HOMESTEAD, Fla. — The moment he crossed the finish line in second place, Carson Kvapil posed a question to crew chief Rodney Childers.
“I need to know, if we had won that, would we have won the championship?” Kvapil asked.
Kvapil was tantalizingly close to both the race win and the title, but a victory in Saturday’s NASCAR O’Reilly Auto Parts Series Championship Race still would have left him a few points short of the championship.
Instead, the race win went to Brandon Jones, and the O’Reilly Series title went to Kvapil’s JR Motorsports teammate Justin Allgaier, who secured the second championship of a storied career with a seventh-place finish.
Kvapil crossed the finish line 3.937 seconds behind Jones, and the runner-up finish left him third in the final Chase standings, 28 points behind Allgaier and 14 points back of second-place Jesse Love, who ran fourth as defending series champion on Saturday.
What Kvapil accomplished in 2026 nevertheless was remarkable. Splitting time between three different cars, with two different car owners (JR Motorsports and Mario Gosselin) and three different crew chiefs (Childers, Gosselin and Phillip Bell), Kvapil made a serious bid for his first title.
It wasn’t until the 21st race of the season that Kvapil was paired with Childers in the No. 1 JRM Chevrolet for the duration of the campaign.
Kvapil responded with consecutive victories at Indianapolis and Iowa in the regular season and a win at Martinsville in the Chase. He ran second at Talladega a week earlier after giving up the lead on the final lap.
“It’s tough,” said Kvapil, the son of 2003 NASCAR CRAFTSMAN Truck Series champion Travis Kvapil. “Like you said, jumping around from the 9, the 1, the 91, 11 weeks in a row being in a different car. It makes it hard.
“I was able to learn honestly quite a bit throughout the year, get a lot of experience. I kind of only had one crew chief this whole time I’ve done this NASCAR thing. To have three different teams, some crazy, weird circumstances going on, I was able to learn from it.”
Nevertheless, Kvapil could recite a laundry list of circumstances that left him short of the championship.
“Came into the Chase second, gained points on the 7 (Allgaier) in the first half,” said the 23-year-old from Mooresville, North Carolina. “Never really had any stellar runs of winning races in the Chase until Martinsville.
“Just had a lot of days where we were leading Bristol and we lose a right rear wheel, lose a truck arm at Charlotte. A lot of points left on the table. That’s not even counting the one or two times we finished second over who won the race.”
Next year, Kvapil will return to JR Motorsports full-time in the No. 8 Chevrolet with Childers as his crew chief.
“Overall, it was a really fun year,” Kvapil said. “When we teamed up with Rodney and the whole No. 1 team, it was game-on from there. We finished second in our first two races, won the third and fourth.
“It’s been a good year. I’m excited to get to next year with these guys. Being full-time, every week together from week one, is going to be really big for us… Can’t wait to kick it back off at Daytona.”
