Reigning Daytona 500 champion Austin Cindric has been thrown into the fire early in his NASCAR Cup Series career.
Not only is the Team Penske driver dealing with the growing pains of being a rookie at NASCAR’s highest level, he’s also balancing the fact the NextGen car is a completely different beast to figure out.
“The funny thing is you have guys who say this is the easiest year to be a rookie and in some ways, I think that’s based off of the fact that everyone is having to learn quite a lot and there’s a lot of newness with the cars,” Cindric said. “That doesn’t mean that I don’t have habits I’m having to unlearn as well.”
Cindric believes a big part of his learning process in the Cup Series has been adjusting to the differences between the NextGen car and the NASCAR Xfinity Series car.
“My whole basis of how to drive a stock car has been in an Xfinity car,” Cindric said. “That’s pretty much it. I had one year in the Trucks, but it’s pretty much four years of Xfinity racing and that’s what I’ve defined racing on an oval, period.”
Though Cindric came out of the gate as strong as any rookie could, winning the 64th running of the Daytona 500, he’s only been able to muster only one top-10 finish since (COTA in April).
A reoccurring theme within the Cup Series garage has been the unlearning process between the Gen 6 and NextGen car. For Cindric, it gives him a sense of normalcy knowing the veterans of the sport are going through the same “rookie-like” process that he’s dealing with every week.
“I think it’s just a process and in some ways it’s nice with the new car because there are a lot of very humanizing days for a lot of different drivers in the field,” Cindric said. “Some days you’ll be back racing for 20th with Martin Truex Jr. This guy is a Cup champion. This guy is expecting to be in the hunt for this championship. He came really close to winning the championship last year and they have bad days because everyone is learning. Everyone is having highs and lows and that’s why I feel like the points are still really close. That’s why we’re having new winners every weekend. It’s challenging, for sure. It’s just about minimizing those bad days and learning from them and applying them to make the next day better.”
As the NASCAR Cup Series heads to Talladega (Ala.) Superspeedway this weekend for the second superspeedway race of the year, Cindric is intrigued by how the race will play out compared to Daytona in February.
“I’ll be interested to see how much handling does or doesn’t matter,” Cindric said. “I feel like you had times in the race where the bottom lane would fade at Daytona even though it was probably the most dominant lane for restarts and early runs, whereas Talladega you don’t really see the off of turn four slides that guys usually have at Daytona.”
Cindric feels that despite the familiarity of a superspeedway with the NextGen car, teams will have to digest each bit of information as it comes during the weekend.
“Car-wise, I’m interested to see where we qualify and what gains we were able to make just from having the cars longer,” Cindric said. “I think everyone is kind of in that same boat, so it’ll be interesting to see who has done more homework after the first event of the year.”