Carson Kvapil is ready for the big time after winning Martinsville

You don’t have to be a NASCAR insider to know what’s coming next.  

Just pay attention.

Carson Kvapil is going NASCAR racing next season, and with his victory on Saturday night in the ValleyStar Credit Union 300 at Martinsville Speedway, he will bring with him to the second highest level in the discipline every significant prize Late Model Stock Car racing has to offer.

The second-generation racer has won at North Wilkesboro, has two CARS Tour championships, and now has a Ridgeway Grandfather Clock. The expectations were quite high following Josh Berry at the JR Motorsports Late Model program but he has done nothing but match him over the past three years.

“When I first started, I was nervous, because I didn’t think I could live up to Josh’s reputation,” Kvapil said. “Late Model Stock racing is super cutthroat and that JR Motorsports would always have good cars but I also knew that Josh was exceptionally good.”

You know who did believe Kvapil could be just as good?

LW Miller, whose son Wyatt raced at the Millbridge Speedway dirt track alongside the Kvapils, believed it. Some combination of Miller, Kelley Earnhardt-Miller and Dale Earnhardt Jr. believed it between the hands-on dirt success and what Kvapil was doing in the CARS Super Late Model Tour driving their family car.

“I told Dale, I am holding him back,” said Travis Kvapil. “It’s just me and him working on these cars and he is so good but he just needs the infrastructure to be something really special and they must have believed it too.”

Miller introduced the younger Kvapil to Dale Jr. at Millbridge and a couple of weeks after that conversation, when Berry had another Xfinity Series opportunity, they already had their next driver in mind.

But really, the younger Kvapil is more than just a driver and that is what makes him such a deserving prospect to make this jump, because he knows his Late Model Stock like the back of his hand. Before he drove the car full-time, he worked on them, and is still just as vital a crew member as crew chief Bryan Shaffer.

His dad, again, shared a story of the young racer he raised.

“So, during practice, we had transmission trouble and Carson jumps out of the car and dives under it,” the elder Kvapil said. “The same thing happened after the heat when we got tangled up; he’s running the string bars and the toe, tape measure, all that.

“He knows what he’s doing.”

And the same is true of younger brother, Caden, who is coming right up behind him.

“I told my boys,” their dad said, “that if we are going to do this, I can afford the Legends and Bandoleros, but if we’re going to travel with Late Models, we’re going to have to do all of it, because I can’t afford the check to have someone else do it.

“It still costs a lot of money and we’ve made a big investment in our boys the last couple of years but it’s so rewarding the way they do it. Carson builds the bump stops, the springs and he could 100 percent build this whole car. To do it this way, and have success doing it, is way more rewarding than carrying your helmet through the tunnel.”

That’s the caliber of racer that JR Motorsports has in Kvapil.   

“He’s really good,” Shaffer said. “He was really good right from the start and he’s not going to have any trouble making it.”

With Kvapil poised to move on, that’s what made this weekend so important, because it was the one missing line item on his resume.

“This is the one I really wanted bad,” Kvapil said. “My days are numbered, I guess you could say, so it’s one we really wanted to do together.”

And Mike Looney, the 2016 race winner, really made him earn it too. It’s the sort of epic way anyone would want to win this race, fending off a previous winner over a series of head-to-head restarts and after a 50 lap-plus long duel.

“I would have done whatever it took,” Looney said.

Kvapil said he believed him too, saying it was for a grandfather clock, and it was just a testament to how big of race this is that even the cleanest racer in the field was willing to use the bumper if that’s what it took to win Martinsville.

But it’s also reflective of what the past three years have taught him too.

“This Late Model Stock racing is so much harder than it looks,” Kvapil said. “To win a CARS Tour race is huge, so to win championships is even bigger obviously, and this race is a championship within itself. These race cars are incredibly technical.

“This stuff is actually really hard and it prepared me really well for the bigger cars.”