s going to continue to be successful. But I think from our perspective it really was about visibility. A different way for the UConn brand to be visible. But I think we really are just scratching the surface.” 

Now Anglace and UConn are looking to take some huge steps in their partnership while trying to build a unique relationship that goes far beyond financial backing and brand activation. In 2026 Anglace, of Seymour, will look to expand on his relationship with UConn in some unique ways that could lead to him getting the opportunity to run at the national series level with NASCAR. 

The 23-year old Anglace is looking to use the financial support of UConn’s marketing efforts to design a plan that would help him land starts on the NASCAR Craftsman Truck Series in 2026 with UConn actually becoming a hands-on partner in the operations of a race team. 

Anglace has put together a partnership with the Mike Harmon Racing team on the Craftsman Truck Series to run as many as five races in the division in 2026. And the effort to make that happen will involve growing the relationship with UConn to have students at the school taking on a hands-on part of the racing team. 

The UConn Formula SAE team is a popular student-run organization that designs and fabricates electric and internal combustion Formula Style race cars for collegiate competition all around the country. The Formula SAE program has all the elements of building a race team for competition, from design engineers to marketing to financial oversight. 

The expanding plan going forward is to bring together the Formula SAE team as part of a Anglace’s operations from Stafford to national level events. Through his partnership with Mike Harmon Racing, Anglace will be able to develop a shop for the Truck Series team in Connecticut and bring the elements of the Formula SAE team over to operations of that team. 

“UConn’s plan and our plan is to try to turn around Harmon’s team,” Anglace said. “So UConn has pretty much given me all their engineers that want to come and work on the Truck and try to turn the whole team around for those few races that we’re going to do.” 

For Muncy, expanding the relationship to bringing a hands-on element for UConn students in running a race team is part of a long range vision of the school’s decision to get involved in a motorsports sponsorship. 

“I said to Nick from the beginning, he reached out and I think he was looking at it from a ‘Hey, we need some financial support, why not swing big?’ Muncy said. “I think from my perspective I looked at it and said ‘You know what, we do marketing on an annual basis, whether it’s billboards around the state, on the highways, or advertising at the airport or advertising all over the place, this is a different way for us to look at advertising. A different way for us to look at how to have people see our brand and where they see our brand. I looked at it as a little bit of a longer range thing. I said ‘Ok, you seem to have aspirations that line up with the mission of our institution, which is to be the best at what we do, regardless of what that is. Whether that’s playing basketball gams or research or anything from an academic perspective or student life perspective. You know, we’re going to do it, we want to do it the best. He seemed to have that type of attitude.

“I think I even said to him jokingly at the beginning: ‘We’re willing to do this, we’ll see how it goes, optimistic that it will go well and when it goes really really well just don’t forget us when you’re famous.’ I think from our perspective we couldn’t be happier with sort of the direction it’s trending.” 

The Craftsman Truck Series is the third level tier of NASCAR’s three national divisions, which also includes the top level NASCAR Cup Series and the second tier NASCAR O’Reilly Auto Parts Series (formerly NASCAR Xfinity Series). 

For Anglace, the current aim of getting into Truck series events in 2026 comes with a very focused goal of getting through the NASCAR approval process to run O’Reilly Auto Parts Series events, possibly as early as the 2026 season.

“Essentially what the plan is is that we’re going to try and spend less money to do more races [with the Craftsman Truck Series] so that we can get through NASCAR’s approval process and then kind of gamble like [Ryan Preece] did in the [second tier NASCAR O’Reilly Auto Parts Series],” Anglace said. 

Preece is a former Stafford Speedway regular and Berlin native. In 2017 Preece used a huge amount of his financial backing to get a very limited opportunity in an Xfinity Series ride with Joe Gibbs Racing. Preece finished second in his first race with the team at New Hampshire Motor Speedway on July 15, 2017 and then grabbed the attention of the NASCAR world when he won an Xfinity Series event at Iowa Speedway in his second event with the team on July 29, 2017. Preece was able to parlay that success to land in the NASCAR Cup Series. Preece now runs full-time in the NASCAR Cup Series with RFK Racing. 

For UConn, the hope is that their relationship with an established racing team can permeate multiple facets for the school that go far beyond just simple brand marketing. 

“Especially early on in the partnership when it became public, I was pretty persistent with Nick about saying ‘Hey, I need you to make sure that you say you’ve partnered with UConn, you’re not partnered UConn athletics, because it’s not just about athletics, it really is about the entire institution and the opportunities that exist,” Muncy said. “There are layers and layers and layers of opportunity with so many things that we have going on on our campus. It’s nice to have the race car at a football game or a basketball game where people can see it and touch it or take pictures with Nick, but we have students … so if all of the sudden as part of an academic program or student programing here on our campus, you can do an internship with a racing team, whether that’s as a College of Engineering student because you’re interested in the mechanics of a how a race car works, or it could be in the School of Business because you’re interested in the marketing or the finance aspect of how a race car team works, or frankly it could be the School of Fine Arts or Digital Media and Design because you’re going to work with Nick on promotional campaigns or advertising or different things along those lines. 

“There’s really this incredible network of incredibly talented students and faculty and staff on our campus that could look at this and say ‘Hey, this is a really really cool thing, come to UConn and you can do internship with a racing team’, that’s not something I think that anybody would ever think they’d be saying about as an opportunity here at UConn. I know that my colleagues in the College of Engineering are incredibly excited about these types of things. Anytime you can provide an experience that for one reason or another has this sort of [feeling] of like ‘Oh, that’s fun, that’s sports, that’s connected to competition.’ It’s totally different and dials up the attention meter.” 

Anglace finished fifth in the SK Light Modified standings at Stafford in 2025 with three victories. In addition to the plans to run selected Craftsman Truck Series events in 2026, Anglace also plans to continue to run full-time in the SK Light Modified division at Stafford while also running selected SK Modified and Tour Type Modified events.

The plan is to involve UConn’s Formula SAE team with all facets of Anglace’s racing efforts in 2026. 

“What I love the most about Nick’s time with the Formula SAE team was how jacked he was because he came away from that going … ’Holy cow, this awesome. These are my people.’” Muncy said. “That’s the really really cool part of it.”