Submitted photo Ryan Roulette stands in front of his No. 77 car at Phoenix Raceway.

One local dirt track driver finally earned the shot for which he has been waiting almost two decades, and it could not have come on a bigger stage.

Ryan Roulette, a Knoxville, Iowa native who moved to Minot, North Dakota about four years ago, began his climb up the NASCAR ladder with his first ARCA Menards Series race at Phoenix Raceway Nov. 6.

The veteran dirt racer of approximately 15 years placed 28th out of 34 total drivers in Arizona, a bit lower than he was hoping to finish due to some “rookie stuff” and growing pains with his new team, but expressed his abundant gratitude for his first NASCAR opportunity and used it as a learning experience.

“It was amazing to get the chance to finally get out there. I’ve been trying to do that for years now,” Roulette said. “28th is not super exciting by any means, but we had some pretty big hiccups in the beginning of the race with the car; as the team’s trying to figure me out, I’m trying to figure them out, figure out the best way to set this car up to my style of driving, and converting me over to an asphalt style of driving.”

Roulette grew up watching spring car races in the “Holy Mecca” of the sport, his hometown, and later began racing himself. After four years living in the Magic City, Roulette says he would be hard-pressed to find a dirt race in North Dakota he has not driven at least once.

He met Naval Academy graduate and Lieutenant Commander, as well as current NASCAR driver, Jesse Iwuji in 2018 and the latter served as a mentor for Roulette and took him under his wing.

Iwuji began teaching Roulette about asphalt racing and connected him with a team, called Performance P-1 Motorsports, in Madera, California to help him earn more experience in his new arena.

With an extensive dirt track resume that includes two top-25 INEX finishes, 24 Hard Charger awards and 47 top-five finishes overall, as well as a hunger for continued improvement on asphalt, Roulette got connected with Brett Bodine, the approval authority at NASCAR. He soon received the green light to participate in this fall’s ARCA race.

“We’ve been talking about it probably since the beginning of the year,” Roulette recalled. “To race at this level is not one of those things where you can just say, ‘Hey I’m going to race, here I come.’ There’s a lot of approval processes, and they really dig into your background.”

The ARCA Menards Series represents only the first tier of four in NASCAR racing. With enough experience and positive results, drivers can next advance to the Camping World Truck Series, followed by the Xfinity Series and finally the Monster Energy Cup Series, the “holy grail of the top end of NASCAR,” Roulette said.

Where Roulette differs from other drivers who want to advance as high as they can is his desire to follow in the footsteps of Stewart Friesen and stick with the Truck Series. In his six-year NASCAR career, Friesen has earned 33 top-five finishes and a pair of overall wins in 2019.

“The key thing to the truck series is I feel like it’s somewhere that you can really get into and plant roots down and stay there for,” Roulette said. “Even though I have a ton of racing experience, the majority of it’s on dirt. I think the truck series is an excellent goal of where I’d like to see myself get to, and I’d be very happy to go there and make a career out of that.”

Roulette’s next steps are simple. To achieve his next goal, he must continue racing asphalt and accruing experience. He achieved the goals he and his team, sponsored by Bellator Recruiting Academy, set for his first NASCAR race, finishing, earning seat time and brining the car back in clean, and now he and his team will fine-tune the mistakes in hopes of placing higher in his next race.

“I think the best compliment I got was I showed a lot of patience and I showed a lot of talent, even though it didn’t quite reflect with the 28th finish,” he recalled. “The team has a lot of high hopes in me, and we’re hoping to get some stuff put together for next year and hopefully run a lot more.”