The Carroll Speedshop tandem of Brandon Pierce and Landon Huffman have a significant chip on their shoulders entering the 2025 CARS Tour season.
After an interview with both of them, Pierce fired off a text that really hammered on the sentiment around their program after a frustration
“Last little tidbit that I didn’t mention on our call … For me in 2025, it’s all about betting on myself and being better. Our performance last year was unacceptable and not the standard that I or the Carrolls hold themselves to. We will be better this year!”
The stat sheet reflects the self-accountability from Pierce. In his first season after moving from Lee Pulliam Performance to work with John and Justin Carroll, Pierce only scored a single top-10 and a 10th place championship finisher.
This is a driver with a CARS Tour win who is usually found inside the top-10 every week until this past year. There was a great deal of misfortune baked into those results but Pierce wasn’t interested in making a lot of excuses this week.
If someone wanted to try, the wacky ST2 tire situation and how it made everyone drive last season was an easy one.
“It was a fiasco,” Pierce said but didn’t want to tie that into his results. Huffman says he never wants to see ST2s ever again, hoping the get buried in the Sahara Desert, but also said responsibility falls on racers for how they drove on them.
At the same time Pierce was going through his trouble, Huffman was going through the worst season of his own career. In the aftermath of not being invited back to Nelson Motorsports, where he delivered the team an Old North State Nationals and nearly won Martinsville, Huffman started the season by failing to qualify into the season opener at Southern National.
Huffman just could not get a handle on the R&S Race Cars chassis owned by Jimmy Mooring but operated out of the Huffman Racing shop in the North Carolina foothills. Those cars have a radically different geometry than other Late Model Stocks and Huffman concluded he just didn’t have the tools to work on those cars.
That effort was short lived and then Huffman tried running the weekly series car he usually runs at Hickory and Tri-County in CARS races and the Tour is just a different level of competition right now. Huffman enjoyed his best success once he paired up with Carroll Speedshop, taking over for the departing Jacob Heafner.
Still, in totality, Huffman and Pierce did not have the seasons they wanted and are very much wearing a degree of swagger in advance of this season.
“I feel like we’re flying under the radar,” Huffman said. “We both had a down year. But I feel optimistic and excited because the Carrolls have always brought competitive cars.
“Last year, was one of their one of their lowest points. It was certainly one of my lowest points. It was a low point for BP too. But I think we can both compete for wins. He’s won in the CARS Tour. I’ve won on the CARS Tour and Justin (Carroll) has won on the Tour.
“We’re building new cars; we have new engines. It’s such a lame cliché but we had our team meeting and we talked about, ‘to finish first, you must first finish,’ but I really believe that’s the key for us. At Nelson, I didn’t have a DNF. It’s not always about raw speed, and especially in CARS Tour right now, these races are about survival. But really, I expect us to be in the top-10 but if we do what we’re supposed to do, we can win races.”
Pierce and Huffman, alongside the Carrolls, is just a group of friends that have done this for a long time. Huffman first met the Carrolls when he just started in Late Models and Justin Carroll came up from behind him in Legend Cars. They have been friends ever since.
Huffman is part of a social circle that includes Pierce and fellow CARS Tour regular Dylon Wilson. That sort of relationship is going to be important to turning Carroll Speedshop around.
“I’m going to be blunt about it — he’s not a distraction,” Pierce said of his teammate. “There are dynamics in racing that sometimes are not a great fit. It takes time for some people to acclimate to each other. He knows what he wants out of his car and we can push each other to be better.
“We are not going to have to overexplain to each other. If we have 30 seconds, getting out of the car, between practice to talk about what we have going on, that’s all we’ll need.”
These are two veteran short track drivers racing for a father-son duo of veteran racers. Huffman likes the dynamic too.
“Teammates aren’t always a good thing in racing,” Huffman said. “But one of the big draws for me is that this is a racing family. We both came up racing the same way. We didn’t have a lot of money and we got the most out of our cars. They have good equipment.
“As far as BP, we have been friends for three years, probably longer. We are going to make each other better. Sometimes a teammate can be a mess but it’s a benefit when it’s the right person. BP is the right person.
“The cost to race on the tour right now is astronomical so if we’re going to have success, we’re going to have to be smarter and work harder, communicate well and we have all of that. I know we have good cars. I’m ready to go.”
Matt Weaver is the owner and founder of Short Track Scene. Weaver grew up in the sport, having raced himself before becoming a reporter in college at the University of South Alabama. He also has extensive experience covering NASCAR, IndyCar and Dirt Sprint Cars.
