Harvick wins Wilkesboro; Maier and RWR claim championships

Keelan Harvick won the CARS Pro Late Model Tour championship race at North Wilkesboro while Ben Maier claimed the drivers championship and Rick Ware Racing claimed the owners championship.

Luke Baldwin started on pole in his Rick Ware Racing No. 51 and Keelan started second. Kevin Harvick started third but fell out early with mechanical issues, letting Keelan claim another win in the Harvick Cup.

Baldwin led every lap until 11 laps to go, when Keelan made the pass on the inside in turns three and four. Harvick was able to get to Baldwin’s rear bumper a few laps before that, and after a side by side battle for three laps, Keelan cleared him and was able to claim the checkered flag.

It is his fourth win this year and his third in a row.

“It was really fun battling with Luke,” Keelan said. “He’s really fun to race with, and I just can’t thank all my Rackley W.A.R. guys [enough]. It wouldn’t be possible without them to come to the racetrack and have a fast car. It’s really cool to [win and] just be a part of this track.”

Late in the race, Keelan found a groove on the bottom of turns three and four to find the extra speed he needed to get past Baldwin.

“I found a line on the bottom of three and four,” Keelan said. “It just really hooked around the corner, and I think that’s what the edge was of me passing him. We were pretty even in one and two, and just three and four, I could just wrap the line a little bit better than him.”

Even though he is only 13-years-old, he has shown a lot of maturity in his race craft, something he credits his competition and his dad for.

“It just comes from racing around the right people like Luke and everybody who has a lot of that skill,” Keelan said. “To learn from them, that’s what I think has [helped me] excel.”

Kevin added on, “He knows his dad will kick his ass if he runs [someone] over on purpose”

Maier claims drivers championship

When Maier took the green for the 100-lap race, he clinched the drivers championship. Maier finished fourth, just behind the leaders.

Even though he didn’t score a win this year, seven top tens, two of which were runner-ups, and only two DNFs was enough to claim the title over Brandon Lopez.

“It’s amazing,” Maier said. “The guys put in as much work as anybody else here and even more to get me out of here and get the car as fast as it is. We struggled a little bit on long run, especially the high grip tracks like this but on old pavement we were definitely really strong.

“We were good at Ace, Caraway, Anderson. We were really fast at but just unfortunate things happened like getting wrecked or just stupid stuff. It was unfortunate we didn’t get a win but we’re really fortunate to have won the championship.

“Getting a championship is definitely better than getting a win. We won at the beginning of the year at Cordele [in] my first ever Pro race so that was a pretty big deal. I’d say it was pretty good competition, pretty much CARS Tour caliber competition so that was really good, It sucks we didn’t get a win in the CARS Tour but unfortunate things happen. Can’t really do anything about that but it was a really good season overall.”

Maier credits his Setzer Racing Development team fro helping him get up to speed so quickly when he had little experience in a Late Model.

“It was definitely amazing just getting the experience since I never really ran ovals before this,” Maier said. “It was awesome. I got race craft experience on ovals, just all kinds of stuff that I couldn’t learn anything else and I’m very appreciative for that.”

2026 is still uncertain for him, but he is working on finalizing his plans for next year.

“We’re still trying to work it out,” Maier said. “Most people have their stuff figured out by now but when you don’t have as much funding as a lot of other people it’s a lot more difficult to find rides. So we’re trying to figure out funding and what we can do to get in as much racing as we can next year.”

Rick Ware Racing wins owners championship

Even though Baldwin lost the lead late in the race and finished second, it was more than enough to clench the owners championship for Rick Ware Racing.

The team scored three wins on the season. Baldwin won at Orange County and Anderson, while Carson Ware won at Ace. Baldwin was happy to be able to bring the title home for Rick Ware.

“I feel great,” Baldwin said. “Rick Ware and Lisa Ware gave me a great opportunity to come run these late models for RWR and Troy Smith and everybody in the shop are just badass. That and the 7VA are the two best race cars I’ve ever driven. Seems like every time we unload we have a car to compete and we don’t have to do much to it to get it where it needs to be. It was cool. It was a fun race.”

