Hickory Motor Speedway standout Dylon Wilson will be making his debut in the Championship Auto Racing Series (CARS) in Saturday night’s Catawba Valley 250 at Hickory Motor Speedway in Newton, North Carolina.
Wilson, 20, will be racing a Late Model Stock Car in his first of what he hopes will be several starts on the tour this season. Wilson has plenty of experience at Hickory, having scored two wins in the Limited Late Model division at Hickory last season. Up until now, Wilson has been running at Hickory in preparation for the CARS Tour.
“I think we’re ready to go,” Wilson said. “I wanted to start racing the CARS Tour earlier this year, maybe at Orange County. We ended up just messing around at Hickory and getting our stuff together but I think we have a good shot at it. We’re looking forward to it. We’ll see how it goes.”
Wilson has raced in a Straight-Rail chassis before, most notably when he attempted to make the field for the Snowflake 100 at Five Flags Speedway in Pensacola, Florida last winter. He says he considered running both the Late Model and Super Late Model races but, for now, he’s focusing all his efforts on the Late Model Stock Car side.
“We were thinking about doing double duty but for the first time around we’ll just run Late Models,” Wilson stated. “Maybe next time we’ll run double duty. We just wanted to put our focus on Late Models.”
After watching Brayton Haws win at Orange County Speedway running a conventional setup, Wilson says he too will stick with a conventional setup for Hickory.
“With Brayton winning, it gives me confidence in it because we bounced around between running between running them but Brayton and a few other guys running it, we’ll be fine,” Wilson explained. “One of the guys in the CARS Tour runs the Ford Crate and we have a Chevy crate but, at Hickory, with it being 85 degrees, the least amount of grip possible at Hickory, the weather, it’s not going to be a horsepower race, it will be all chassis. We’ll see what happens and who can stay out of trouble the longest.
“We’ll pace ourselves a little bit here,” Wilson continued. “Just really want to focus. There are a lot of really good cars coming. We have to make sure we make the damn race first. That’s the main deal. We have a good car. We’re a regular at Hickory. We’ll just try to get the job done.”
After the race at Hickory, Wilson hopes to compete in more CARS Tour races and also hopes to make some trips to Greenville-Pickens Speedway (Easley, South Carolina) and Wake County Speedway (Raleigh, North Carolina) during the summer months.
“The last few weeks, we’ve been trying to save up money,” Wilson remarked. “Depending on how Saturday goes, we might run the majority of the CARS Tour races and we’ll travel around. I’d like to go to Greenville, Wake County and I love racing on worn out tracks especially during the summer. We picked up three wins in the dead heat of summer.”
RACE22.com will have “Up to the Minute” coverage presented by Five Star Race Car Bodies from the CARS Tour Catawba Valley 250 at Hickory Motor Speedway on Twitter. In addition to RACE22.com’s coverage, RACEFEEDX.com will have live streaming video coverage of the race.
