Ricky Stenhouse Jr. set the record straight on the speculation circulating the interwebs concerning his Sprint Car team, Stenhouse Jr.-Marshall Racing, he co-owns with Richard Marshall. 

In a 17-minute sitdown interview released by DIRTVision on Wednesday morning, the NASCAR Cup driver confirmed a series of crew changes he and Marshall have made, specificially cutting ties with crew chief Kyle Ripper the day after Sheldon Haudenschild impressively took the SJM Racing No. 17 team to Williams Grove National Open victory lane at Mechanicsburg, Pa.'s Williams Grove Speedway.

It's yet another domino to fall in this wildly active Sprint Car Silly Season that seems to have no end.

"That's for sure what happened," the 38-year-old Stenhouse told DIRTVision's Connor Wade, adding that mulling this change of direction "goes back to probably Knoxville" and Aug. 6-9's Knoxville Nationals at Raceway when "we kind of heard rumblings of Sheldon and Ripper putting their own kind of thing together."

On Sept. 4, the SJM Racing team announced Haudenschild and Ripper — one of the longest tenured driver-crew chief pairings on the World of Outlaws circuit since 2017 — are departing the operation following Nov. 8's World Finals at The Dirt Track at Charlotte.

Now it appears Haudenschild is the only component of the team finishing out the 2025 season as crewmen Luke Vaugn and Jayce Warrick informed SJM Racing they're departing team as well, effective immediately.

SJM has already hired Kyle Pruit, former crew chief of Logan Schuchart released by Shark Racing on Sept. 30, for the 2026 season, a deal finalized "a week-and-a-half ago," per Stenhouse, who also mentioned that they initially were looking to make a change at crew chief following 2025 whether Haudenschild stayed or not.

"I felt like, for us to give Sheldon the best shot to win a championship, we were looking at making a change at the crew chief position. I know Sheldon are boys, and they've been tight from day one, and have had great success. But we've had a lot of inconsistencies," said Stenhouse, who added that "Richard and I, at that point, we didn't want to blow everything up."

"We said, 'Hey, let's finish out the year. Let's go win as many races as possible, obviously Williams Grove being one of them," he added.

According to Stenhouse, once the SJM team hired Pruitt a little over a week ago, the plan heading into the weekend escalated into parting ways with Ripper following Saturday's Williams Grove National Open. Stenhouse didn't anticipate having to officially make that move hours after the team's monumental victory.

"I was gonna call Ripper after Saturday night after the race at Williams Grove, tell him, 'Hey, we appreciate it, but we're gonna do something different' and explain to him why. The win happened, and kind of threw a wrench in our plans. I didn't wanna call on Saturday night and do that, let them enjoy the win, like they deserved. So we did it Sunday, around lunchtime.

"Richard and I called Ripper, and he was asleep. He didn't answer. So we had to get someone to knock on his door. He was in the truck still. Definitely not ideally how we want to do it. I was hoping he'd answer the phone. I had Cup things I had to do on Sunday, so I had a time window we had to get all this done in. We wanted to get it done so Kyle Pruitt can start working on the car, get it prepared for this weekend."

While Stenhouse understands the optics of this organizational shift isn't ideal, "we just felt like it was best for us and our team."

"We definitely didn't wait until they won and said, 'Hey let's call him and fire him.' To my point of view, it's kind of hard to fire someone that already quit," Stenhouse said. "So you know, it's the best way for us to move along and prepare for 2026, which I'm excited about. That's the next, most important, thing now, is 2026."

Haudenschild and Ripper are rumored to join the KCP Racing No. 18 team next season, which recently parted ways with 21-year-old Emerson Axsom and hired veteran Cory Eliason in an interim role. SJM, meanwhile, are still searching for its new driver, but at least have a crew chief positioned in Pruitt. 

"When he was let go from Shark Racing, it gave us an opportunity on the NOS Energy Drink No. 17 team to start preparing for 2026," Stenhouse said. "In this championship, we're not gonna catch fourth-place, we're not gonna fall back to sixth. 2026 starts now for our team. We have a lot of parts to order, things to get organized. I can't put Kyle Pruitt in there to do that with them still racing out of our shop.

"Richard and I talked a week-and-a-half ago, when Kyle's news broke out he was not employed, (thinking), 'Hey, how can we transition this?' In the best way possible, I felt like, was getting him in our system and start working."

Spencer Bayston, Giovanni Scelzi and Donny Schatz are among high-profile drivers with undisclosed plans for 2026. Stenhouse says "we'll have some news here this year pretty soon."

"Driver searching is wild. Again, I've never had to do that that much. ... We're getting really close to announcing something there," Stenhouse said. "I'm looking forward to the future, that's for sure."