RFK Racing (Roush Fenway Keselowski Racing), a championship-winning NASCAR team based in Concord, North Carolina, is leveraging Tulip’s frontline operations platform to transform the way it builds, inspects, and maintains race cars. By replacing spreadsheets and manual processes with connected, real-time apps, RFK Racing has gained end-to-end traceability of every component on its cars, streamlined race day preparation, and empowered its crew to continuously improve operations.

RFK Racing and Tulip at a Glance:

• Industry: Automotive & Specialty Vehicles (Professional Motorsports)

• Location: Concord, North Carolina, USA

• Team Size: ~300 employees (3 NASCAR Cup Series teams)

• Challenge: Rebuild race cars weekly with zero errors, manage tens of thousands of parts, and modernize manual tracking

• Solution: Tulip Frontline Operations Platform for custom manufacturing apps, real-time data, and connected workflows

• Results: 100% parts traceability (46,000+ parts tracked), streamlined car assembly workflows, and a scalable digital-first culture enabling continuous improvement

Challenges: Manufacturing for the Fast Lane with Zero Margin for Error

For decades, NASCAR teams gained an advantage by building custom parts in-house. That changed with the Next Gen race car – NASCAR now mandates that ~90% of components be purchased off-the-shelf. “The competitive advantage has moved from custom engineering to precision assembly,” explains Kevin Kidd, Director of Software and Analytics at RFK Racing.

Each car is made up of hundreds of parts that must fit together within extremely tight tolerances - a body panel, for example, must have a tolerance of just 1.5 mm. “Quite literally hundreds of parts come together to build this race car. We have to use a tremendous amount of metrology all the way through the build process. In certain cases, we’re measuring things two, three, four times,” says Kidd. There is no room for error: even a ten-thousandth of an inch misalignment can impact aerodynamics and performance. It’s a scenario familiar to many manufacturers: tight regulations and quality requirements that mean you have to get it right the first time, with no second chances.

Traceability is non-negotiable. After each race, every component on RFK's cars cannot be reused until it passes rigorous inspection and re-approval. NASCAR officials conduct detailed tear-downs, even CT-scanning and 3D-analyzing parts. If anything seems amiss, the team must prove the part's compliance. "If you're sitting in inspection with NASCAR and for whatever reason they're questioning a part, you need to have this traceability," Kidd explains. In practice, this means tracking the lifecycle of tens of thousands of parts. RFK's database contains over 46,000 parts accumulated across current and past car builds. Keeping such records with legacy tools had become untenable.

Prior to 2023, RFK Racing relied on a patchwork of Excel spreadsheets and siloed databases to manage these processes. Excel had been “the tool of choice for 30 years for citizen developers” in racing, but the data ended up trapped on individual laptops and sheets. In late 2022, RFK committed to adding a third car in select races. With their current processes, they needed a way to remove friction.

The RFK Racing team faced many common, modern manufacturing challenges: extreme quality demands, massive traceability data, and rapid scaling – all in the high-speed, high-stakes environment of professional motorsports.

Solution: Digital Operations That Race on Tulip

Their answer was to go digital-first and build a connected operations system tailored to their unique needs. Kevin Kidd and his team decided to create their own lightweight Manufacturing Execution System (MES) to orchestrate everything from part tracking to work orders. Instead of coding it from scratch or settling for rigid off-the-shelf software, they took a composable approach with Tulip.

Traditional manufacturing software couldn't handle their unique use cases, like reusing and rebuilding components multiple times. So, the team worked with Tulip's Professional Services team to develop apps that solved their exact problems.

“We wanted to create a system that still encouraged the citizen developer, that allowed our technicians to be able to capture the data… and drive all that into this connected environment where systems are suddenly talking to each other,” says Kidd.

With Tulip's Frontline Operations Platform, The RFK Racing team can quickly create interactive apps for their mechanics and engineers, integrate those apps with connected equipment and back-end systems, and iterate on them at a moment's notice. Tulip gave RFK Racing the best of both worlds: the freedom to innovate like a DIY solution, with the speed and scalability of an enterprise platform.

