Schrader began operating his own team in 1987, entering the then-Busch Series with the No. 45 Red Baron Pizza Ford Thunderbird at North Carolina Speedway, where he qualified 21st and finished 5th one lap down. Switching to the No. 52 and Chevrolet machinery in 1988 under Exxon sponsorship, the team ran ten races with two top-five finishes. By 1989, Schrader had recorded his first Busch Series win at Dover, and subsequent seasons brought additional sponsorship partnerships including Kodiak and AC Delco.
In 1992, with AC Delco as title sponsor, Schrader achieved a career-best 29th-place points finish in the Busch Series. He won again in 1994 at Talladega Superspeedway, one of two top-five results that season. The team withdrew from the Busch Series after 1995, though it briefly returned in 2001 and 2002 with limited Cup attempts under the No. 07.
KSR entered the Craftsman Truck Series in its inaugural 1995 season, with Schrader driving the No. 52 Chevrolet Silverado sponsored by AC Delco. In seven starts that year he won at Saugus Speedway. The team's Truck effort grew in subsequent seasons through a series of driver rotations: Tobey Butler in 1996, Mike Wallace from mid-1997 through 1998 (posting eleven top-tens in 1998), and rookie Scott Hansen in 1999, who earned a second-place finish in the NASCAR Rookie of the Year standings.
The team scaled back to part-time Truck competition from 2000 onward, running Schrader alongside Lyndon Amick and later Mike Wallace in shared arrangements. Schrader posted a second-place Truck finish at Darlington in 2001. The team returned in 2008 with a fourth-place finish in the first race back, and made additional appearances at the Eldora Speedway Mudsummer Classic dirt race from 2013 through 2016. At the 2013 Eldora event, Schrader won the pole position, becoming the oldest pole-sitter in NASCAR history at the time.
During 1990, KSR made its first NASCAR Winston Cup appearance when Brian Ross drove the team's No. 58 Pontiac at Pocono Raceway, finishing 27th after an engine failure. The team also fielded a pair of Cup races in 1996, with Jack Sprague driving a Pedigree Petfoods-sponsored Pontiac Grand Prix to a best finish of 23rd at Phoenix.
The ARCA Menards Series became the team's primary competitive platform in later years. KSR ran full ARCA seasons with Matt Kurzejewski in 2016, earning a third-place points finish while picking up Menards as a sponsor, and with Austin Theriault in 2017, when the team won seven races and Theriault captured the ARCA championship.
Sponsorship difficulties constrained the team from 2018 onward. Will Rodgers drove for KSR on a part-time basis in 2018 and 2019, and Bret Holmes filled in for races at Iowa the same year. In 2020, the team partnered with Fury Race Cars to field Natalie Decker in the No. 52 at Daytona ahead of her Truck Series appearance. After that season, Schrader announced the closure of the ARCA operation — ending the team's stock car activities for the first time since 1990 — while preserving its dirt racing program.
Over more than three decades, Ken Schrader Racing embodied the owner-driver model prevalent in American short-track and stock car culture. The team's No. 52 became a consistent presence across NASCAR's developmental ladder, producing competitive results at multiple levels while operating with modest resources. The 2017 ARCA championship under Theriault stood as the team's most significant title, crowning a period of sustained effort in a series where KSR remained active long after withdrawing from NASCAR's higher-profile divisions.