You won’t find Austin Cindric’s Daytona 500 trophy in his house.
It’s currently sitting in a place of honor at Team Penske’s North Carolina headquarters reserved for the trophy from the team’s last victory.
Whenever Cindric’s Harley J. Earl trophy is replaced, you still won’t find it at his place of residence. In fact, you won’t find any racing memorabilia there. Cindric keeps all of that in a separate location.
So if you were standing in his living room, complete with an 85-inch TV (the first thing he bought for his house), you’d never know you were visiting the home of the first rookie to win the Daytona 500.
Why is that?
“Home is home,” Cindric told SPEED SPORT. “It’s supposed to be an escape.”
The Team Penske driver likes to compartmentalize. He’s been that way since he was a kid in grade school.
Unlike a typical kid his age, Cindric made it a point to get his homework done before he went home at the end of the day. Why spend time at home on school work when you could be playing with your dog or mashing away on your favorite video games?
Seems like sound logic.
Cindric, 23, took two months to watch his Daytona 500 win in its entirety. Well, almost its entirety.
The rewatch came Wednesday, four days before the NASCAR Cup Series race at Talladega Superspeedway. He viewed it with his crew chief, Jeremy Bulllins, and his spotter, Doug Campbell.
“The funny thing is we got to the final restart, and we kind of looked to each other,” Cindric said. “I’m like, ‘Do we really even need to watch this? We’ve all watched this a million times. Do we even need to study it? Do we even even need to talk about it?’ It’s just kind of funny, because we all know that for everyone in the room, whether that’s me, Jeremy and Doug, the three of us, that’s obviously the greatest moment of our racing careers. That’s the peak right now. And it’s pretty, pretty special to obviously share that with not just them, but a lot of people on the team.”
When asked what has been an unexpected perk of winning NASCAR’s biggest race, Cindric can only come up with one example.
When people introduce him, he’s called “Daytona 500 winner Austin Cindric” rather than “Rookie Austin Cindric.”
“I can’t help but smile every time somebody says it,” Cindric said. “I’ll see how long it takes to wear off, but ‘Daytona 500 winner Austin Cindric’ makes me smile every time.”
Alex Bowman “Banned” From Simulator?
A year-and-half ago Alex Bowman’s crew chief, Greg Ives, came to a decision.
“I got banned from the simulator,” Bowman told SPEED SPORT. “Greg said, ‘no more.’”
Ok, Bowman wasn’t really banned from using the GM simulator.
“Greg was just like, ‘Hey, we’re not going to keep doing this every week. It’s not helping us,’” Bowman said. “My opinion, the use for a simulator. I think we’re using it for the wrong reasons. In the past, we were trying to use it to develop setups and to develop our race cars. And it led us down some wrong paths a couple of times, and the guy’s got frustrated with it.”
As a result, Bowman and the No. 48 team only plan to use the simulator to prepare for road courses this season.
It’s already worked in their favor. Bowman finished second at Circuit of The Americas matching his best result on a road course.
“I think me using it as a race car driver to work on concepts for COTA really helped me when I got there,” Bowman said. “So I’m just going to try to use it for the road courses in that way going forward. … I was really impressed because it had been a while since I had been in our simulator. And it was spot on from the simulator to the race track for COTA. So that was really cool to see. A lot of times it’s not that close or different week-to-week. And it was absolutely spot on for COTA, which is big props to the GM guys for making that happen.”
The “Energy” of Talladega
When it comes to Sunday’s NASCAR Cup Series race at Talladega, Ty Dillon has the same questions as everyone else.
What the heck is the race going to be like?
Bubba Wallace (23) and Kurt Busch (1) lead the NASCAR Cup Series YellaWood 500 field during the late race scramble before rain halted the event Monday afternoon at Talladega (Ala.) Superspeedway.
“These weeks are always weird for me because I’m thinking the same things you guys are,” the Petty GMS Motorsports driver said Thursday.
“Is it going to be aggressive? Is it going to be calm?” Dillon posited. “Speedweek (at Daytona) seemed calm up until the Daytona 500. And then we started the race and people were bump drafting on lap one. I’m a big proponent of feeling the energy of the race. I just got off a meeting with my guys and I said this is the hardest race for me to prepare for. I just go off of what I feel. It may change within a lap, but I feel like if we can get up there and put ourselves in a good spot to get stage points and run up front, that’s obviously where you’d like to be.”
Of course there’s the possibility of the race having “bad energy,” where drivers are “doing things they shouldn’t at a certain time. For me, I won’t know until I’m in the situation. I don’t think anyone showed much patience in the Daytona 500. But also, in my opinion, nobody showed any patience in the last three years of superspeedway races.”
Dillon said he’ll do his best to play a “smart game” at NASCAR’s biggest oval track.
He’ll “feel the energy of the pack; get stage points if it feels right and we have the speed to do it and in the right situation. But if not, I have to make sure our Black Rifle Camaro crosses the line on the lead lap and I can pretty much always guarantee us a top 15 or top 10 in that way.”
Top-10 Steak On The Line
So far in the NASCAR Xfinity Series season, A.J. Allmendinger has been perfect.
While he only has only win to date — at COTA — the Kaulig Racing driver is the only driver to finish in the top 10 in all eight races.
Allmendinger takes the streak to Talladega, where he has four career Xfinity starts. In those races it’s been feast or famine for Allmendinger.
In 2020, he finished seventh in the spring before wrecking out in the fall. In 2021, he finished third in the spring before a crash took him out in the fall.
“At Kaulig Racing, we know we have fast cars when we show up to superspeedways, Allmendinger said in media release. “When it comes to outright speed at places like Talladega, I like Kaulig Racing’s chances. I feel like over the four years that I have been with Kaulig Racing, we’ve done a great job as a team dictating these types of races, but Talladega is definitely more challenging, because there is so much you can’t dictate there.”
Circle K Speed Street Musical Acts Announced
Here’s who you can expect to see perform during the Memorial Day weekend musical festival in Concord, North Carolina in connection with the Coca-Cola 600.
On Friday, Four-time Grammy-nominated rapper Flo Rida will kick off the festivities with a 75-minute performance featuring internationally acclaimed hits like “Low,” “Right Round” and “My House.”
A native of Miami Gardens, Florida, Flo Rida’s career has produced four studio albums and collaborations with stars like T-Pain, Sia, Kesha, Timbaland, Rick Ross, Sean Kingston and Lil Wayne.
Saturday at Circle K Speed Street belongs to the classic rock fans, with Steve Miller Band taking the stage to entertain fans with a musical collection of instantly recognizable songs spanning the group’s five decades of music. The 90-minute set will feature fan favorites like “The Joker,” “Take the Money and Run,” “Fly Like an Eagle,” “Jet Airliner” and “Jungle Love.”
Keyword: NASCAR Nuggets: The Compartmentalization Of Austin Cindric