Team Penske’s Austin Cindric finally reached Victory Lane on Sunday at the Talladega Superspeedway after several misses this season. Drafting skills need to be on point to win on such tracks, and they were for him. He spoke to NASCAR’s Shannon Spake following the celebrations and explained what it is like to draft with a stock car on superspeedways.
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The bumpers on the Next Gen car aren’t square-shaped. They’re more round. Drivers need to position themselves to the car in front of them with minute precision due to this. They need to be centered on the car they are pushing, and the car that’s pushing them needs to be centered on them. Over the years of experience, Cindric has figured out a way to do this.
He said, “I’ve always figured the best way to do that is to pick a point on the horizon, pick a point on the racetrack to just absolutely focus on and don’t deviate from it.”
“Almost like an airplane landing on a runway in high winds, right? You’re kind of getting blown around and pushed around all different ways.” If he keeps moving, the car behind him will not be able to keep up the draft.
Fortunately, everyone around Cindric did their jobs perfectly on Sunday. He heaped praise on Kyle Larson in particular and noted how the Hendrick Motorsports driver gave him all the right pushes at the right times when it would have been really easy to spin him out instead and take the lead. He added that it was everything he needed in the past to execute finishes and win races.
Why didn’t Larson spin out Cindric?
Larson doesn’t have a big reputation as a superspeedway driver. Despite this, he performed extremely well at Talladega and was close to reaching Victory Lane. He won Stage 1, finished second in Stage 2, and was set to cause a huge upset. Unfortunately, he couldn’t find it in him to get past Cindric in the final laps.
He said in his post-race interview, “You are trying to do all you can to win without crashing the front row. I could have easily crashed the front row. But that’s not anything you want to see at the end of these races. Did all I could, I thought, in the final five laps or so.” It was a matter of ethics for him.
And so, Cindric and Ryan Preece finished ahead of him. Preece was disqualified in the post-race inspection after his car was found violating the rule book. Larson benefited and was awarded second place. He now sits second on the points table next to his teammate William Byron.
