Compelling CARS Tour racing product is close to crossing a line says drivers

The CARS Tour race on Friday at Ace Speedway encapsulated everything good and bad about the current direction of Late Model Stock Car competition.

It doesn’t matter if it’s the regional tour or Virginia Triple Crown but these races have a distinct identity right now. They are all compelling barnburners, feature a lot of side-by-side battles, and many of those end with someone getting crashed.

Every race.

On Friday night at Ace, Brenden Queen and Ryan Millington had a prolonged side-by-side battle that eventually turned a little ugly. Nearly a dozen cars were sent to the rear at some point because they were either spun or caused the spinning.

Millington and Connor Hall had a similar duel at Hickory and it ended with a final lap dive bomb and disqualification. Ronnie Bassett Jr. was awarded the win.

The Hampton Heat 200 saw Queen and Hall trade bump and runs, their spotters argued about it during the caution, with Butterbean ultimately winning the race. Queen said he wasn’t going to be denied over how he felt Hall raced him during the CARS Tour race at Langley earlier in the summer.

That race featured a three-wide finish, by the way.

The race at North Wilkesboro saw a massive pile-up that destroyed a half dozen cars. Corey Heim was flipped upside down at Caraway, a race which also saw the continuation of a three-year Hall versus Carson Kvapil rivalry.

There has just been a massive amount of carnage in these races.

As team owner and car builder Marcus Richmond, of R&S Race Cars, points out, CARS Tour used to be where Late Model Stock teams went to race because they knew series officials prioritized clean racing and drivers raced accordingly.

“The biggest thing for me is that CARS Tour used to be the cleanest racing out there,” Richmond said. “Everyone used to love to come CARS Tour racing because of the clean racing.

“So a couple of things here, and I’m probably going to get criticized for saying this, but there are a lot more young kids in the series right now, which is okay because it brings money and gives people jobs and everything but the kids do not respect it like some of the older drivers do and can’t pass clean.”

That’s problem number one as the former Snowball Derby winning crew chief and NASCAR veteran sees it. The other is the new Hoosier ST2s, which were introduced this season.

“It doesn’t fall off and you can’t pass,” Richmond said. “Nobody. So, what are you going to do? You’re going to hit them and knock them out of the way. That’s the only way you can pass somebody right now. We’ve seen that at Hickory. We’ve seen it at Ace. We’ve seen it at quite a few places and I think that’s been the biggest problem.”

Fellow car owner, but also one of the greatest Late Model Stock drivers of all-time, Lee Pulliam agrees with some of that but also isn’t sure this has reached a crisis point. 

“A lot of it is the pressure being placed on the young drivers for wanting to win and take the next step,” Pulliam said. “It’s ratcheted everything up and it’s hard for the series directors and whatnot.”

Pulliam said he felt bad for Millington at Hickory because he understood why he felt the need to come back after Hall for their earlier contact.

“But I also get the CARS Tour for making calls like that because these cars cost a ton of money to build,” Pulliam said. “Car counts are an issue everywhere right now. Everyone has a tighter wallet than they’ve had in the past and it costs more to do it and less money to do it with and that’s why they have to make calls like that.”

At the same time, Pulliam says everyone who enjoys Late Model Stock racing is spoiled in terms of entertainment.

“We have some of the best races in the country every week with this group of racers,” Pulliam added. “We move each other, and they’re saving race cars that most short trackers couldn’t think of hanging onto and saving. So, I think we’re spoiled.

“We can have this conversation but we also need to have the conversation about how great the racing is right now. The series is doing their best to control some of it and I think they’re doing a good job to make sure lines aren’t being crossed.”

To wit, CARS Tour series director Kip Childress addressed the racing product before the race at Wilkesboro just to remind his current roster there is a line.

How drivers feel

Mini Tyrell, who has raced on the Tour for almost a decade, says the meeting with Childress and other series leaders was productive and clear, even if there is still a lot of room for improvement.

“I don’t know if I’m supposed to elaborate on that publicly,” Tyrrell said, “but he more or less told us, ‘Hey, let’s stop running over each other and start showing these people that we’re professionals and this is a professional racing series and can pass each other with respect.’

“But at the same time, we just left a freshly paved track like Wilkesboro where it was super hard to pass, with just one dominant line and the only way to get around someone is to rough them up a little bit. And that’s just how this season has gone overall.

