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NASCAR Advance Auto Parts Weekly Series

NASCAR national champion Connor Hall preaching patience and resilience

“If you told me the day after the banquet last year that I would have tried this again, I would have told you that you were insane. Never.”

And yet the insanity is palpable, not only because Connor Hall has successfully earned back-to-back Advance Auto Parts NASCAR Weekly Series National Championships, but also because he is the current CARS Tour points leader and Virginia Triple Crown championship leader entering the biggest Late Model Stock race of the season.

The ValleyStar Credit Union 300 at Martinsville Speedway.

“This race is not really part of a series,” Hall said. “I don’t come here to points race. I want to win a grandfather clock. If I can’t do that, then yes, I want to maximize my race and make the most of any other scenario.

“But really, when you look back at recent history, usually if you take home the clock, you are more than likely the Triple Crown champion too.”

But again, it’s absolutely wild that Hall is in the spot to begin with.

He was committed to a CARS Tour championship run with Nelson Motorsports and maybe his personal car would come out every now and then at Langley Speedway, his home track, but once the success with it continued into 2024, Hall couldn’t help himself.

“So, after the banquet, we stripped our national championship car down to the bare chassis and tried to add a percent here and there and just wanted it to be a little bit better,” Hall said. “And before long, it’s sitting on the surface plate for the first time and it looks perfect and it’s easy to want to race it, right?”

His earliest races that counted towards NASCAR national points actually came with the Nelson No. 22 team as they entered the Florence Icebreaker and Southern National’s March Speed Week with the goal of preparing for a CARS Tour championship run.

But those races, with full fields, counted all the same for NASCAR points and Hall captured the national championship representing both the Nelson program and his personal No. 77 car that primarily got raced at Langley and Hickory.

The championship was won with 18 wins.

Longtime agent, promoter and racing everyman Joey Dennewitz left Spire Sports + Entertainment to serve as NASCAR’s Managing Director for weekly and touring divisions in 2023 and Hall is the only champion he has known thus far.

“Connor is as automatic as they come,” Dennewitz said. “Not only behind the wheel of a Late Model, where he is literally one of the best in his era to do it but also with whatever we ask him to do. He always picks up the phone and is just an incredible ambassador for NASCAR and the Advance Auto Parts Weekly Series.”

And to that point, Hall has always aspired to have that reputation. Like anyone with his recent winning percentage, he is starting to get booed a little more than he is comfortable with but accepts for the right reasons.

“I mean, obviously, it’s great to be liked by people of that regard, it really is, but my goal when I first started this whole national championship thing the first time was that I wanted to be respected.

“In my early Late Model career, I had decent levels of success. I had some weekly series wins and a couple of big shows but I wanted to do something to separate me from the 95 percent of weekly racers.”

While Hall, 27, certainly still has national touring ambitions, he also says he wasn’t ever driven by his ‘draft stock’

“I grew up watching Philip Morris race,” Hall said of the four-time NASCAR national champion. “That’s who I wanted to be. He was this super decorated, incredibly successful short track racer that everyone respected.

“Lee Pulliam, Josh Berry. I want to go to the race track with my son one day and have people say, ‘yeah, that’s Connor Hall, he accomplished X, Y and Z.’ To me, I gauge myself on ‘where am I to those other great national champions?’

Again, Hall still likes to believe he can reach the Cup Series because what top level race car driver in any discipline doesn’t? But the difference between 24-year-old Connor Hall and the one of today, three years later is that he is older, wiser and also more accepting of whatever will be, will be.

“We started winning a lot more big races but once you tell the 30th team you don’t have the money to go national touring racing, then the calls stop coming,” Hall said. “It took some time but I realized that I’m still luckier than 99 percent of America because I get to work on and drive a race car.

“So, then I decided I wanted to be the absolute best Late Model Stock driver I could be. If this is my pinnacle, I wanted to maximize it.

“I didn’t want to spend all my effort stuck in a negative mindset, worrying about all the what ifs and how I needed to make an opportunity happen because that was like a 1.1 percent chance for where I was at back then.”

Hall said he grew up a lot in that three -ear stretch, dedicated himself more to relationship building and the mechanical engineering aspect of the business. What he learned is that this approach had a longer runway for building a racing career than when he was hyper-focused on results at the expense of everything else.

“It’s cliché but it’s also reminder that the top of the mountain looks far away sometimes, and it makes you want to run, when you should be taking your time and looking for the most efficient way to climb it,” he said. “It was like, I could throw my hook over my shoulder and turn around or just keep climbing.”

Chad Bryant, who Hall drove for the previous three seasons, was incredibly instrumental in teaching the young racer patience. Even though they don’t race together right now, Bryant and Hall are still best friends.

“He absolutely changed my life,” Hall said. “Not just the Late Model and Truck Series opportunities or the relationships but in the way I approach racing. He’s been an incredible mentor.

“I used to care so much about what I did behind the wheel that Chad pulled me in and made me realize I could get where I wanted to be but by changing my approach a little bit. I want to considering going back for my mechanical engineering degree. Chad fast tracked a lot of things but mostly making me realize that the 21-year-old me that thought he knew everything was just young and ignorant.”

Hall again pointed to Pulliam who has carved out a successful niche for himself in racing as a crew chief and team owner when he determined, even before turning 40, that this was a more viable path if he wanted to stay in racing.

He also cited Berry, who even while winning races across the Mid-Atlantic also managed JR Motorsports’ driver development program.

“So now, when my blue 77 comes out of the trailer, I take so much pride in it because I’m way more involved in it than I have ever been,” Hall said. “I want to win it behind the wheel but I have so much pride that I’m winning putting my time and what I’ve learned into this car.

“I look at that car and say ‘gosh damn, what a badass race car’ and I want everyone else to think that too. But at the end of the day, I truly believe that my calling in life is to be a race car driver and I have put every ounce and resource from my life into that purpose.”

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.

1 Comment

1 Comment

  1. Ralph Savage

    October 2, 2024 at 4:54 pm

    Great article Matt Weaver! I have followed Connor closely this year and have seen a change in how he drives… much more cautious I think. I am interested to know if you heard him comment on how he got turned around at Martinsville….did he feel it was on purpose or did he just lay back to save for a late run and ended up with aggressive drivers wanting to get to the front? Your articles are always detail so I thought you might know. Thanks RT Savage.

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