Larry King Law's Langley Speedway is a 0.397-mile flat paved oval with six degrees of banking in the corners and two on the straightaways — one of the flattest competitive ovals in Virginia. It does not give a fast car anywhere to hide. You make your own grip there, lap after lap, and the guy who knows the place best usually figures it out first.
Saturday night, the guy who knows the place best was Connor Hall. Again.
Hall hadn't run a CARS Tour Late Model Stock event all year before the Visit Hampton Virginia 125. His 2026 has been a Niece Motorsports project — a part-time NASCAR Craftsman Truck Series seat, a mentor role over the team's Late Model program, the gig that has the shop's twenty-somethings calling him "Unc." But Langley is home. He grew up in Hampton. He won eleven consecutive Late Model features here in 2023 and became the first Division I national champion in track history. When the Tour comes to town, Hall comes out.
Landen Lewis led the early going. That's the wrinkle that makes this one worth slowing down on: Lewis is Hall's Niece teammate, and he's the defending CARS Tour Late Model Stock champion. He's also splitting 2026 between the Niece Truck program and select Late Model starts, and he came into Langley with a win already this year — Caraway, back in April, his sixth career series victory.
Hall took the top spot from Lewis near halfway. And then the race did what Langley races do: it kept throwing restarts. Late ones. The kind that hand a runner-up a free run at the leader. Lewis had the shots. He didn't take them.
"At the end of the day, I didn't want to be that guy to wreck ," Lewis said, in comments reported by Zach Evans of Racing America. "I'm starting to mature at my old age where I'm tired of fixing race cars."
That's not soft. That's a champion doing the math — runner-up points plus an intact race car plus an intact relationship with a teammate he hopes to share a Truck Series shop with full-time. Hall ran the restarts clean and brought it home for the win.
"I'm tired of all these young kids in the race shop at Niece calling me Unc," Hall said in victory lane, per Racing America. "I had to come show them Unc's still got it a bit. I race with such a great group of guys. To be teammates with Landen and Parker and a bunch of these other guys out here. To be able to come out on off weekends and play together, it's super fun."
The points story. Here's the part that matters for the championship: Caden Kvapil finished third — and he did it the hard way, again. The JR Motorsports No. 88 qualified 15th and drove to the podium. That's the fourth time this season Kvapil has finished top-three after starting outside the top ten, a pattern that started at the Southern National opener in February, where he qualified 29th and won the thing outright.
Kvapil came into Langley leading the Late Model Stock standings — 204 points, 22 clear of Treyten Lapcevich, as of the post-Ace standings entering the weekend. A third-place run only widens that margin, and it widens it against the part-time threat: Lewis, the defending champion, can't catch the title on the partial schedule he's running, which makes Kvapil's week-in, week-out consistency the real championship story.
"All night, we just kind of struggled with the car," Kvapil said, per Racing America. "We got up to the top five and were really content with where we were at. The car really came to life the last two or so restarts. It was kind of weird, because me and the 77 made contact on the frontstretch and bent the front steering really bad, and all of a sudden, it was better. Definitely not the night we were looking for. Obviously, a third's not bad. I'm a little disappointed, but I guess it's good to be mad at third."
Mad at third while extending a points lead. That's a championship temperament.
Carson Brown finished fourth — the 17-year-old RCR development driver, the kid who won his ARCA debut at Phoenix in February, running the Hettinger No. 5B. Lapcevich, the Chad Bryant Racing entry sitting second in the standings, rounded out the top five despite the frontstretch contact with Kvapil.
A note on what's still ahead for Hall: he'll be back at Langley in July for the Hampton Heat, the second leg of Virginia's Triple Crown and the track's marquee event — the one Brenden "Butterbean" Queen has won three times and Hall has been chasing.
"I think people are starting to realize I'm just a good old boy who wants to do some CARS racing," Hall said, per Racing America. "I just want to win races and drink a little beer after."
The Tour stays in Virginia. The Late Model Stock cars run again June 13 at Dominion Raceway in Thornburg — the second of two straight Commonwealth dates. Kvapil carries the points lead north. Lewis carries the knowledge that he could have had Saturday and chose not to take it.
And Unc carries home another Langley trophy. The kids can call him whatever they want now.
Reporting and quotes via Zach Evans, Racing America.