16-year-old Tristian McKee has secured the 2026 ARCA Menard's Series East division champion, besting Max Reaves in the season finale at Bristol Motor Speedway.
McKee, a Spire Motorsports development driver, entered the race just one point clear of the rising Joe Gibbs Racing star. However, he ran just ahead of him for nearly the entire race.
As Carson Brown claimed victory in Thursday's Bristol race after leading every single lap, his Pinnacle Racing Group teammate McKee finished second. Reaves, who fell back to seventh on the final restart, charged up to fourth by the time the race ended, about 3.8 seconds behind the newly crowned champion.
"It feels really good. It means a lot just to get a championship in Trans Am, like you said, and then in the lower levels of NASCAR starting out, so yeah, it's definitely really cool. We had a good year, and I knew we just had to put it together here today, and thanks to all the PRG guys -- Shane, Kevin, every one of them, Chevrolet, Josh Wise, everyone at Spire."
It's an eight-race schedule for ARCA East, with McKee winning four races and never finishing worse than third. Reaves has been impressive as well, with the 16-year-old winning two ARCA East races this year.
McKee recently made his NASCAR Craftsman Truck Series debut with Spire, managing to earn back-to-back top tens in his first two starts as a Truck Series driver -- eighth at Richmond and sixth at Loudon.
McKee will run the Truck race at Bristol that immediately follows the ARCA race on Thursday.
Brown, who will move up to the NASCAR O'Reilly Series in 2027 with RCR, said of the victory: “This victory ranks pretty high up there, to be honest. Just a big thank you to everyone at Distributor Wire & Cable, RCR, Wise Optimization, Chevrolet and Pinnacle Racing Group, and Derek Nealon, my spotter up there on the tower. He was working his butt off to help me out and be my other set of eyes. Lapped traffic kind of forced me to the top line, and it was rolling really fast there at the end. I was just doing everything I could to move around, chase that top line, and make it as easy as possible to get by some of those lapped cars and not cut anything too close. It was a tough one, and I’m glad I was able to bring it to victory lane for all these guys. We’ve been really strong all year, had a lot of speed. Just been missing this factor, right? Knew that this was one everyone here wanted, and we worked really hard for it.”
