Project Never Lift Is the First Project. Here Is What Comes After.

Charlotte.

There is a reason this program is in Charlotte. Stock car racing's center of gravity sits within an hour of here. The shop is in Mooresville. The engine partner is one Charlotte-area phone call. The engineers, the fabricators, the drivers coming up the ladder, the ones who came up before them — this region holds them.

You can build a stock car development program in many places. You can build it fast in this one. That is why Queen City Garage is named after Charlotte.

This weekend.

Saturday at Florence Motor Speedway. Fifty laps, Limited Late Model, the 25 on the door. We already talked about why May 9 is a chassis benchmark, not an engine debut. This piece is about what comes after.

The arc.

Project Never Lift is the first project. PNL is one leg of three.

Engine first. The 5.7L Hemi co-development with Mopar Direct Connection has the work in hand: certified to a known curve, ready for chassis time. Engines justify a development shop. They take a partner who has been with you long enough to trust the data. We have the partner. We have the engine.

Drivers next. A driver pipeline, not a driver-for-hire. A process: find people who can drive, put them in a chassis we already understand, work them through the engine program we built, graduate them into the next seat. The first driver in the seat is me. That is on purpose. The founder is the test pilot. The drivers after sit in a car the founder has already driven, in a program the founder has already written. That removes excuses on both sides.

Crew after. Mechanics, engineers, fabricators, race-day strategists. The people who run the cars. Stock car racing has a workforce problem, and the people in the shops know it. A program that builds drivers without building the people who keep the cars running is a paint scheme with a marketing arm. We are not building a marketing arm. We are building a shop.

Why three legs.

A racing program with one revenue line is fragile. An engine program alone is good work and a bad business. A driver-development arm alone is a feeder for someone else's headlines. A crew program alone is a school without students. Together they feed each other: engines pay for chassis time, chassis time develops drivers, drivers create demand for trained crew, trained crew runs the next engine.

Self-sustaining means that the program's outputs create demand for the next round of inputs. We are not there yet. We are at the beginning of leg one, with leg two and leg three sketched in the same notebook.

Why in public?

The build log is the deal. We could run this program quietly and send out press releases when something photogenic comes up. We are choosing the other path on purpose. The work shows up here when it shows up. The wins show up here when they happen. The bad days show up here too — slow laps, blown sessions, dyno numbers that didn't pan out, decisions we got wrong. A development program that only publishes its wins teaches nothing.

The risk is obvious. The reward is the reason the shop exists in the first place: to teach people who care to learn.

About Saturday.

The 25 runs. We will write about the laps as they ran, not as we wanted them to run. If the result is a benchmark we can build from, we say so. If a session taught us a different lesson than the one we were planning to learn, we say so.

Then the engine fits when the data says it does. Then the next driver sits in the same chair. Then the crew that ran this weekend trains the next crew that runs the next round.

That is the program. The engine is leg one. We start at Florence on Saturday.

— Dylan "Mamba" Smith, Founder, Queen City Garage Charlotte, North Carolina · May 8, 2026