It’s been a long time coming, but Kenny Wallace is finally making his CARS Tour debut this Saturday night at Virginia’s South Boston Speedway. Wallace will be racing a Late Model Stock Car out of the R&S RaceCars stables.

“I’ve been dreaming about running more asphalt races,” said Wallace. “I called Dale Earnhardt Jr. up and through a lot of talking he said ‘You need to run the CARS Tour series’ and I said I’d love that. So I watched on Flo(Racing) the race from Florence. It was a 120-lap race or something like that. They had a stop at lap 60 and I was like ‘That’s me.’”

Wallace was initially scheduled to run the Old North State Nationals event at Tri-County Motor Speedway in North Carolina back in May, but after rain postponed that event he was forced to pivot. Wallace and the team settled on this weekend’s 125-lap race at South Boston Speedway instead.

While Wallace has a lot of experience at South Boston Speedway from his time in the NASCAR Busch Series (now Xfinity Series) from back in the day, this will be a very different experience for him. He’s been racing on dirt mostly for the last few years, with a handful of pavement starts mixed in.

“I’m an asphalt guy. I wanted to learn how to run dirt, and I love dirt. I ran the old ASA and then I made it to NASCAR and I wanted to learn how to run dirt because dirt is where AJ Foyt and Mario Andretti, they ran it. So I wanted to be worldly.

“But I want to say this about me and asphalt. I haven’t been sliding off. I’ve been up in South Bend, Indiana with those wedge Super Late Models, and I’ve been digging. I run up there a lot. I’ve been up in Nova Scotia. I’ve run the IWK 250. And I’ve competed well. It’s no joke, and I don’t think I’ve forgot.” 

Wallace said he has been watching CARS Tour races to study, and he’s learned that the talent pool is quite deep with this series.

“Kenny Schrader would say it like this, ‘There’s only 30 cars here, but there’s only 24 really good ones,’” Wallace said with a laugh. “That’s the way the CARS Tour is. I’m lucky to be driving for Marcus Richmond out of South Boston, Virginia. I respect everybody on that race track. I think what I’m going to do is I’m just going to show up, race hard, and race with respect that we all learned from the great Mark Martin. I’m not interested in rooting and gouging people out of the way. I’m going test, be prepared, and go at it.”

Wallace will go at it with the CARS Tour on Saturday, October 7 at South Boston Speedway live on FloRacing. Fans can subscribe to FloRacing by clicking here.