Unless you’ve been living under a rock (or just aren’t on the internet, in which case, congratulations), you’ve seen the clip. Last October, on pit road at Nashville Superspeedway, Billy “The Kid” Hoskinson left the line in the small tire final at Street Car Takeover Nashville. His twin-turbo, big-block Camaro launched up onto the rear tires and stayed up a lot longer than anybody in the grandstands figured it would. It had all four wheels in the air near the stripe, somehow stayed straight and won the $30,000. “That was the wildest pass I’ve ever made,” Hoskinson said afterward, and he admitted he didn’t even know he’d won until they called him. I believe him. I’m not sure I’d have known what planet I was on.
Here’s the part of the story that tends to get lost under the wheelstand. The guy in the other lane was Ryan Mitchell, and by Hoskinson’s own count Mitchell had beaten him six times in a row before that night. Six. If you grew up on Peanuts, you know the deal with Charlie Brown and the football, and that’s about how I imagine the Hoskinson camp felt every time that ‘87 Firebird pulled into the other lane. Mitchell is a multi-time War in the Woods small tire champ and one of the most feared small tire hitters in the country, so the sixth loss wasn’t anything to be embarrassed about.
Still, Nashville is where Hoskinson finally got Lucy’s football.
So now it’s a rematch, and it’s this weekend, Oct. 16-17, a week later than Chase Lautenbach and the SCT crew had planned. The remnants of the hurricane rolled through last weekend and pushed the whole deal back seven days. I called Hoskinson on Monday to talk about it, mostly because I wanted to give Chase and SCT some love (I think Street Car Takeover is one of the coolest things happening in drag racing right now, and I’m not shy about saying so). I figured the defending champ could make the case better than I could.
My first question was about the surface. Mitchell had told me in a quick phone call earlier that he isn’t worried about it, that his plan is to put roughly 2,000 horsepower to the ground there, so I asked Hoskinson if the surface was surprisingly good. “No, the surface is really challenging, especially early in the race and on the starting line,” Hoskinson said. “It gets pretty good down track. Like it’s really smooth, but you can’t really apply a lot of horsepower until after like 300 feet. That’s where the Camaro really shined last year, but it’s really, really tricky early. You can mess up pretty easy.”
Hoskinson has raced just about everywhere a guy can race a small tire car, from the backroads he built the Street Racing Channel on (closing in on 400,000 YouTube subscribers last I checked) to the no-prep and drag-and-drive deals he’s moved into since. So I wanted to know what it’s like to roll into a facility that hosts NASCAR Cup races. Let’s be honest, opportunities like that didn’t exist for small tire guys not very long ago.
“It’s so cool being on the NASCAR pit road,” he said. “I never thought growing up that I’d ever get a chance to race on a freaking NASCAR track. You know, you’re under the lights, they’ve got them all turned on. And I mean, it’s surreal, the experience, like you feel like you’re big time for sure. You pull into Nashville and you go under the tunnel, it says Nashville Superspeedway. And then you come out and you’re in the infield. You can see the freaking leaderboard and everything. Like it’s pretty neat.”
The Camaro is coming back with the big wing, but it won’t sit where it did last year. The Hoskinson crew addressed exactly the thing that made that final round famous, which was the front end that didn’t want to come down.
“We lowered the wing and moved it forward just a little bit because we were having wheelie issues last time we were there,” he explained. “And at a certain mile an hour, it just couldn’t, we couldn’t keep the front end down. So we made a few changes, moved it down and moved it forward. Hopefully that gives it a little bit less leverage and we’ll be able to go a little bit faster.”
Don’t make the mistake of thinking this is a two-car show, either. Hoskinson rattled off a list of hitters he expects on the property. One is Andrew Lavender, who’s gone deep at the all-wheel-drive versus rear-wheel-drive shootouts. He also named Devin Grace, possibly Brian White and his own brother, Tommy Hoskinson, who’s bringing the “Possum” S10.
“It’s going to be the toughest of the tough,” Hoskinson said. “There’s not going to be any ducks hardly at all. Everybody’s serious. Like everybody knows what it takes to win there. So it’s going to be tough for sure. It’s not just going to be me and Ryan that are capable of winning this deal.”
And the small tire shootout is only one slice of the weekend. SCT is bringing its full circus to Lebanon, Tennessee: Street Racer, True Street and Daily Driver, roll racing, index racing, Lil Gangsta’s, Junior Dragsters and the women-only 1/4 Mile Queens class. Add in the first-ever SCT drifting event, a car show and a burnout contest. Weekend spectator tickets are $60 online at StreetCarTakeover.com (more at the gate), and kids 12 and under get in free.
This story was originally published on October 12, 2026. 
