NASCAR CUP SERIES
TALLADEGA SUPERSPEEDWAY
GEICO 500
TEAM CHEVY PRESS CONF. TRANSCRIPT
JUNE 18, 2020
BRENDAN GAUGHAN, NO. 62 BEARD OIL DISTRIBUTING/SOUTH POINT HOTEL & CASINO CAMARO ZL1 1LE, spoke with media via teleconference to discuss his return to competition this weekend at Talladega Superspeedway, returning to superspeedway racing after his seventh-place finish at this year’s Daytona 500, and more. Full Transcript:
TALK TO US A LITTLE BIT ABOUT TALLADEGA THIS WEEKEND.
“Somebody asked me earlier if I feel like I’m rusty – I haven’t been in a car. I said ‘nobody has raced a superspeedway race since the last time I raced one’. So, I’m no rustier than anybody else. I’m excited – the Beard Oil team, we’re excited that we were able to stay in the top-40 in points. We were sweating that for a bit, especially after Bristol. I said earlier that I love Tommy Baldwin and B.J. McLeod – they’re my buddies and I like them a lot. After Bristol, I started to go ‘uh-oh’. But the great run at Daytona to get that top-10 is what enabled us to be able to make this race. Who would have thought we’d be sitting here in the world the way it is now and that seventh-place finish at Daytona for the No. 62 pays dividends yet again, and kept us locked in for Talladega.”
YOU’RE ON RECORD SAYING THIS WILL BE YOUR LAST YEAR OF NASCAR COMPETITION, MOSTLY BECAUSE OF THE NEXT-GEN CAR THAT’S COMING DOWN THE LINE. NOW THAT IT’S NOT COMING DOWN THE LINE FOR ANOTHER YEAR, IS THERE ANY CHANCE THAT BRENDAN GAUGHAN WILL GIVE IT ANOTHER GO IN 2021?
“I highly doubt it. Listen, the world is a different place than we started in January 2020. I’ve been so busy with business obligations and family obligations, I’m just afraid that I couldn’t give it enough time. It’s not like it takes a ton of time for me to do it now for the Beards’, but I don’t know. The Daytona 500 is always the carrot that dangles in front of you and that’s such an amazing, spectacular race that is hard to say no to. But as of right now, my answer is no. I’m still sticking to my guns and not going to be racing next year. If I did, it would probably only be the Daytona 500. Even then, it’s going to be a mighty-long stretch to get back there for the 500 next year.”
DO YOU HAVE PLANS TO HAVE ANY INVOLVEMENT WITH BEARD MOTORSPORTS IN ANY CAPACITY MOVING FORWARD?
“I would do anything that Darren Shaw, Mark Beard, Amy Beard, Linda Beard, Little Mark Beard need me for. Anything they ever need me for, I’m one thousand percent on board with the Beard family. Now that there’s going to be an extra year of this car, I was telling them that they didn’t need to go to the Next-Gen car – that it wasn’t something they needed to be a part of. But now that they have one more year of this race car, I might try to help them pick a driver better than the old guy they had and see if they can’t get a little bit of sponsorship money, even for some young gun out there. I’m not going to say it’s up to me, but if they gave it to me, I definitely know two names right off the top of my head that I would like to put in a race car for that family because I respect them a lot and I would only want very few people doing it for them.”
HAVE THEY TRIED CONVINCING YOU AT ALL TO COME BACK?
“Like I said, it’s very hard to say no to Mrs. Beard. Mrs. Beard is very, very inspirational. I want this printed word-for-word, she’s even offered to cook me chili (laughs). But right now, I’ll help them find a better replacement than what they had.”
HOW MUCH OF AN IMPACT HAVE THEY HAD ON YOU RACING FOR THE PAST COUPLE OF YEARS?
