What’s it like winning a Daytona 500 as a rookie? Austin Cindric reflects a year later
Austin Cindric wore a bulky, shiny, familiar ring on his right hand.
He wore that Daytona 500 jewelry for practically four straight days a year and a few months ago, he said, after winning NASCAR’s biggest race in February 2022. And he donned it again on Tuesday morning in the NASCAR Hall of Fame in Uptown Charlotte, where a model of the No. 2 Next Gen car was unveiled in the museum’s “Glory Road.”
“The key is to put chap stick on your finger,” he said. “Because otherwise it just doesn’t come off.”
It’s in moments like these when you notice how strange Cindric’s rookie season as a full-time driver in the NASCAR Cup Series was. The Team Penske driver, in some ways, didn’t get a chance to feel like a rookie at all after the win last year — between the required appearances and attention and being locked into the playoffs so early.
But worry not: Cindric has received his fair share of rookie moments since, he said.
“I think there were some days where I didn’t feel like one, and there were some days I really felt like a rookie,” Cindric said with a smile. “There are some days where I still feel like a rookie.”
Cindric was the first driver to win a points race in the Next Gen car that NASCAR rolled out at the beginning of last season. That’s why his Next Gen (Generation 7) car was unveiled in the NASCAR HOF on Tuesday.
But the 2022 Daytona 500 did more than get him a spot in Uptown Charlotte. It thrust him in some elite company and pressed upon him some high expectations. Drivers who have won the Daytona 500 the first year of a new generation Cup car tend to be of the legendary variety: Richard Petty won the 1981 Daytona 500 (the debut of the Generation 3 car). Davey Allison won the 1991 Great American Race (Gen 4). Kevin Harvick won it in 2007 (Gen 5), and Jimmie Johnson won it in 2013 (Gen 6).
Cindric has learned a lot since that win. He advanced to the Round of 12 in the NASCAR Cup playoffs and was one less late wreck away from advancing to the Round of 8.
He has since followed that up with an up-and-down second year so far this season. He’s notched two Top 10s in the first seven races and ran strong all day at Atlanta before finishing P11.
“I’d say it feels normal,” Cindric said of his sophomore season. “I feel like I’m going into work every day. It doesn’t feel like, ‘Oh my God, I’m going Cup racing. I gotta figure this out. Look at the guys I’m racing against. This and that.’
“Yeah, I still feel like I have a lack of experience some days, but I definitely know what I bring to the table and know what I have to work on. There have been some frustrating moments already throughout the year. You start the year off getting put into the wall three races in a row. Trying to figure out how you got things going. Then you have two really good weeks, and then you have a really bad week. So it’s just the ups and downs. It’s so hard now more than ever I think to find consistency in the Cup Series, and that’s why you see drivers and organizations right now really having success just being in the game every week.”
Through the first seven races of 2023, there have been six different winners — an indication that the parity hasn’t left the Cup Series since the Next Gen car was introduced last season.
The race at Bristol Motor Speedway this weekend could introduce another winner, too, considering the 0.5-mile dirt track a lot different than anything else the field has run this season.
When asked what will be the toughest challenge this weekend’s racetrack poses, he chuckled.
“Dirt,” he said. “Dirt challenges me.”
He elaborated: “I’m certainly embracing the challenge. It’s obviously a discipline and a style of driving that I definitely didn’t grow up being a part of. I look at it as a great opportunity to not only learn and grow, but kinda understand my competitors a bit differently. Probably half the field raced on dirt to some extent. And when I say dirt, I mean short-track dirt ovals. I’ve raced in rally cars full drive on dirt. I feel pretty comfortable slinging around in loose-surface driving, but it’s definitely a different discipline.”
Cindric added that he feels much more prepared this year for Bristol’s dirt oval compared to his first Cup run there. He had to learn how to do it “on the fly.”
The same could be said about the rest of what he had to do in his 2022 season — the rookie season that didn’t feel like a rookie season at all.
This story was originally published April 4, 2023 at 1:00 PM.
