I have had window braces smashed in the front of my car, several times. They fail all the time in the front.
For some reason, the busier I am at the track, the better I tend to race. I think it's because I don't have to deal with all the distractions outside the car that can get me in trouble at times.
I always like my chances at Daytona.
You can beat a dead horse as much as you want, but it doesn't come back to life. And sometimes you just have to change things up to keep the excitement and enthusiasm in the sport.
Dale Jr. has never gotten a fair shake from the start because, guess what? He's not his father. He was always supposed to have been someone else. The pressure he's under is unreal.
When you have fast cars and bad luck, it's a lot easier to handle than having slow cars and bad luck.
My favorite part of any military feature, aside from the people themselves, is how clean and organized everything is. I like things clean and organized, and they don't get any cleaner or more organized than they are in any branch of the military.
I've been a part of this before, where you think the racing gods are against you, then next thing you know, you can't do anything wrong. You're winning races and doing things you feel like you shouldn't have done that particular day. It all comes full circle in this sport. It has a funny way of doing it.
You want to see how many races you can win, you want to see how many laps you can lead.
If you can qualify on the pole or in the front, you have a better chance of getting five points for leading a lap or leading the most laps.
When you have the most stable team in the garage from a financial standpoint and manufacturer standpoint, that attracts good people.
I'm a pretty intense person at the racetrack, but when I'm not thinking about my race car or in the garage doing my job, I'm pretty laid back, and I like to be organized and do normal things.
For me, I believe that Dale Jr. has had a big part in kind of stunting the growth of NASCAR because he's got these legions of fans and this huge outreach of being able to reach different places that none of us have the possibility to reach, but he's won nine races in 10 years at Hendrick Motorsports and hasn't been able to reach outside of that.
If you can get your team to that point of being able to be in that playoff race mindset every week, that's something that most teams can't do.
I mowed yards with my grandpa at $10 a pop for awhile. I painted numbers on curbs. I cleaned swimming pools. I usually did all of that over the summer, and then I'd continue to do the yard part during the year as I went to school.
Being a good race car driver is one thing, but to take all the time commitments and all the pushing and pulling and learning when to say no - because you need to rest or focus on the things you need to do to make the car go fast - those are the hardest things to learn and the most distracting things to learn.
When we're outside of the racetrack and in our team meetings, you need to communicate with your teammates and do what's best for the company in order to give the people that work there the best opportunity to succeed and maximize the potential of their job.
I love racing cars, and we have to have great competitors to make the diverse fan base have people to root for, and some people like calm, shy Ryan Blaney that knows a lot about the sport, or Chase Elliott, who's been around racing and has those deep ties to NASCAR and the southern roots of our sport. Those guys are all important.
Experience will always win in this sport. That experience helps with a lot of things, even in the race shop. You are going to have experience in certain scenarios where you can make those right decisions.
I don't ever leave my garage stall during practice. I don't want to know what other people are doing. I don't look at the scoreboard.
