Dirt late model racer Hayden Cardwell grew up on the clay ovals of Eastern Tennessee. But when he won the chance to drive a pavement car in a drawing held by Velocita, entered with dealer Melissa Markewitz, Hayden was game. The debut would come in a late model sportsman car at Bowman Gray Stadium, the paved oval known as “The Madhouse.”
“Very tight, not a lot of room for error,” Hayden said of his first impressions of the ¼-mile bullring. “It is hard to believe there are two lanes of racing. Videos don’t do it justice at all.”
Velocita’s Brad Smith, a Bowman Gray local, helped Hayden throughout the night.
“The pavement cars are way different than what I am used to,” Hayden, of Knoxville, Tennessee, said. “You drive them in straight, getting on the brakes into the corner.
“You have to be a lot more patient with a pavement car than a dirt car,” he continued.”I had to let the pavement late model drive itself and roll into the turn and corner before I picked the gas up. I couldn’t drive a dirt late model like that.”
Instead of signals from crewmembers with sticks, Hayden had spotters on the radio to help guide him.
“My spotter let me know when another car had a run and told me when to protect the bottom,” Hayden said. “On dirt that would make the racing worse. Everyone would know where the fast lane was and racing would become one lane. On dirt, you drive by the seat of your pants, searching for those fine lines that work best for you.”
Cardwell experienced his fair share of bumper beating at Bowman Gray.
“The drivers at Bowman Gray are more aggressive than most dirt drivers I race with,” he said. “The respect level is different. There wasn’t the amount of respect for other drivers that dirt drivers show. On dirt, drivers will give you an inch here or there. At Bowman Gray, they will take every opportunity that they can to move you out of the way.”
Hayden Cardwell came home with a ninth and a seventh in his first night at Bowman Gray. What perhaps most impressed Hayden was the track’s atmosphere.
“My biggest takeaway was the size of the crowd and the energy it gave off,” Hayden said. “There was a bigger crowd there than at any race I had been in before.”
For now, he has no plans to race pavement again in the immediate future, but, “If the opportunity arose, I would entertain it, especially at Bowman Gray Stadium,” he said.
Outside Groove Note of Transparency: Clarified who held the drawing for the chance to race at Bowman Gray Stadium (2026-08-13).
Mike Adaskaveg has written hundreds of stories since the website’s inception. This year marks his 54th year of covering auto racing. Adaskaveg got his start working for track photographer Lloyd Burnham at Connecticut’s Stafford Motor Speedway in 1970. Since then, he’s been a columnist, writer, and photographer, in racing and in mainstream media, for several outlets, including the Journal Inquirer, Boston Herald, Stock Car Racing, and Speedway Illustrated. Among Adaskaveg’s many awards are the 1992 Eastern Motorsport Press Association (EMPA) Ace Lane Photographer of the Year and the 2019 National Motorsports Press Association (NMPA) George Cunningham Writer of the Year.