“Most of you have been around the sport a very long time and know that my career has been interesting, to say the least. Some faults of my own – I gladly admit mine. But I’ve had the best time with these guys. I loved ending my career with Richard Childress. Everything that he ever said he tried to do for me, he did, and we worked hard. We competed for championships, we won races and I never thought I’d have this opportunity anyway in the Cup Series. The greatest couple of years of my Cup career have been with the Beard family. I’m honored to say that I’ve been a part of it. I’m honored to say they’ve allowed me to do this and this has, honestly, been the coolest way I could think to go out. Come on, my last Daytona 500, I got a seventh-place finish. The only thing better would be to win! But a seventh-place finish for this little team – our press release said ‘David versus Goliath’. And I said, us versus Front Row Motorsports is David versus Goliath. The fact that we can compete with the Penske’s, the Gibbs’ and the Childress’ of the world – that’s just unfathomable. I love the opportunity that they gave me. I appreciate every bit of it. I’ll try to squeeze in a race car a couple more times and do what I do best for them, which is be there at the end of superspeedway races.”
FIRST OFF, NOT HAVING PRACTICE THIS WEEKEND, DOES THAT AFFECT YOU GUYS AT ALL?
“It affects us probably more than most teams. Most teams at least have some sort of an engineering staff, at least have some sort of equipment to pull that race car down repeatedly to make sure they’re going to hit their travels. Our race team does not. It’s difficult, also, to get time in other peoples’ shops right now with the way NASCAR has the teams sequestered. So, we could not get all the time at RCR that we normally would have the luxury of being able to get thanks to Richard (Childress). I do know that it got pulled down, I do know they were able to get some time on the pull down rig. But not as much as others or other races we’ve had. So, for us, it is a disadvantage. But thankfully, for us, the equalizer is that there is going to be a competition caution and I have a feeling the No. 62 team will be very graciously looking forward to that competition caution if we happen to miss our travels, hit the splitter too hard or anything like that.”
THE CAR THAT YOU’RE RUNNING – HOW OLD IS THAT ONE? WHAT’S THE SITUATION? I KNOW LAST YEAR YOU ADDED SOME CARS.
“I also destroyed a couple of cars. This is the car that we raced at Daytona. It survived Daytona. It had a little bit of damage. Before all the world change after Daytona, we were able to get it to RCR to get some of the fluff and buff done on the body. Our race team is absolutely the greatest race team in the history of mankind at social distancing, so Darren was able to do all the work in the shop himself with the updates NASCAR required – the extra bars, plates, those sort of things. Darren was able to get those done. So, it’s the same car we had at Daytona.”
YOU FLIPPED AT TALLADEGA AND MADE A LOT OF JOKES AFTERWARD. YOU ARE DOING THIS PART-TIME. DID YOU HAVE ANY SECOND THOUGHTS AFTER SEEING THE RYAN NEWMAN WRECK?
“No – Look (Ryan) Newman’s wreck was horrific. If you remember after, the main thing I said was the main thing you don’t ever want is to get hit on that roof. That is the weakest part that we can get hit on. Ryan, of course, got hit there and Ryan walked out of that hospital two days later. NASCAR does what they do best – they took it back to the R&D Center, they analyzed, they put it in computer models and they have made this race car even safer than it was before the one that Ryan Newman survived that crash in. So, it didn’t really affect my thought process on this. It kind of re-affirmed that we are not invincible, we are not indestructible. But we are as safe as humanly possible. I’m still a race car driver and I’m willing to accept the risks that are involved. I do feel very, very safe with what NASCAR has put out there and what Darren has done for me with our Chevy.”
DO YOU THINK THE CHANGES TO THE CAR, AS FAR AS REDUCED HORSEPOWER, WILL HAVE A BIG IMPACT?
“All through the decades, NASCAR has had different race cars, different rules packages, different tires – I’ve liked some, I’ve disliked some. In the end, you race whatever they tell us to race. This is what they’ve told us to race, I’m racing it and I will do my best to drive it. Fortunately, for me, we have great ECR guys working on our engine package to make sure that the motor will do what it needs to do and we’ve had enough aero people looking at these to say ‘hey, they’ve been able to do what we need to do to get updates to be correct’. So, fortunately, we’re a little team that gets just enough help to be very, very competitive.”
CHASE BRISCOE SAID AFTER HE WON THE XFINITY RACE A WEEK, HE SAID THAT WHEN WE GO TO TALLADEGA WITHOUT PRACTICE, WE WILL NOT HAVE ANY OPPORTUNITY TO PRACTICE OUR MOVES. THEREFORE, WE’RE JUST GOING TO HAVE TO GO FOR IT. I KNOW YOU’RE RACING IN A DIFFERENT DIVISION, BUT WHEN YOU HEAR THAT, CAN YOU KIND OF PUT SOME SENSE INTO THAT? IS THAT TRUE?