Using Tulip, RFK Racing’s small software team built out a suite of integrated apps that cover a wide range of use cases:

The team even uses Tulip trackside. On race day, crew members use a Tulip app on a tablet to run through standardized NASCAR-required checks checklists (ensuring all NASCAR-required checks are complete, recording last-minute adjustments, etc.). If an issue arises during the race, they can log it in Tulip immediately. All that information feeds back into the system for post-race analysis, ensuring no detail falls through the cracks in the heat of competition.

Tulip’s platform is plugged into their broader IT landscape. The team integrated Tulip with their enterprise resource planning (ERP) system as it came online, ensuring data flows between inventory management and the Tulip apps on the floor. Tulip’s connectors and open API allowed RFK Racing to link databases so that part numbers, bills of materials, and supplier info are consistent across systems. This eliminated duplicate data entry and further broke down silos. Now, when the team’s leadership reviews operations, they get a single source of truth that combines production data from Tulip with cost and inventory data from the ERP.

RFK Racing deployed Tulip as the frontline operations platform for their racing program – streamlining car assembly workflows, centralizing data collection, and connecting their team like never before. The team was able to move from a manual, reactive mindset to a connected, proactive one. And they did it in a matter of months, not years.

Results

A Data-Driven Advantage Makes Compliance Easy

Implementing Tulip’s platform has paid dividends for RFK Racing. The team has achieved new levels of traceability, operational efficiency, and scalability in their operations – gains that not only make life easier in the shop, but also translate into performance on the track.

• First and foremost, RFK Racing now has complete, end-to-end traceability on every component of their race cars.

• All 46,000+ parts in their database can be searched and traced in seconds

The days of rifling through file folders or siloed knowledge are over. If a NASCAR official questions a part or if an internal quality issue arises, RFK Racing can instantly pull up the part’s entire history – when it was received, which builds and races it was used in, inspection reports, and more. This digital record-keeping has effectively error-proofed their compliance process. In the 2023 season, RFK Racing passed every NASCAR inspection with flying colors, avoiding the penalties that can cripple a team’s championship hopes.

Time to Post-Race Results Reduced From Hours to Minutes

RFK Racing reduced the average duration of its post-race teardown and inspection process by roughly 30% with Tulip – giving them back precious hours in the tight turnaround between races. Moreover, by integrating inventory status with assembly, the crew can perform critical build and quality checks right-first-time, because they have real-time data and prompts at their fingertips. Across hundreds of such micro-optimizations, the time savings add up.

A Winner’s Culture of Continuous Improvement

Connected data has also unlocked actionable insights. Engineers now have access to rich datasets for analysis. These insights inform decisions like how often to retire parts preemptively or which suppliers’ parts last longer. It’s a level of data-driven decision-making that was impractical when information lived in disparate spreadsheets.

RFK’s competition department now holds weekly review meetings where they visualize key metrics from Tulip dashboards – such as parts usage counts, assembly times, and quality checks completed – to pinpoint where they can improve.

The adoption of Tulip helped establish a digital-first culture across the organization. As team members like mechanics and inspectors became co-creators of their digital tools, they took pride in them. Ideas for new Tulip apps or features now bubble up from the frontlines regularly. Trust was a core principle: “trust is assumed” in giving employees freedom to improve the process. The result is that just about everyone at RFK became a problem solver. It’s the same ethos as on the race team – always find a way to go faster – now applied to their workflows.

What’s Next: Continual Innovation On and Off the Track

RFK’s embrace of Tulip has reinforced their reputation as one of NASCAR’s most innovative teams. The partnership is part of RFK’s broader TeK Alliance initiative – a program championed by co-owner Brad Keselowski to bring tech leaders into racing. Through the TeK Alliance, the team has shown what modern, data-driven operations can look like in motorsports. Their culture of continuous transformation shows that advanced manufacturing principles like genealogical part tracking, connected workstations, and real-time analytics can provide a winning edge even in an adrenaline-fueled race shop.

The team continues to encourage everyone to ask: “What can we do better for the next race?” and “How can we leverage our data in new ways?” The mentality is contagious. As new crew members join, they’ll be trained not just in how to use the Tulip apps, but also why the data is valuable.

Kevin Kidd puts it best when reflecting on the philosophy that will guide RFK’s future: “Never stop chasing innovation and continuous improvement. In NASCAR, you’re either improving or you’re falling behind. There is no standing still.” Equipped with Tulip and a drive to improve, RFK Racing is well positioned to keep pushing the boundaries of what’s possible at 200 MPH.