Queen City Garage, the Charlotte stock-car development holding that publicly launched this month, runs its first competitive lap as a development team Saturday at Florence Motor Speedway. The car wears No. 25. Fifty laps, Limited Late Model, Mother's Day card. The engine that defines the program — a 5.7L Hemi co-developed with Mopar Direct Connection — is not in the car this weekend. That part is on purpose.
That detail is the program. Queen City Garage is not a race team that wants to win at Florence. It is a development program that wants to learn from Florence, then put a verified engine in a chassis it already understands. The May 9 race is what QCG founder Dylan "Mamba" Smith called, in the holding's launch post, "a chassis benchmark, not an engine debut."
What QCG Actually Is
Queen City Garage is a Charlotte-based development program with a stated three-leg arc — engine, drivers, crew — and one project running so far. The first project is Project Never Lift: a 5.7L Hemi co-development with Mopar Direct Connection aimed at returning Mopar to the late model stock racing economy. The first engine has arrived in Mooresville and been dyno-validated, according to QCG's published build log. The shop floor is Lee Faulk Racing in Mooresville. The corporate footprint is Charlotte. The legal mailing address, for the curious, is Raleigh — that's the registered agent.
Dylan Smith, the program's founder, is a co-host of Kevin Harvick's Happy Hour, the podcast presented by NASCAR and FOX. On Tuesday's episode — a Texas race recap that aired May 5 — Smith told the show:
"I worked out this deal. I've been working on it for a while with Mopar and with Dodge, with them getting a crate engine back in the late model stock racing... The engine's not in the car this weekend, but I had to buy a car, and so we probably need to make sure it runs pretty well before we put the engine in. So this is the first week that I'll be in a Dodge on track, so I'm excited about it."
That was the program's first national mention. The launch post on qcgarage.com had been live for two days at that point.
Why Charlotte
The Charlotte angle is not incidental. The metro is the operational and demographic center of NASCAR — Cup teams, Xfinity teams, and a development ladder of late-model and short-track operations cluster between Mooresville, Concord, Huntersville, and Statesville. The NASCAR Hall of Fame sits in uptown Charlotte. The team shops, the engineers, the chassis fabricators, the drivers coming up through the late-model ranks — they are all here. Building a stock car development program in the city is a choice to plug into infrastructure that already exists, rather than build it.
QCG names the geography directly in its three-leg vision document: "There is a reason this program is in Charlotte. Stock car racing's center of gravity sits inside an hour of here." The shop is in Mooresville. The engine partner is one Charlotte-area phone call. The longer arc — the driver pipeline and the eventual crew development program — is supposed to draw from the same regional labor market.
The Sister Property
One indicator that QCG knows the city's race culture is the holding's other live property: NASCAR Sundays. The site is described in its publication record as "a Queen City Garage production. Weekly NASCAR watch party at Mac's Speed Shop in Charlotte — live DJ, drink specials, every Sunday race." The tagline is the operational instruction: "Every Sunday. Green flag at 2. Mac's South Blvd."
Smith said on Kevin Harvick's Happy Hour that NASCAR Sundays drew 120 viewers for the Texas Cup race on May 3.
The 120 figure matters because it recurs. NASCAR Sundays runs every Sunday, not as a one-off. It is the kind of community that requires a venue willing to host a weekly crowd and a producer willing to keep showing up to one. Mac's Speed Shop on South Boulevard has been the venue. The match makes sense.
What the number says about QCG is that the holding has spent the spring proving it can build a Sunday in Charlotte before it has tried to build a development team. That is unusual sequencing for a NASCAR-adjacent business. Most start with the car.
What Saturday Actually Is
The Florence race is a chassis benchmark. QCG has said this publicly in its build log, and Smith repeated it on Harvick's show. The 25 will run on sourced equipment with a known dyno curve so the chassis is the only variable that gets to talk during the session. Once the chassis is understood, the PNL Hemi gets dropped into a known platform — with QCG's own measurement notes already in hand.
Florence Motor Speedway is a 0.4-mile asphalt bullring fifteen miles south of Darlington, sometimes called the Diamond of the Southeast. Saturday's Limited Late Model class runs a fifty-lap feature for $1,000 to win on the Mother's Day card. The green flag drops at 7 PM.
What's Next
The published QCG arc has three legs. Engine first — leg one is in motion, with a dyno-validated 5.7L Hemi on hand. Drivers next — Smith has said the founder will be the first driver in the development seat, with a pipeline to follow. Crew after — mechanics, engineers, fabricators, race-day strategists, drawn from the same regional ecosystem.
The pace is set by the engine work. Engines justify a development shop in this sport because they are the long-cycle, capital-intensive item that requires a partner relationship. QCG has the partner. According to the launch post, the company has been working with Mopar Direct Connection since 2019 — back to Smith's Dodge Thrill Ride tour and his 2022 Florence run in the No. 170 Dodge Charger SRT Super Late Model.
The 25 runs Saturday at 7 PM. What happens after that depends on the data.
— Jack Beckett, Staff Writer, The Charlotte Mercury
*Disclosure: Queen City Garage and The Charlotte Mercury share common ownership.