“I do think, though, that the respect factor has been thrown out the window with how people are racing each other this year.”

Bobby McCarty, a three-time champion on the tour, says he blames the new tires more than young racers.

“A lot of these kids like Brent Crews, and the rest of them, they race a lot of other cars and you don’t see that kind of racing,” McCarty said. “It’s these tires, man.

“We don’t get the same serial number from week-to-week and we’re spending two grand to get a mystery set of tires and are doing their R&D and that’s not right.”

He had a lot to say about tires, and that’s a separate story for another day, but McCarty adamantly believes the grip level and lack of falloff inherent to the ST2 promotes this kind of racing.

“I haven’t see a race this year that didn’t have rooting and gouging and just knocking people three grooves up the race track,” McCarty said. “That’s not racing man. I don’t get it at all.

“And it’s these tires that were built in three months and could have been handled better. We’re spending 20 to 30 grand to get here, to have tires that have no support, and then they don’t allow you to even race, manage and pass on them. That’s not right, man.”

Bassett Jr. expressed the exact same sentiment.

“I think it comes down to this tire, honestly,” Bassett said. “There’s not any more riding or saving. You used to have to manage your tires and then you could pass if you did a better job of it by the end.

“Now, at the end of the day, everybody’s running within a half a tenth of each other. So it’s just really hard to pass all race. It’s like Cup racing where everyone runs within a tenth of each other and can’t pass. There’s no fall off and track position becomes key.”

Many of the duels this year have featured Hall versus Queen. There is an unmistakable rivalry there, and history that dates back years, and that has fueled the way they race each other more than tires or any other determining factor.

“Say what you will about me and Connor but I just feel like I race the way that I get raced,” Queen said. “And he never wrecked me. I gave him what he gave me first and we didn’t wreck each other. So I’m good with that and I’m good with being moved.

“Take what happened between me and Mini at Wilkesboro. I shouldn’t have pulled up behind him on pit road and it made me look like I was madder than I was. All I really wanted to talk about was being pushed up into the marbles, three lanes up the race track.

“I just wanted to say that I’d take finishing third over second if it meant pushing me in the marbles and risk tearing up one of Lee’s cars.”

The most even-keeled take, predictably, came from Brandon Pierce, who has raced this series for almost a decade and is a definition Late Model Stock lifer.

He says that everything that’s been brought up is a factor. Yes, there are younger drives and this is a far more durable tire and that’s a cocktail for intensity.

“There are some young racers, they are racing for their next shot, and everyone knows who it is and they’ve raised the aggression level for all of us,” Pierce said. “But there are several rivalries in this series right now, some disputes that have been building over the whole season, or several season, and they always race each other hard and it leads here.

“And I’m guilty of it too, right? There’s a line that every race car driver knows is there. We all have the same tools, our brain, for reaching that conclusion of how close to that line we want to get. And oftentimes, how far to the line you want to get is based on how close to the line the other guy came to you, and that’s fair.

“Any short track driver will tell you that but it’s also true that these races are harder to win than ever before. And if you have a chance to win in this series, with how big it has grown the last couple of years, a sort of desperation sets in where you will do whatever it takes to not let it slip away.”

At the same time, he’s also grateful that Childress is trying to put CARS Tour drivers in check because he concedes that the entire roster is getting really close to the line.

“Kip came down on us at Wilkesboro and told us to clean it up,” Pierce said. “He’s right and I agree with everything he said. I do think it’s starting to get overboard and the only reason the cars aren’t ending up into the wall are the talented drivers behind the wheel. There would be more junked race cars if it wasn’t this group driving them.

“But it’s crossing the line, even if it’s not gotten ugly yet. We are flirting all over that line, and if we cross that line, it’s going to impact us as a series.”

Like Pulliam, his friend, mentor and former team owner, Pierce agrees that the racing is compelling to compete in, watch and discuss on his Big Time Auto Racing podcast but they, again, are just getting too close to the line in which it starts to become a negative.

“We don’t want that,” Pierce said. “No one does — racers, media, the series. CARS Tour has presented us such a great stage to be on and it gives us the flexibility to handle things wherever our moral compass points us.

“But right now, and we’re all human, there are too many instances where we start to see red and we have forgotten to use common sense. It needs to be addressed and even after our meeting at Wilkesboro, I don’t think the message landed. There’s probably going to be another one, something that happens.”

And there was.