Parker Eatmon had this one. Led all but ten laps at a track nobody had raced before, held off thirty cars on a sold-out Saturday night in downtown Nashville, and did everything right except the last thing that mattered.
Caden Kvapil took the Late Model Stock feature at the Tootsie's Music City Showdown at Nashville Fairgrounds Speedway the way he's been taking races all year — from the back half of the top five, with ten laps left, on a restart nobody else wanted. The JR Motorsports No. 88 beat Eatmon from the bottom groove after Landon Huffman's spin reset the field, and once Kvapil had clean air, it was OVER.
That's three wins in the last four CARS Tour LMSC events for Kvapil. North Wilkesboro. Southern National. Nashville. Every one of them taken inside the final twenty-five laps. Every one of them stolen from somebody who thought they had it.
But the Tootsie's Music City Showdown was a doubleheader, and the Late Model Stock feature was only half the story.
Dawson Sutton comes home
Before Kvapil's restart heroics, a kid from Lebanon, Tennessee — twenty-five miles up the road from the Fairgrounds — had already put on a clinic in the Pro Late Model feature.
Dawson Sutton won the PLM race in his No. 62 Rackley W.A.R. Chevrolet, and what made it remarkable wasn't just the result. It was the commute. The night before, Sutton finished seventh in the NASCAR Craftsman Truck Series race at Bristol Motor Speedway. He drove back to Nashville on Saturday and won a hundred-lap Pro Late Model race at his home track. That's the CARS Tour in miniature — the best short track drivers in the country showing up everywhere, in everything, because they can't stop racing.
Sutton took the lead from Evan McKnight on lap 30 and held it the rest of the way. It was his first PLM Tour victory in ten starts, but he already knew this track. Last November, Sutton led 202 of 300 laps to win the prestigious All American 400 at this same Fairgrounds. Nashville is his house. Saturday night, he proved it again.
"It means the world," Sutton said. "Ever since I saw this race on the schedule, I marked it down and told my guys I wanted to run it. Seeing this crowd is truly amazing."
(He also collected a $10,000 Flodium bonus. Not bad for a guy who was at Bristol twelve hours earlier.)
Kaden Honeycutt finished second in the PLM, with Brandon Lopez third, Brett Robinson fourth, and Jackson Boone fifth. Thirty-six starters, one hundred laps, and the kind of field depth that makes the Pro Late Model tour the best development series in short track racing.
The guitar problem
Back to the Late Model Stocks — and the Kvapil family's growing storage crisis.
Two guitars already hang in the Kvapil house in Mooresville. Carson won his at Nashville Fairgrounds in 2021, leading all one hundred laps in the North/South Super Late Model Challenge. Travis has one from Nashville too. Now Caden has his own, and the display case needs an expansion.
"I've been talking about wanting to get a guitar," Kvapil said. "My brother got one, my dad got one and it's really cool I finally got one. I told them on the way here that if I win, I'm going to be playing that thing all the way home."
Three Kvapils. Three guitars. All from Nashville. The family that came down from Janesville, Wisconsin to Mooresville, North Carolina to build race cars now owns a piece of Music City too.
How the LMSC race played out
Nashville Fairgrounds is a .596-mile oval that sat on the 2026 schedule like an invitation and a dare. Matt Weaver drove over two days before the green flag for testing and called it what it was: "A new track with no notebook and a weird tire combination." Nobody had baseline data. Nobody had a setup sheet. Thirty-one cars showed up and figured it out under the lights.
Polesitter Dylan Fetcho led early before Eatmon took command and ran the kind of dominant race that earns a reputation on this tour. Kvapil qualified third and stayed inside the top five all night, biding his time in a car that was getting loose as the tires wore.
"We were really good at the end of the first half or so, but I don't think we made a big enough of an adjustment," Kvapil said. "The yellow allowed us to cool it down and I had really good grip on the restart to be able to get out in front and have clean air."
Eatmon knew exactly what happened on that final restart: "I don't know if I spun the tires a little bit, but I got a bad restart and he timed it perfectly. He took the lead from me straight-up, so I've got to get better for the next one."
Eatmon's team — Matt Piercy Racing — gave him the best car on the track for 115 laps. That's not consolation. That's a warning to the rest of the tour.
Behind them: Fetcho third, Conner Jones fourth, Landen Lewis fifth. Dale Earnhardt Jr. finished twelfth in the No. 8 Bass Pro Shops Chevrolet — not the top ten the Hall of Famer and CARS Tour co-owner came for, but Junior raced at this Fairgrounds in the late nineties and keeps coming back because he believes this series deserves it. Thirty-one starters on a sold-out Saturday night says he's right.
What it means
Race 3 of fourteen. Kvapil has won two of them. If he keeps this pace, he could join Jared Fryar and his brother Carson as the only drivers to win CARS Tour championships across two divisions — he already has the 2023 PLM title.
Caraway Speedway is next, April 25. Both divisions. A track with a notebook, a history, and zero sympathy for the driver who won last week.
Saturday night in Nashville gave you everything the CARS Tour is: a sold-out Fairgrounds, a Truck Series driver winning the PLM at his home track, a family collecting its third guitar, and a kid in a JR Motorsports Chevrolet who keeps stealing races from people who led all night. Three guitars, two winners, one series — and a season that's only just begun.