The day when Josh Rice met with JRR Motorsports owner James Rattliff last month to firm up the details of Rice’s hiring had the 27-year-old driver from Crittenden, Ky., feeling as anxious as he’s ever been.

“I was literally shaking when we were sitting there at lunchtime,” Rice said, recalling the moments before he cinched a deal to drive for Rattliff’s Campbellsville, Ky.-based team. “I was kind of speechless, actually, because I mean, that’s what we’ve all worked for. That’s why we’ve done it as long as we did, for somebody to pick us up."

The opportunity to go racing on a national level in 2026 with Rattliff was, indeed, the realization of a dream for Rice. Over the past decade he’s established himself as one of the country’s top regional Dirt Late Model racers and, in turn, a sizzling-hot prospect just waiting for a shot at the division’s big time — and finally, his break had come.

“I’m so damn excited,” Rice said, his anticipation dripping from every word. “I’ve always wanted to be a full-time driver and now, thanks to James, I have the chance.”

Rice said he’s “had other offers” to race nationally since he burst onto the Dirt Late Model scene in 2015 as a 16-year-old who made noise at his home track, Florence Speedway in Union, Ky., and qualified for the Dream at Eldora Speedway in Rossburg, Ohio, in his first attempt. He turned down those overtures, however, and in retrospect, he’s glad he did.

Calling Rattliff’s offer “perfect timing,” Rice sees himself as more prepared to tackle either the Lucas Oil Late Model Dirt Series or World of Outlaws Real American Beer Late Model Series — the team will decide which one come February — than he would have been in recent years.

“I think it would have hurt me in a way” to take the national plunge earlier, Rice said. “I don’t want to go to James’s and not feel like I’m ready, and now I feel like I am.”

Rattliff certainly agrees. A 59-year-old businessman who operates JRR Auto Sales and has fielded race cars for over a quarter-century, he identified Rice as a prime candidate to replace the departing Daulton Wilson of Fayetteville, N.C., who spent the past four years campaigning Rattliff’s equipment on the Lucas Oil Series. Looking to move his racing program in a “little different direction” after feeling it “wasn’t progressing as well as I hoped,” he sees Rice as a hungry, aggressive talent ready to spread his wings and “deserving of a chance to race a national tour.”

“I’ve watched Josh over the years,” said Rattliff, who will continue to field regional teams maintained by former driver Tim Tungate for his son Justin, a Lucas Oil Series regular in 2007-08 who now races occasionally while working with his father in the car business, and Jason Jameson of Lawrenceburg, Ind. “You know, he’s just fun to watch. I think he’ll be a good fit for our program.

“He’s a wheelman. It may take him a little time to get used to some of the new tracks, but he’ll be all right. I’m very excited. I really feel like Josh will win a (national tour) race or two, or, you know, a big race or two.”

A second-generation racer who grew up watching his father, Jerry, 58, and older brother James, 32, compete at Florence and other area tracks, Rice’s driving career began in 2013 running an open-wheel modified for Rick Jones, who had previously sponsored Jerry’s efforts. He moved to the Dirt Late Model ranks in ’15 piloting cars owned by the Kuzman family, who provided the teenager quality equipment.

“Obviously I can’t thank the Kuzmans enough for everything,” Rice said. “I mean, they gave me like my first shot in a Late Model.”

What rankles Rice about his stretch with the Kuzmans in the mid-2010s was the outsiders who thought he should have immediately hit the road to race nationally with the couple’s support.

“Everybody was like, ‘Well, that was your opportunity there,’” Rice said. “I mean, I was like 16 years old. I was still kind of trying to figure everything out. It was new to us because that was like our first upgrade to the (latest) technology. We were stuck in the old ways with (brother) James. We just went off stuff dad knew forever. We didn’t even have a spring smasher. We told John Kuzman, like, ‘Hey, we got to spend some money just to get in the ball game. We’re not even close.’

“We bought them two Club (29) cars from Darrell (Lanigan) and ran for two years, and then John got sick and kind of got out of it. And then Rick (Jones) got me back in a modified that we raced for a couple years, and Dad called him one day and he was like, ‘Hey, what do you think about going back to the Late Model?’ And Rick bought us a car, that was in 2019.

“And my buddy Shawn (Fulwood) moved up here from Florida, and that’s what got us like to the next step,” he continued. “We didn’t even really know how to use the spring smasher, me and James. We were just going off what everybody told us. (Fulwood) really stepped our ballgame up and got us going. He had his own little deal going in Florida, and then he actually got James’s first win like this second week up here. I feel like he got us to the next level and then we just worked from there.”

Jones, who sponsored Rice during the Kuzman years, has pushed Rice forward as his car owner for the past seven seasons. Rice has achieved ever-growing success, highlighted by two Lucas Oil Series victories at Florence (Ralph Latham Memorial in 2021 and ’22), an Eldora breakthrough this past June with a $30,000 Dream preliminary triumph and three consecutive Northern Allstar Late Model Series titles.

Now that Rice has landed a deal with Rattliff to move on, Jones couldn’t be more pleased.

