Daytona 500 weekend is here, and Ricky Stenhouse Jr. is looking to etch his name further into history.
The winner of the 2023 race, Stenhouse would become the 13th driver to take home the Daytona 500 checkered flag twice.
After lying low for a couple of months after the season started, Stenhouse is “pumped” to get back to competitive racing.
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“I’m ready to go. My team, we got a lot of good things working with our team, and everybody’s ready to go,” Stenhouse told Fox News Digital in a recent interview.
Stenhouse’s victory three years ago didn’t exactly change his own view of himself as a driver, but he knows that the Daytona 500 is where legacies are made.
“I think it changed the way maybe a lot of fans saw me as a driver. I mean, anytime you can put Daytona 500 champion next to your name, it’s something that we’ve been striving for,” he said. “I mean, I ran my first 500 in 2012, and it took me until 2023 to get that box marked. It was a huge win for a small team like ours. I felt like that really propelled us to have a great season that year, and I still feel like we’re taking momentum from that. Even though last season wasn’t the season that we wanted it to be, we’ll still show up to the 500 this year very confident that we’re gonna have a shot to go win.”
Since then, Stenhouse has won just one race: the 2024 YellaWood 500 at Talladega. Winning in NASCAR, of course, is not easy, and it’s a constant mind game for anyone in the sport.
“It’s very similar to golf, as in, you know, a good season’s gonna be two, three wins, right? You’ll have guys that jump into that five and six category, but it’s not many. You’ll see guys make a living on top-10s, right? It’s tough,” Stenhouse said. “But I think for us and Hyak and our team, we got 35 employees, we’re a small team, we kind of know our place, we know our resources, the things that we have.
“If we run top-15 weekly, that’s going to be a home run for us. But I think that’s what kind of keeps us motivated, keeps us going, not getting down, is, for one, every week is a different course, a different track. And you just gotta pick your stuff up if it was a bad week and move on to the next.”
So, how do they avoid that bad week? Or better yet, how do they have a successful week?
“It takes a car that you’re comfortable with, that you can take pushes, push people, you can maneuver it left and right really quick. If you need to go up the track, down the track, make the blocks,” Stenhouse said. “But then you have to have good strategy as well. You got to be able to save fuel, keep your track position, and then when it’s time to come down pit road, your pit crew’s got to do the job when you get in the pit box to get you out and make sure you’re still in the lead when you come back out. And I would say that’s probably the most difficult part about winning the Daytona.
“So I would say here, lately, the last three years, four years at Daytona, that gas man on that last pit stop has been kind of a game changer. He can save you seconds, and seconds is a lot. So just put yourself in position, missing the wrecks, and the chaos, you never know what’s gonna happen.”
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