As his dad reaches a milestone start in his Sprint Cup Series career, Carson Kvapil will be making his very first NASCAR start. The eight-year-old son of Travis Kvapil will be doing a different kind of racing, though. He’ll compete in the “Battle of the NASCAR Kids” Saturday at Homestead-Miami (Fla.) Speedway.
The tournament will have drivers’ children playing “NASCAR Unleashed,” a newly released racing video game. The event will raise funds for charities, with Carson competing for NASCAR Dreams, a program operated by the NASCAR Foundation that grants wishes at the racetrack to chronically ill children.
The following day, dad Travis Kvapil will make his 175th career Cup start when he takes the green flag in the Ford 400 in the No. 38 Long John Silver’s Ford. He has six starts at the 1.5-mile Florida oval, with a top finish of seventh (2008).
Comments from Travis Kvapil, driver of the No. 38 Long John Silver’s Ford, going into Homestead and ending the season:
“Carson’s ready to go. He’s been practicing and I think he’s got a good shot. But regardless of how it ends, it’ll be fun to go and watch him play and compete for a good cause. We’ve got three kids from Front Row Motorsports competing – Carson, Todd Gilliland and Faith Yeley – so hopefully one of them can grab the checkered flag.
“For the Cup race, it’s definitely going to be a drastic change from Phoenix to Homestead. Being in Phoenix with the new asphalt being laid down, it was very narrow – one and a half, maybe two lanes. And Homestead is quite the opposite. It’s a track where you can run easily three-wide. And there’s four or so lanes you can use. You can run right against the bottom, right against the wall and anywhere in between.
“It’s a great track to end the season on. And it’s a great track to take the championship battle down to the wire, where guys can really race and move around and give themselves a lot of options to make passes. I like Miami and I like that racetrack. It’s a fun place to race because it’s a fast mile-and-a-half racetrack with some good banking to it.
“I feel like the No. 38 team finally got some momentum going over the last six or eight weeks and things have been going good. I’m kind of disappointed the season’s over. I’d kind of like to keep going and run some more races. But, it will be nice to have some time off and enjoy the holidays. Before you know it, it will be time to get back to it.
“A couple months ago, it didn’t look very encouraging that the 38 team was going to make it back to the top 35 by season’s end. More than anything, it was just about not having trouble – not having gears break or things like that that we’ve had happen. We got caught up in a couple wrecks at the beginning of the season and that put us behind. So, we finally had a decent stretch recently where things didn’t go against us.”
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