“Rick Jones has always said, ‘I can take you so far, but the plan is for somebody to pick you up,’” Rice said. “I met with Rick (to inform him of Rattliff’s offer) and he was thrilled, he was pumped. He told me he’s going to kind of take this as his time to get out. His kids are kind of taking over the business and he kind of wants to go a different route, which is awesome.”

Rice is planning one final start with Jones — Dec. 4-6’s Gateway Dirt Nationals at The Dome at America’s Center in St. Louis, Mo. — but he’s already diving in with JRR. The process of getting Rice familiar with the team’s Longhorn Chassis and working together with crew chief Dean Bower, who joined JRR full-time this year to wrench for Wilson and is staying on with Rice’s arrival, commenced unofficially on Oct. 11 when he jumped into Rattliff’s son Justin’s car (renumbered with Rice’s No. 11) and scored a weekly feature win at Atomic Speedway in Alma, Ohio.

“They wanted to go test at Ponderosa (Speedway in Junction City, Ky.), and I already had stuff going,” Rice said. “I rented a bunch of equipment to use at my house, like a skid-steer and a mini-excavator, and I’m like, ‘Man, I’m paying for this stuff all weekend so I don’t want to get far from the house. But I’m not going to tell you no,’ because I already told them no once because of work and everything.

“So I was like, ‘Well, instead of testing and spending a bunch of money, what if we test at Atomic for three-grand (to win)?’”

Rice made the roughly 2-hour drive to the JRR shop the day before the Atomic show to mount his seat in the car and then returned home. He worked around his yard with his rented equipment until late Saturday afternoon and then met the team at the track about an hour before hot laps. He promptly swept the evening’s action, impressing his new owner a couple weeks before they publicly announced their pairing.

“He had never raced the car and he set fast time, won his heat race, won the feature,” said Rattliff, who has also fielded cars over the years for such drivers as Don O’Neal, Brad Neat and Terry English. “It wasn't a stellar field of cars, but his lap times were really good and he did a really, really good job not to have ever been in the car before.

“We had talked about testing, and Dean called me and said Josh asked if we’d rather race than test. I said, ‘I’d absolutely rather race,’ because I think you learn more, so that’s what we did. We had good results. We won three-grand.”

Rice was back racing for JRR in last weekend’s Valvoline American Late Model Iron-Man Series doubleheader at Atomic — his first action as the team’s hired driver — and tallied finishes of third and fifth. He’ll continue his late-season acclimation with the team at next weekend’s WoO World Finals at The Dirt Track at Charlotte in Concord, N.C. — the first time Rice has run the event since 2015.

The team would be willing to attempt even more races in November, but Rice has a few non-racing events on his schedule that preceded his deal with JRR.

“What sucks is I obviously didn’t know this deal was going to happen, so I’ve already got a cruise booked for a bachelor party trip and I got a wedding, so there’s two weekends in November I'm going to lose,” Rice said. “I’m like, ‘Damn.’ I hate telling them guys no, but I got stuff planned.”

Now that he’s teamed with JRR, though, Rice can start arranging everything he does around his racing endeavors. That, of course, is the most exciting part of his new path, one that he admitted is “going to be a big life change.”

Indeed, Rice has already given his two-weeks notice at his job at the DHL logistics company, where he’s worked for seven years. He worked out an off-season salary agreement with Rattliff so that he can start full-time with the team soon after his last day at DHL on Nov. 4.

“I’ve kind of built a really good deal (at DHL),” Rice said. “I’ve got five weeks of vacation. I work the Sunday through Wednesday night shift, which works great for racing — well, I don’t want to say it works great, but I get the weekends off. Normally Thursday is my day to get everything ready.

“But I honestly cannot wait to get off the night shift. It’s starting to wear on me. I've been there for seven years and I'm ready to get back to feeling like a human being (with regular hours).”

Rice understands that there still will be late nights as a full-time driver, whether it’s at the track, making overnight hauls or when “we’ve got motors or whatever to get swapped.” But he’s ready to embrace his new world and, while he plans to remain in his current home, he’ll be spending plenty of hours in the JRR shop.

“I just bought a brand new truck, so my plan is just trade it in and then find something that’s good on gas where I can just haul down there,” Rice said. “If I leave at 6, I can be there by 8 in the morning. And they’ve got a house for all the crew guys, so I’m sure I'll have a room in there somewhere when I need to stay there.

“That’s something I wanted to like stress to Dean — if we have a tore-up race car, I’m staying until everything's done like that. I told him, ‘I’m not leaving you hanging.’ I don't think you win races just being the helmet-carrier (driver) either. I think you got to be involved in working on your stuff. I think we’ve kind of proved that with this deal.”

And now Rice has his chance to devote even more time to his racing craft. The challenge ahead — all the new tracks he’ll visit, all the high-level competition he’ll face — will be a challenge, but he has to keep reminding himself that he will now be able to eat, breathe and sleep racing to prepare himself for it.

“Just to focus on just racing is going to be really good,” Rice said. “If they want to go test or go race somewhere, I don’t have to look at my work schedule anymore. I can just go. I’m really looking forward to it.”