The last time Lee Pulliam won a race as a driver, most of the kids running Late Model Stocks on the CARS Tour were in middle school. That was 2019. Six years of silence from one of the most prolific short-track racers who ever strapped into a stock car — no starts, no press conferences, no comeback-trail interviews on some podcast. Just gone. The man who won four NASCAR weekly national championships and more than fifty races at South Boston Speedway stepped out of the car and disappeared into the Virginia countryside like it was the most natural thing in the world.
Then he came back. And he came back for everything.
Robert Lee Pulliam was born on April 5, 1988, and raised in Semora, North Carolina, a speck of a town near the Virginia line. He lives in Alton, Virginia, just up the road from South Boston Speedway, where he built the résumé that makes everything else in this story possible. More than fifty wins at South Boston — the most prolific winner in the track's modern era. Between 2011 and 2016, Pulliam won six consecutive South Boston 200s, the marquee race on the track's annual calendar. Six in a row. At a race that draws the best Late Model Stock talent in the Southeast every single year.
The national numbers are just as absurd. Four NASCAR Whelen All-American Series national championships — 2012, 2013, 2015, and 2017. Only Peyton Sellers has won more weekly national titles among active Virginia-circuit drivers, and Sellers needed years between his. Pulliam won four in six seasons. He also claimed two Virginia Triple Crown titles in 2015 and 2019, putting him second on the all-time VTC list behind Sellers' five.
The résumé was already complete. Pulliam could have stayed retired and his place in Virginia short-track history was locked.
But six years is a long time to not do the thing that made you who you are. Pulliam didn't talk about it publicly — he's never been a guy who works things out at a microphone — but the gap between "retired driver" and "race shop owner" tells its own story. He built Lee Pulliam Performance, a shop that fields the No. 5 car in the CARS Tour Late Model Stock division with Carson Brown behind the wheel. He came back to the sport as an owner first, building the next generation from behind the pit wall. Every weekend, watching cars he built run at speeds he knew in his bones. If that doesn't make the itch come back, nothing will.
On February 28, 2026, Pulliam showed up at Southern National Motorsports Park for the CARS Tour season opener and finished second. Three weeks later, on March 21, he won at South Boston. Two thousand, three hundred and eighty-seven days between victories. He didn't just win — he won at the track where he'd built his legend, the place where the record book has his name on more pages than anyone else's. After more than six years away, the first win back came at home.
And then JR Motorsports called.
On March 28, 2026, Lee Pulliam rolled off twelfth at Martinsville Speedway for his first NASCAR O'Reilly Auto Parts Series start, driving the No. 9 Chevrolet for JR Motorsports. He sold out of commemorative t-shirts before the green flag dropped. By the halfway point, the thirty-seven-year-old short-track legend was running the front row on restarts against drivers who've been doing this at the national level for years. He led forty laps — second only to Justin Allgaier's 114.
Then came the restart that would have ended a lesser story. Pulliam jumped from the front row, missed a shift, and the field stacked into the back of him — nineteen cars piling into each other under a twenty-six-minute red flag while Pulliam sat in the cockpit knowing he'd caused it. Dale Earnhardt Jr. got on the radio. Whatever he said worked, because Pulliam drove the final laps like a man who'd been racing at Martinsville his whole life. He finished fifth. Post-race, he called it "just a little bit of inexperience." Earnhardt called him a helluva driver.
Fifth place in your first national series start at thirty-seven years old after six years away from racing. T-shirts sold out before you take the green. Forty laps led at the toughest short track on the NASCAR calendar. A wreck that would have rattled a veteran, and you come back from the red flag and finish top five anyway.
Lee Pulliam owns a race shop. He runs a CARS Tour team. He just turned a one-off ride at Martinsville into the kind of debut that makes team owners start making phone calls. He is thirty-seven years old, three days from thirty-eight, and the record book still isn't finished with him.
Two thousand, three hundred and eighty-seven days between wins. The next one took four weeks.
Read more: South Boston Speedway: Sixty-Eight Years of Asphalt, Ambition, and the Fastest Small Town in Virginia — the full history of the track where Lee Pulliam's 2,387-day absence ended.