“Some of the younger guys maybe need to spend a little more time making sure they know where their race car is going to go. I kind of know some moves that I like. Every time you go, the race car handles a little different. But in the end, it still has the same characteristics that it’s going to have at Daytona, so I kind of know most of the moves that I want to make. I’ll spend the first half of that race practicing some of them. Everybody knows that we’ll try to get up there and be competitive during the race, but most of the time I’ll play a lot of it safe and I’ll be practicing. I’ll be side-drafting and seeing how far my race car will go. I’ll be letting people pin me down hard and seeing how it reacts. I’ll try to get a run on people and I’ll be using some of those laps as a test session early on in the race to figure out how our race car is going to handle for when it matters at the end.”
GIVEN THAT PHILOSOPHY, MAYBE MORE IN XFINITY AND LESS IN CUP, THOSE WHO ARE NOT VETERANS LIKE YOU WILL TRY THOSE MOVES AND WING IT WITHOUT PRACTICE?
“I think what you’ll see is a lot of guys doing what I do – you’re going to see a lot of people practicing. And the way this thing is now with the organizations that all work so well together, I think you’ll be able to see people probably practice those together, maybe even orchestrate some of them during the race if they get a calm setting to maybe say ‘hey, can I see what mine looks like in the front versus the back’. And maybe some teams will work with each other to do that. I think you’re going to see maybe a little bit of coordinated effort team-wise and some people will get it faster than others, just like anything else in life. You’ll have a lot of laps to be able to try and practice a few things if you put yourself in the right situation.”
AFTER THE END OF THE DAYTONA 500, THERE WAS A LOT OF TALK ABOUT IT BEING A WAKEUP CALL FOR SOME. YOU’VE BEEN RACING A LONG TIME NOW. HOW DO YOU FEEL LIKE RACING AT DAYTONA AND TALLADEGA HAS CHANGED IN THE LAST 20 YEARS SINCE YOU’VE BEEN AROUND? DO YOU THINK DRIVERS WILL BE LESS AGGRESSIVE AND MORE CAUTIOUS THIS WEEKEND?
“No, drivers have short-term memory problems. When it’s bad, we forget, and when it’s great, we remember. You’ll have to ask the younger drivers that question if they feel that way. To me, I can only answer for me and I know how I feel in a race car. I know that I’ve never felt invincible in my life in a race car. I’ve also never raced with the word ‘no fear’ and I’ve known a few drivers that did. We have healthy fears, you need to use knowledge and intelligence to do some of these things. If people think the younger generation maybe feels invincible, you’ll have to ask them that. For me, all through the years, we’ve had aggressive drivers and non-aggressive drivers. It didn’t matter if it was an older guy, younger guy, you always have people that some are more aggressive and some less aggressive. And you have that today as you had 20 years ago. The style of racing is nothing the same. Look, the race cars have changed completely. The old drafting, the new drafting. We went through bump-drafting, the tandem-drafting. But we raced through all of them and you make the moves. Some people like it better than others and we just keep on digging with it.”
AS A NASCAR VETERAN AS YOURSELF, WE’VE SEEN A BIG CHANGE RECENTLY FROM NASCAR AS FAR AS THE CONFEDERATE FLAG GOES. YOU’VE BEEN ABLE TO SIT BEHIND THE SCENES A LITTLE BIT BEING A PART-TIME DRIVER. HAVE YOU EVER EXPERIENCED ANYTHING LIKE THIS?
“Me and these sort of questions start 25-30 years ago. I’ve made statements in the past that can reflect my feelings on it. I think the flag, if you understand the history of it, you understand what the flag is and what it has become to stand for. NASCAR, five years ago, made a deal where they tried to get rid of it without overstepping too many bounds. But now the world has changed where you can kind of step over those bounds and make change, and they made a very positive one. It will work out great for our sport, as a whole. I think we’ll gain a lot of new fans and a lot of new people will be paying attention, and that’s great for all of us.”
Team Chevy high-resolution racing photos are available for editorial use.
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