Arguably the wildest CARS Tour championship battle ever moves north to Langley Speedway in Virginia for the VisitHampton125.com this weekend.
Nine drivers are within a race of each other, remarkable because this will be the seventh race of the season and no one has separated themselves from the pack. Two-time and reigning champion Carson Kvpail missed a race to make his Xfinity Series debut but also got spun out of the top-five over the weekend.
Everyone else has used at least two mulligans due to attrition and also trying to learn this new Hoosier ST1 and ST2 tire combination.
“It’s made this points battle is weird, it is so weird,” said three-time champion Bobby McCarty. “Like, I really believe this is going to be the highest average finish for the champion. I don’t see anyone having a top-four average and winning the championship like we have the past several years.”
New points leader Brenden Queen is up to 8.0 after winning on Saturday at Tri-County and Connor Hall is sitting at 7.33 after his first bad finish of the year.
“Hopefully we’ve got some of our bad races out of our system and we can start making (Hall) sweat a little bit the rest of the way,” Queen said.
- Brenden Queen
- Connor Hall -5
- Brent Crews -11
- Mini Tyrrell -12
- Bobby McCarty -20
- Treyten Lapcevich -22
- Ryan Millington -22
- Carson Kvapil -23
- Chad McCumbee -28
- Deac McCaskill -48
So next up is Langley where Queen and Hall both have wins in the past two years but previous season notebooks mean nothing thanks to the new tire combination.
Track: Langley Speedway
Location: Langley, Va.
Length: .400 miles
Laps: 125
CARS LMSC Tour races: 5
LMSC Langley Speedway winners: Connor Hall, Brenden Queen, Kaden Honeycutt, Layne Riggs, Deac McCaskill.
Late Model Stock Entry List: #03 Brenden Queen, #04 Ronnie Bassett Jr., #08 Deac McCaskill, #1 Andrew Grady, #2 Brandon Pierce, #2w Matt Waltz, #6 Bobby McCarty, #8 Carson Kvapil, #11 Buddy Isles Jr., #15 Ryan Millington, #16 Chad McCumbee, #21 Tyler Tomassi, #22 Connor Hall, #23 Kade Brown, #24 Cody Dempster, #29 Brent Crews, #44 Conner Jones, #45 Bryce Applegate, #55 Gavan Boschele, #62 Landen Lewis, #71 Katie Hettinger, #77 Treyten Lapcevich, #81 Mini Tyrrell, #95 Jacob Heafner
Quotables
“We’ve won a lot of races there lately and it’s always good to get back home. I really need a race there after how (Tri-County) went so we can hopefully turn some of this around.” -Connor Hall
“Really looking forward to it. It’s been one of my best race tracks. I’ve almost won the Hampton Heat twice. I’ve got a second and third there. I was looking forward to Tri-County. We tested on Thursday and felt like we had a really good car. We did have a really good car but track position was super key. But really excited to get to Langley and luck permitting, we can finally turn this around.” -Brandon Pierce
“I’ve ran good there. Two runs there and finished ninth and 10th with how good we’ve been on speed, top-10 everywhere we go, maybe we can go there and shock the world.” -Andrew Grady
“With these tires, our notebooks mean nothing. You throw a setup on that worked for you here in the past and it doesn’t do anything. So Langley is going to be interesting, high tire wear, abrasive, no notebook.” -Bobby McCarty
