Folks, let me tell you something about Pro Late Model racing in 2026.
A driver from Catawba, North Carolina named Mason Walters showed up to the season opener at Southern National Motorsports Park on February 28, made a race-winning pass on Keelan Harvick with four laps to go, and parked the No. 6 Setzer Racing & Development Chevrolet in victory lane for his first career CARS Tour PLM win.
It was his fourth series start.
And here's the thing — the No. 6 chassis Walters drove that afternoon? That's the SAME car Ben Maier won the 2025 PLM championship in.
Same shop. Same chassis. Same number. Different name on the door.
Robert Setzer's operation has been at this for a while. If you've been paying attention to CARS Tour Pro Late Models the last few years, you already know. Setzer Racing & Development is one of those family operations that has somehow figured out how to put Pro Late Models in victory lane at the highest level of the discipline — and then quietly keep doing it. Maier was the 2025 PLM champion. He drove the No. 6. He won the title in it. He's running elsewhere in 2026. The No. 6 chassis got handed to Walters.
Walters won the first race of 2026 in it.
That's not nothing.
Look. There are two ways to read this season's PLM picture right now, four races in.
The first way is the way the standings tell it. Walters leads PLM driver points — 153 points, one win, two top-fives, four top-tens through four starts. Treyten Lapcevich and Evan McKnight are both at 132 (-21 from Walters), with Lapcevich officially sitting P3 and McKnight P4. McKnight is Walters' Setzer R&D teammate, running the No. 20 — same shop, different leg of the operation. McKnight doesn't have a win yet in 2026, but he's got three top-tens in four starts. He's the consistency arm. Walters is the win arm. Both Setzer R&D cars.
The second way to read it is the Kaden Honeycutt complication.
Honeycutt is the 2024 PLM Tour champion. He's also a NASCAR Craftsman Truck Series regular, which means he's not running the full CARS calendar this year. But when he shows up, he wins. He's started three of the four PLM races. He's won two of them — Caraway on April 26 and Ace on May 9, the second of which was the first weekend sweep in CARS Tour history. (Honeycutt won the LMSC race and the PLM race in the same weekend at Ace, which no driver had ever done before. Then, just for fun, he won the ARCA race and the NASCAR Truck race at Watkins Glen the Friday before. Four wins, two days, four disciplines. The kid is on a heater.)
The Honeycutt results put him P2 in PLM points despite the partial schedule, eighteen points back from Walters. If Honeycutt ran the full schedule, the championship math would look completely different. He doesn't, so it doesn't.
What that means for the Setzer R&D story is this: Walters is the championship-form leader of the full-schedule field — that's the structural fact. Honeycutt is the disruptor who keeps showing up and winning the races he runs. Both things are true. The points board reflects it.
Here's the part that ought to make you sit up.
Setzer Racing & Development won the 2025 PLM championship with Ben Maier in the No. 6. The same shop's 2026 No. 6 just won the season opener with Mason Walters. McKnight is in their No. 20 with three top-tens in four starts. Across two seasons, the same operation has produced one championship driver, one new race-winning driver, and one consistent top-ten driver. The standings keep telling the same story.
In a year when a thirteen-year-old (Keelan Harvick) signed a Toyota TRD development deal, when seventeen-year-old Carson Brown won an ARCA race at Phoenix back in February, when the PLM grid keeps getting younger and more deep-pocketed every season — Robert Setzer's two-driver operation has both cars in the top four in points and one of them holding the points lead.
And here's the schedule problem for the rest of the field — there's a long PLM gap right now. The LMSC tour runs at Langley this Saturday and at Dominion on June 13, but neither is a PLM weekend. The PLM tour doesn't return until North Wilkesboro on July 17 — a ten-week pause from Ace. That gives Walters a points lead to sit on for two months. It gives McKnight time to work on the No. 20 setup. It gives Honeycutt no PLM points to chase. The math doesn't move until mid-July.
When the PLM tour does come back, it comes back at North Wilkesboro. Cup-weekend infrastructure. Companion to the Window World 450 on July 19. Maximum eyeballs, maximum stakes, the kind of doubleheader weekend where a championship-form team can either confirm itself or get caught.
The No. 6 won the title in 2025. The No. 6 won the opener in 2026.
The next ten weeks tell us if Setzer's still building champions.