Toward the end of his NASCAR career, Matt Kenseth found it quite tough to call it quits and bring his career to an end. He retired 3 times between 2017 and 2020. However, after he came back out of his retirement for the second time, in 2020, Kenseth became convinced that this time, he’s had enough, that this time, this retirement would be the definitive one.
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And while many would’ve placed a good bet on Kenseth coming back from his retirement again, he didn’t. He stayed away from full-time racing since bringing the curtain down to his career at the end of the 2020 season.
As for why didn’t he think about coming back again, he recently opened up to Dale Earnhardt Jr.
Matt Kenseth opens up on the realization that convinced him to retire for good
During an appearance on Junior’s podcast, Kenseth recalled how in 2020, upon his return to NASCAR, he realized soon enough that he couldn’t do it full-time anymore. This prompted the host to wonder why or what made him feel that way, to which Kenseth replied, “I’m gonna tell you something and you may or may not agree with this, but I think most drivers get to drive almost as long as they want to.”
“They come to this spot where they realize they’re not as good as they once were. And ones who are going to tell you they never came to realization or never knew it … is probably not telling you the truth. I could just tell.”
“I remember Jeff Gordon telling me things about like when he was raced up, he goes, ‘Uh… there’s just things that are different. It’s hard to explain until it happens.'” You can just tell. When you’re at your best, you probably remember this, you’d make moves before you even thought about making moves, you already made it.
“You feel like you’re going 40 mph instead of going 200 mph.”
Kenseth claimed that after not having raced for a year and a half, when he did get in the car in 2020, he felt quite the opposite of how he felt when he was ‘at it.’
“I was always behind. By the time I was ready to make the move, there was already somebody in the hole. I felt like I was so far behind where the car was, I felt like we were doing 300 mph instead of a 170 mph. It was just everything’s different, everything is happening so fast, it’s just hard to … I just wasn’t as good as I once was,” he conceded.
Dale Earnhardt Jr. relates to Matt Kenseth’s response
Reacting to his guest’s response, Earnhardt Jr. claimed he understands his comments on this subject. He pointed to how he himself feels when he takes part in his yearly race in the Xfinity Series, and how different it becomes when it’s no longer a regular thing.
“Those things, when you drive the car every single week, the car becomes a part of your body. You buckle into it and it’s all one thing and you know where every inch of this car is at, at all times,” Earnhardt Jr. described. “It wasn’t second nature.”
When his co-host Mike Davis wondered if this has to do more with repetition than a driver’s age, Junior agreed. But he also pointed out how with age, the willingness to take risks gets lower and lower, how when a driver gets older, they become more measured and don’t make the moves on the track they would as a young driver.
