DAYTONA BEACH, Fla.: Entering his NASCAR Xfinity Series rookie season, Carson Kvapil would debut his season on the 2.5-mile big stage of Daytona International Speedway.
With qualifying being cancelled, the JR Motorsports driver would begin the United Rentals 300 from the tenth position based on the NASCAR rulebook.
Going green for the start of Stage 1, Kvapil would unfortunately have only a few laps before the caution would wave for a multi-car incident on the backstretch.
The driver of the No.1 Bass Pro Shops/Clarience Tech Chevrolet would get collected in the melee and received some significant damage to his car.
However, his team would tell him to bring it to pit road and they would get him a new bumper, seal up the deck and pull the fender away from the left rear tire that was slightly rubbing.
Kvapil would return to the track letting the team know that there was smoke coming into the car from the tire and he would return to pit road where they would finish up fixing his car, returning him once more to the field in the 35th position.
Finishing the first stage in the 24th place, Kvapil tells the team that the “Car seems fine. I don’t really have much to complain about.” With that being said the team comes up with a plan to move forward and leaves the JR Motorsports driver out on the track.
Starting from the 23rd position in Stage 2, Kvapil would need to claw his way through the field. At times the racing got extremely intense, but the Rookie of the Year contender kept his head down and worked his way up to the 14th place by the end of the stage even though he told his team that his car was extremely loose.
Bringing their driver to pit road on Lap 61, the team went to work giving Kvapil a new set of Goodyear Tires, fuel, 2 rounds out of the right rear as well as them taking the track bar down.
Returning to the field in the 15th place in the third and final stage, the tension is high, but crew chief Andrew Overstreet let’s his driver know that “Everything is good with the car. Stay with our teammates.” On Lap 88 a wreck ensued when several drivers were coming to pit road which gave the team time to bring Kvapil down pit road for tires, fuel and an air pressure adjustment as the No.1 Chevrolet was building tight.
Working his way back through the field, Kvapil made it up to ninth place before another caution would come out for a multi-car accident in turn two.
Several more cautions and close calls would happen before coming to the conclusion of the United Rentals 300. Barely scraping through the accident on Lap 113 the team asked, “How are you?” to which Kvapil replied, “All good”.
With NASCAR Overtime on deck to conclude the race and taking advantage of his position in the field, Kvapil came home in the fourth place, the highest finishing driver of the rookie class.
“That was cool!” said Kvapil. “I feel a whole lot more confident about this kind of racing now.”
The Mooresville, NC native was impressed that the team had gotten him back into contention to win at Daytona International Speedway.
“We started out with that little crash there coming off two I think it was and it just kinda put us back in a hole a little bit. We kept having to pit and fix it and stuff like that and I was looking in the mirror and it didn’t look too good.”
Even with all the back and forth with the car and track position, the young driver was pleased with his day. “There towards the end it all just find of started working out and we started moving up.”
Topping it all off as he got out of his car, the first person to call him was his boss, Dale Earnhardt Jr, congratulating him on a job well done on his first ever race at Daytona International Speedway.
Next up for Kvapil will be the Bennett Transportation and Logistics 250 on Saturday February 22, 2025 at 5pm E.T. Follow Grace Krenrich on X (formerly known as Twitter) and Threads @grace3140 or email at mailto:[email protected].
