It's really not about what you have. It's about how you're able to enjoy life in general.
When you have fast cars and bad luck, it's a lot easier to handle than having slow cars and bad luck.
I'm going to quit when I feel like I'm not having fun anymore or I'm not competitive.
A lot of the kids we have coming up through our ranks now have been in stock cars since they were 12 or 13 years old. It's much different. I think you have to pick a path. If you want to race open-wheel cars and do those things, it's probably going to be carts and into an open-wheel series.
We have a great group of people and sponsors around us, and you don't want to send them out as outcasts because you have this newfound success and this new tool of things you can sell.
If you can qualify on the pole or in the front, you have a better chance of getting five points for leading a lap or leading the most laps.
I mowed yards with my grandpa at $10 a pop for awhile. I painted numbers on curbs. I cleaned swimming pools. I usually did all of that over the summer, and then I'd continue to do the yard part during the year as I went to school.
Being a good race car driver is one thing, but to take all the time commitments and all the pushing and pulling and learning when to say no - because you need to rest or focus on the things you need to do to make the car go fast - those are the hardest things to learn and the most distracting things to learn.
If you follow the same path as everyone else you're just going to be like everyone else.
I purposefully try to go through days without picking my phone up, and that's hard to do because we're so dependent on it.
I sometimes need to be smarter, but that's not going to change how I drive.
They could find something wrong with every car if they took it apart for a whole day at the R&D center.
We get paid a lot of money to do what we do, and there's a lot of people who are dependent upon that car running well and us getting everything out of it as a team. So I'm very, very loyal to my team and the company.
I love racing cars, and we have to have great competitors to make the diverse fan base have people to root for, and some people like calm, shy Ryan Blaney that knows a lot about the sport, or Chase Elliott, who's been around racing and has those deep ties to NASCAR and the southern roots of our sport. Those guys are all important.
I had to decide if I wanted to race full time or be an architect. I decided I could always go back to school.
My favorite part of any military feature, aside from the people themselves, is how clean and organized everything is. I like things clean and organized, and they don't get any cleaner or more organized than they are in any branch of the military.
Experience will always win in this sport. That experience helps with a lot of things, even in the race shop. You are going to have experience in certain scenarios where you can make those right decisions.
It kind of sucks when you lose a dog; you don't realize how attached to them you are until they are gone.
We have to take the good with the bad.
Winning takes you to that next level of being a bigger star.
