Mother's Day at the Track

Saturday at Florence. Fifty laps, Limited Late Model. The No. 25 is on the Mother's Day card. The chassis benchmark, in public.

We're at Florence today.

The card is "Mother's Day at the Track." Pit gates open at 1:30 p.m. Driver's meeting at 3:15. First practice round goes off at 3:30, second round to follow. Qualifying at 6 — Euro-style, groups of three, three laps each. Pre-race ceremonies at 7. Then the features run in this order: Bandoleros, Chargers, Mini Stocks, Legend Cars, Limited Late Models, Super Trucks, Crown Vics. Fifty laps for our class. The 25 is on the door.

If you've been reading along on the build log — Thursday's launch, Friday's development arc, yesterday's practice day — you already know what today is. If you're new here, the short version: this is the chassis benchmark, not the engine debut.

We are not putting a new Hemi in an unproven car on a Saturday night and calling the result data. The 25 will run sourced equipment with a known dyno curve. We hold the engine variable still and let the chassis tell us what it has. After Florence, we fit the PNL Hemi against a baseline car we already characterized — with our own numbers in hand.

That is the discipline. Saturday is the first step, not the headline. Michael Faulk built this car in the Mooresville shop to teach us what it can teach us. That work isn't loud, and it isn't supposed to be.

A few notes on what's on the car.

Mopar Heaven is on the hood. Mopar Heaven is the Dodge enthusiast event series whose tenth edition ran at Texas Motor Speedway in March. The Free Dodge Thrill Rides are the same activity that put me on-mic with the brand back in 2019, before any of this. Putting that group on the hood for the first race in QCG colors closes a circle that's been seven years in the making.

B/R Racing is on the quarter panels. Bleacher Report's motorsports sub-brand. I'm a B/R Racing Special Correspondent, and the work the brand publishes — grassroots, character-driven, behind-the-scenes — is the work this car is doing. The car is on the story I'm writing about it.

The track. Florence Motor Speedway is a 0.4-mile asphalt short track fifteen miles south of Darlington. It calls itself the Diamond of the Southeast. Caden Kvapil won the South Carolina 400 here last fall. This is also the track where I drove the No. 170 in the South Carolina 400 in November 2022, in Direct Connection paint, and where the question that became Project Never Lift got asked out loud the first time. That weekend is why we are here today.

Fifty laps. Limited Late Model. $1,000-to-win. Modest stakes, deliberate. A benchmark is supposed to teach you something, and a 0.4-mile asphalt bullring is a good place to learn.

Following along. The build log is at qcgarage.com. I'll post updates as the day moves. After the checkered, the post-race writeup goes here — what the car told us, what we change, what's next.

The PNL Hemi fits when the data says it does.

We are not running this thing soft.

---

Update, May 10: Post-race writeup is up. P7 to P8. The chassis spoke. Read the recap →