As NASCAR races seem easier to win for everyone else, Cole Custer is finding his way back
Cole Custer headed into a 90-degree turn in one of the worst situations for a driver — his brakes weren’t working.
The 24-year-old stood in third place in the Henry 180, but as he headed into the sharp curve, his No. 7 car’s brakes exploded. The vehicle spun wildly out of the track with the front bumper barely attached before stopping, leaving Custer in the midst of a smoking wreck.
“We were running good, we led some laps and overall we lost brakes at the end,” he said with a small chuckle. “So that’s probably the worst feeling you can have as a driver.”
The race, which happened in the Xfinity Series, served as a microcosm for Custer’s struggles in his third full-time Cup Series season driving the No. 41 Ford Mustang for Stewart-Haas Racing, which hasn’t yielded a top-10 finish. The driver says he and his team have had multiple solid runs derailed by “random” events.
“It’s kind of one of those years where it’s kind of like what’s going to happen wrong next,” he said.
In the Cup Series race at Martinsville, Custer ran in the top five as late as the end of the second stage before his pit crew lost a tire, dropping him to the rear.
“It’s a frustrating feeling because it’s just extremely hard to pass on these cars,” he said. “So when you get sent to the back, it really makes it a really tough job to try and get yourself back towards the front.”
“These cars” refers to the Next Gen car NASCAR debuted for the Cup Series this season, which has a carbon fiber body and standardized parts designed to create more parity across stock car racing’s top series. For the governing body, it’s worked; there have been 5 first-time race winners this season, including fellow 2020 rookie Tyler Reddick last week at Road America, and rookie Austin Cindric winning the Daytona 500.
The struggles come after an impressive start to his career. Custer, the 2020 Cup Series Rookie of the Year, won that year’s Quaker State 400 in Kentucky. He was the only rookie to win a race that season.
Before that, he raced full-time in the Xfinity Series and finished No. 2 in the 2019 standings behind Reddick. But that success hasn’t translated to the Cup Series, largely due to the drastic differences in driving level.
Custer said the caliber of competition increased drastically between the two series, that in Xfinity you’re racing 10 to 12 drivers who can win a race while in Cup you’re taking on 25 to 30.
“The little mistakes cost you that much more just because it’s so much harder to get to the pack,” he said. “You’ve got to be good in every single area, you can’t lack in anything.”
Custer and his crew haven’t had that level of consistent excellence, with issues stemming from the penalty in Martinsville to mud blocking the radiator at Bristol, where he started on the pole but had to pit after just five laps.
Despite his struggles, Custer remains optimistic, noting that his team has achieved high speeds throughout the year but needs to continue to work on consistency. He noted that some of the team’s issues have been luck-related but that they needed to ensure they’re “buttoned-up” for future races.
“We’re just all ready for it to turn around, I think everybody knows on our team that we have speed,” he said. “It’s just a matter of making it consistent and getting things sorted out.”
They’ll have to sort it out soon. In over 90 Cup Series races, Custer has just two top-five finishes and knows how important his improvement will be to retaining his spot with Stewart-Haas Racing.
“At the Cup level you’re always under scrutiny, you’re on a national stage, it’s a lot of stress for sure,” he said. “But at the end of the day, you just gotta go out there and focus on what you can control.”
This story was originally published July 7, 2022 at 11:40 AM.
