Jamey Caudill was the winningest driver in UARA-STARS history. That kind of success makes Caudill an early favorite ahead of the series opening race for the Championship Auto Racing Series (CARS) Late Model Stock Tour.
Caudill, 45, from Four Oaks, North Carolina, is a four-time track champion at Southern National Motorsports Park in Lucama, North Carolina – the track that will host the series debut of the CARS Tour. He also had 13 wins in the now-defunct UARA-STARS Series. Now, Caudill’s looking ahead to the CARS Tour with expectations of similar success and a championship bid.
“We’re going to start out running and the plan is to run the whole tour,” Caudill said. “If we don’t have any bad luck and can make it through all the races, I think we’ve got as good a shot at the championship as anybody.”
Caudill competed in several races at the end of the 2014 season, scoring two wins at Southern National Motorsports Park in late-September and then racing in Late Model Stock Car racing’s Triple Crown. Luck did not go Caudill’s way in any of the three big races. Caudill entered the MDCU 300 at Martinsville Speedway with a legitimate chance of winning his second Martinsville Late Model race, but a wreck on the first lap of the heat race took him out of the event.
Luck didn’t go his way in the Autumn Classic at Southern National Motorsports Park or in the Myrtle Beach 400 either. He had a fast car in the Autumn Classic but the race defied history and ran caution free for the entire second half, forcing Caudill, who had been saving tires in anticipation of a late race shootout, to settle for a third place finish. In the Myrtle Beach 400, he was involved in a wreck that took him out of contention for the win.
Caudill says he hopes he’s got the bad luck behind him heading into 2015.
“We’ve got our new car together last year and felt really good going into Martinsville and then to have that bad luck … Hopefully, we’ll get this other car back together and we can get back where we were with the car and feel pretty good about being decent when we show up.”
Caudill thinks he can start off hot with the series running its first race at Southern National Motorsports Park, a track he’s had more success at than anybody.
“We’ve raced there a lot and had a lot of success there,” Caudill stated.
Caudill is used to travelling. In fact, he’s already visited all seven tracks on the CARS Tour schedule and he’s looking forward to competing at those venues again.
We’ve raced at all the racetracks we’re going to and I like going from track to track. The learning curve’s a whole lot shorter than racing at the same place every week. When we show up on Friday and practice, we should get close to where we need to be by race time on Saturday. The racetracks are the same as what we competed in the UARA stuff so we have a lot of old notes we’ll be looking back on and hopefully it will help us get where we need to be in a short amount of time.”
The CARS Tour will, like the UARA tour, allow coilbinding and bump-stops—something that is not prevalent on the NASCAR side of Late Model Stock Car racing. While there will be some differences, Caudill feels that the learning curve should not be too steep.
“Actually, we were coilbinding in UARA so we’ll be a little bit different because I was running a big spring car back then. It’ll be a little bit of a learning curve but not as much so as some.”
Along with the CARS Tour, Caudill plans to once again compete in the Valley Star Credit Union 300 at Martinsville Speedway – a race he won back in 2003.
