CARS Tour Owners Have Big Plans for Series Future

Kevin Harvick slept through it all!

To be fair, the 2014 NASCAR Cup Series champion was on vacation in Italy, but the CARS Tour co-owner was soundly snoring while Bobby McCarty, Carson Kvapil and Brenden Queen closed out one of the best overall races in some time at Dominion Raceway with a finish that will be remembered for an even longer period of time.

“I woke up to my phone having blown up with texts from Dale (Earnhardt Jr.) and Jeff (Burton) so I immediately pulled-up the clip and it was just another example of the fantastic racing we’ve had this season,” Harvick said over the weekend in Nashville. “On the ownership side, this has been a tremendous year, but the racing has been everything we’ve wanted it to be.

“We’ve learned a lot about things we can improve but when the racing is this good, that’s going to make our jobs a lot easier.”

https://twitter.com/FloRacing/status/1670239899990245376

McCarty, the three-time CARS Tour champion, broke an 18-month winless streak, with a three-wide pass under a dueling Kvapil and Queen. It also took winning a drag race down the frontstretch with Queen to seal the deal.

Kvapil was offended that Queen roughed him up to open the door for McCarty in the first place. Queen said it was a fair final laps move because no one wrecked, and McCarty was just relieved that he could still get the job done against a competition level that increases year after year.

Queen really wishes he had won, obviously, but he also recognizes he was part of a significant CARS Tour moment.

“I do, I really do,” Queen said. “We came to this series to put our names on the map and I feel like moments like this, or for me, winning at Wilkesboro, we’re doing a good job of it.”

Watching from home that weekend, his first before returning to the NASCAR on NBC television booth, Earnhardt said the finish left him and brother-in-law L.W. Miller with a spirited debate about the finish.

“I don’t think we had too much of a different opinion,” Earnhardt said. “We both felt the same way about the action on the track, but what L.W. doesn’t have is the same level of (financial) investment in the series.

“I’m sitting there thinking, that was badass that it went viral and everyone was excited about it. What a great race and finish. Bobby winning was a big deal because we need him to be successful and winning as that veteran tough guy. He plays a good role for us, personality wise.”

Earnhardt actually called Queen after the race.

“I said, hey man, a guy passes you clean on the outside, you owe him a little bit more than that,” Earnhardt said of the phone call. “I don’t mind you leaning on a guy a little bit but you owe him a little bit more when he passes you on the outside.

“If (Kvapil) had used him up a little more to get by, than sure, it’s eye-for-an-eye, but he raced him very clean to get by and I just thought he should have raced him a little differently.”

With that said, Earnhardt also recognizes that he wears a lot of different hats as the co-owner of the series, the co-owner of the JR Motorsports car that Kvapil drives and one of the most recognizable faces in motorsports history.

It makes a conversation like that multifaceted.

“I said don’t change who you are because I told you so,” Earnhardt said. “You be who you are and who you want to be on this path of making your career. It was just my own personal advice to him.”

Even though Queen drives for Lee Pulliam Performance, he and Earnhardt became friends last year at the inaugural race at North Wilkesboro. His full-time CARS Tour deal came down between LPP and JR Motorsports. All of that to say that Queen views Earnhardt as something of a mentor, and Earnhardt is invested in Queen as a face of the series, and a driver he wants to see succeed.

“I have an investment in the series,” Earnhardt said. “I told Butterbean this isn’t the last time there will be some sparks between him and Carson and Connor as they battle for this championship. I just wanted to remind him, like I would Carson or Connor (Hall) too, that they have a responsibility to be professional, and smart about what we do, and remember that the world is watching.

“The world sees everything we do, and that’s not literally true but there are a lot of eyes on the CARS Tour right now and Brenden has a great opportunity this year to kick ass and prove that he belongs and deserves an opportunity at the next level.”

Kvapil certainly is anticipating a battle to the end and isn’t sure yet how the on-track relationship with Queen will evolve. There is a great deal of respect between all three of these championship contenders, but they are racing hard with each other every week, and that’s led to on-track moments.

Not just Queen and Kvapil but also Kvapil and Hall over the past 18 months.

“It just depends on how they race me,” Kvapil said. “If we have more of what we had (at Dominion) we’re going to have more than just rubbing doors. I don’t know. We’ll see. I guess it’s up to (Queen) on how far he wants to go with it.”

Juicy.

It’s also a promoters dream, for both Earnhardt and Harvick, in their first year promoting a series to have a variety of winners, storylines and a three-team championship battle emerging. Kyle Larson will make his series debut on Wednesday night at Caraway while Harvick and Earnhardt have both made starts alongside Cup drivers Ross Chastain, Daniel Suarez and Chase Briscoe this season.

Harvick is really pleased, from both and ownership and fan standpoint, about what the series can become moving forward.

“We just want short track racing to keep getting healthier,” Harvick said. “For CARS Tour specifically, we just want it to be the best touring series in the country. That’s the goal.”

Like Harvick, Earnhardt says there are some things to work on, not because the series has any inherent, obvious flaws but because they want it to be as close to perfect as they can make it. Earnhardt hopes to add to the staff, recognizing the huge burden currently placed on founder and president Jack McNelly and operations director Keely Dubensky, with the goal of just making the series more efficient and smoother.

His words.

“We want our weekend policies to be effortless, and that our competitors feel everything is balanced and in order,” Earnhardt said. “We listen to our teams and there are times when things get clunky or they need answers that we don’t immediately have.

“We are making that effort, and without getting into the specifics, what I will say to everyone is that we’re not cruising.

“Yes, we’re having a great season, but we are working behind the scenes to make it better. We are working on tangible things to plug into our series to improve the experience to make it better for our drivers and competitors. The series will be fun for fans no matter what, but I recognize that we need to take care of our drivers, our competitors, and that brings more people to our series. All of that is top of mind.”

READ MORE: Larson and Jeremy Mayfield debut on Wednesday

Harvick said that starting races at the advertised time is something that he and the ownership group, that also includes Burton and Justin Marks, is something that has been on their agenda. CARS Tour generally has two kinds of races — ones where the series rents the tracks and those where the tracks pay a sanctioning fee.

For the latter, tracks tend to add CARS Tour to their local shows, meaning that the main events start whenever their local program begins.

For races at Ace Speedway and Langley Speedway, that was much later than the advertised time and both Harvick and Earnhardt cited that as something they are working on. They both mentioned independently of each other too, a sign that it’s something they collectively recognize as important.

In fact, this interview with Earnhardt had wrapped up but he called the author back over to add a couple of extra points.

Let me add a couple of things

“The Dominion race weekend was an example of how good we can be,” Earnhardt said. “We started closer to our advertised broadcast time and that’s something we’re working with our tracks moving forward.

“We want to make sure that we start at 8 if we saw we’re starting at 8. That’s a frustration for me, because some weekends see us starting late, and we’re working with the tracks on that. The future of the series, the success of the series isn’t just on the attending audience but the streaming audience as well.

“We want to know that if we say the race starts at 9, that fans can turn on FloRacing at 9, and we’re taking the green flag. We haven’t come through with that guarantee every week so that’s one of the things we’re working hard on to make better.”

Harvick made that point too.

“If we say the race is going to start at 8, it needs to be starting at 8 so we have some work to do there,” Harvick said. “We had an hour long call this week about that. And we’re talking through all these things about, ‘yes, we’re having a great season,’ but how can we do some things for next year to make it even better but also consistent for our competitors.

“They’re the reasons CARS Tour is even at this point and we want to make sure it works for them and our fans and we’re working hand-in-hand with them to make this the best series possible.”

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