For 18-year old Lavar Scott, Saturday’s 2022 Hickory Motor Speedway season-opener is an important moment in his racing career. The Rev Racing talent heads into his third year of his Rev Racing tenure, and he comes off a successful 2021 campaign where he scored his first late model win at Hickory Motor Speedway last September.
— Lavar Scott (@LavarScott) September 13, 2021
Throughout the 2022 season, Scott will bounce around and race at Hickory, Tri County Speedway and Florence Motor Speedway, but Saturday’s season-opener at Hickory will boast a stacked field of likely 30-or-more cars.
Even with the large field turnouts at Hickory, Scott feels very confident in his abilities at the 0.363-mile oval.
“I think we have a pretty good chance,” Scott said of Hickory. “We got one win last year at Hickory. We’ve got some changes with the guys working on the cars, crew chief changes, but I think we have pretty good chances. I’m on my A-game, I know the guys always come with their best. I think we can get something done.”
In Saturday’s field will be a mix of talented youngsters, like himself, trying to make a name for themselves as well as grizzled veterans, who will be battling for the year-long track championship.
For Scott, one name pops into his head as the biggest competition at Hickory.
“Landon Huffman. I Heard he’s going to be there a lot this year, so, he’s a person to look out for,” Scott said in an interview with TobyChristie.com. “But it’s a car. It’s a driver. Just have to try to go out there, do my best and beat him.”
Huffman, who revealed his intent to run for the Hickory Motor Speedway track championship to TobyChristie.com back in January, was honored that Scott named him as the biggest threat to win at Hickory. Huffman says Scott is primed for bigger things in his racing career.
“Rev is starting to get some people in there that have a lot of talent and potential,” Huffman said to TobyChristie.com. “Rajah Caruth went in there and won some races and now he is moving up. I think Lavar has the same talent and potential to do bigger things in this sport. Obviously, it’s really hard to show up and win at Hickory, and if you can do that in your first year there, that’s really impressive.”
At just 18, Scott already has a bountiful harvest of racing experience. He comes from a racing family and he has been mixing it up on racetracks, himself, since he was three years old.
“I started at a very young age,” Scott explained. “My whole family raced. My mom was a drag racer, she had an NHRA license. My grandpop raced. Everybody raced in my family. When I was about three years old, my brother got into quarter midgets at a track called Airport Speedway in New Castle, Delaware. I started racing those a lot. When I turned five, I started racing my own car.”
The young racer feels that cutting his teeth in dirt racing, where conditions are always changing, has elevated him now that he is running paved oval races.
“I think it has helped tremendously,” Scott said. “Dirt racing, look at Kyle Larson, he came from dirt racing. You’re not going to go to a dirt track and always have the same track. You have to expand your driving, change your setup or just adapt. And I think that carries a lot to the asphalt side of things where you have to be able to adapt.”
As Scott thrashed on the dirt tracks in the Northeast, he dreamed of making it to the NASCAR Cup Series. Scott had heard old fables of drivers, like Steve Park, getting calls from legends like Dale Earnhardt to drive their cars, out of nowhere, and thought that perhaps that was in his cards.
But things are a little different these days in motorsports.
“When I was younger, the dream was Cup racing somehow. Just figure out how. But the older I got, the more I realized there is a lot of work that needs to be done,” Scott stated. “It’s not like the old days, where if you’re good, you get a call to come race for my team. No, you’ve got to a lot of work on your own. Finding sponsorships, connecting with teams on your own. When I was younger, I had that dream of somebody calling me, but the older I got the more I realized it’s a very, very small chance.”
Scott credits Rev Racing for extending an invite to their driver combine in 2019 for giving his racing dreams a boost.
While Scott did not make the Rev Racing team on his first tryout in March 2019, he came back and earned a spot on the team’s late model program in a secondary combine for their late model program in November, 2019.
Now, Scott finds himself on a growing team and he has another talented racer on his team that he can draw information from in Rajah Caruth.
“Me and Rajah are like tightest, tightest friends,” Scott explained. “In the system we have going on with the US Late Model program and the ARCA program, he was before me. So, everything he’s been through or is going through, I’m going through now. He gives me advice on how to go about this or who to connect with on that. He’s an awesome guy to look up to and learn from.”
Scott’s climb from dirt racer to Late Model racer for Rev Racing has been quite the learning experience. Now, the driver will look to take the next steps in his racing career in 2022, and it all begins Saturday night at Hickory Motor Speedway.