“There probably was more than I could [have done],” Baldwin said about losing the lead to Keelan late in the race. “I know exactly what groove he was talking about and I was trying to hit it and I missed it a couple times and that’s kind of what got me. I think lap cars kind of didn’t help us out either but Keelan did a great job and did everything the right way. Props to him. 

“He’s going to be a good little race car driver. He already is a good little race car driver. It was fun racing with him and unfortunately he just beat me. There’s probably more I [could have done] like you said but that’s how it drove.”

Baldwin said he felt the pressure heading into the race to claim the owners championship.

“After qualifying I felt a lot of pressure because I knew our race car was really good and I was the only one that could mess it up,” Baldwin said. “I did enough to get it done. Unfortunately I gave it away to [Keelan] but it’s special. It was a lot of pressure, probably more pressure than I’ve dealt with in the past two years of racing so I’m glad we came out of it positive”

Rick Ware was very excited about winning the championship.

“Oh, it’s awesome,” Ware said. “This series is extremely competitive. We struggled the first quarter of the season, just getting our bearings and learning what we need to do. Anytime you can win a championship, especially a championship at this level – it’s not easy. “We came into here only four points ahead so it wasn’t over until the last lap. Anything, any issue [could have happened] race related or mechanical it was still a question mark.”

It wasn’t even certain that the team would race the full-season early on, but things came together to allow them to finish out the year with multiple drivers.

“When we started, we just went to a race or two,” Ware said. “We had a totally different program with cars. We didn’t get our FURY [chassis] until about six or seven races in. We had to make decisions on who was available that we figured could do the job. Harrison Burton was track champion at South Boston that made sense and he was available to do it. Cody [Ware] ran a few times [when ot] didn’t conflict with his schedule, Luke was available around some of the modified stuff that he was doing. 

We just kind of picked and chose five different guys throughout the season because we didn’t know at the start of the year that we were going to run full-time. My goal was to slowly build up and about North Wilkesboro [earlier this year] we [decided] we were going to go full-time. So when we won at Orange County with Luke and then we won with Carson at Ace, we were right in the hunt or took the lead in points and then we had to be like, ‘well, maybe we need to look at this thing.’ So we kind of had to build the plan while it was still in the air.”

Ware says they will have a full-time car in the CARS Pro Late Model Tour next year, and maybe even two.

“We’ve had a lot of people interested in possibly having us run a car for them,” Ware said. “I’m not sure what we’re gonna do. I’m gonna say for sure we’re gonna run for an owner’s championship next year. We may run a second car part-time just to kind of have it be an all-star car because some of the people that we know and the other divisions that would love to come race.

“We’re gonna be here. We’re gonna have to step our game up dramatically to even match what we’ve done this year because that’s just the nature the beast. We don’t take anything for granted. We had some fortune when other people had some misfortune. So next year is going to be way harder to do. We’re just gonna have to be on our A-game. I don’t want to stretch us too thin because we are a small company and we do a lot for our sponsors.

“The one thing that we need to do is go race somewhere. We need to be able to win races and chase championships and we can do that in Supercross and flat track and top fuel and here with the Pro Late Model.”

The full finishing results can be viewed below.

zMAX CARS Pro Late Model Tour
North Wilkesboro Speedway
October 18, 2025

1. #62 Keelan Harvick
2. #51 Luke Baldwin
3. #44 Conner Jones
4. #6 Ben Maier
5. #6L Brandon Lopez
6. #61 Evan McKnight
7. #68 Aidan Potter
8. #88 T.J. DeCaire
9. #17J Jake Johnson
10. #7 Treyten Lapcevich
11. #24 Jade Avedisian
12. #25 Isaac Kitzmiller
13. #97 Dylan Garner
14. #22 Dusty Garus
15. #8C Terri Crider
16. #47 Tyler Reif
17. #74 Rodney Dowless
18. #4 Trey Burke
19. #9 Ashton Higgins
20. #82 Taylor Hull
21. #97K Jason Kitzmiller
22. #17M Taylor Mayhew
23. #29 Kevin Harvick