DAYTONA BEACH, Fla. – Who in this world Austin Cindric?
As the 2022 Daytona 500 makes its way to the checkered flag, finally ending the 3 and a half hour enduro race that left dozens of cars behind the wall and saw 25 of the 40 cars on the field crash (that just according to the official box, since almost every car ends the night with damage), the American auto race attracts more eyeballs than any other race that has had a lot of people shouting at their TVs. them to know the names they know.
Bubba Wallace, Kyle Busch, Brad Keselowski, Chase Elliotteven the reigning race champion Michael McDowell – lots of recognizable racers took part in the victory.
But Elliott was 10th, Keselowski ninth, McDowell seventh and Busch sixth. Wallace, for the second time, lacked a bit of glory. Winner? A racer that all those casual Daytona 500-only NASCAR viewers may have never heard of. Now they have.
So, who in the world is Austin Cindric? He’s the 2022 Daytona 500 champion, that’s it. But don’t be embarrassed or confused if you’ve never heard of him before Sunday night. Fans of Avid NASCAR have heard of him since he was a kid. But for the rest of you, here’s what you need to know now about how he’s made himself known.
Cindric joked: “I didn’t pack an extra pair of underwear, now I have to work in the media for a few days, so I might not be so confident today.” Cindric spoke extremely fast. He said the last underwear sentence in 1.2 seconds of silence. He loves his mother: “She was a mainstay in my career. She made macaroons for my crew, and she tucked me in still in my firefighting suit after I made it past the third lap. consecutive.”
He’s a 23-year-old NASCAR Cup Series contender. That’s right, he’s a rookie. On Sunday he will start his eighth Cup. When. When they carve his name on the Harley J. Earl Trophy, he’ll be there by doing what only nine of the 64 racers on the list have previously achieved, winning the Cup. The first series in the sport’s biggest event.
Cindric won the 2020 championship in NASCAR’s second major national race, the Xfinity Series, and came within 0.03 seconds of winning a second straight title last fall. In Xfinity’s 133 career starts, he’s racked up 13 wins and is in the top 10 66% of the time. Good. Like, very good.
Cindric has always been a nice guy behind the wheel. So good that he managed to get through – for the most part anyway – the grumbles of racing life demanding silver spoons, beneficiaries of the NASCAR dictatorship.
You see, his father is Tim Cindric, the longtime president of Team Penske. That’s the team that Austin Cindric drives for. His maternal grandfather, Jim Trueman, was a longtime owner of the IndyCar team, which won the 1986 Indy 500 by driver’s license. Bobby Rahal, less than two weeks before Trueman died of cancer and 12 years before Austin was born. His grandfather, Carl Cindric, was a Gas Alley keyman who built the legendary Offenhauser engines.
If you carefully scan the photos taken in the Indy 500 winner’s circle in the early 2000s, you can catch a glimpse of a tiny Austin Cindric running around. He famously nearly defeated the Borg-Warner Trophy in a Helio Castroneves Indy’s brick yard photo session.
But not only did he not get his father to escort him on a high-class car ride, but his father tried to advise him not to race anymore.
“I always told him there would never be an umbrella from mom and dad,” Tim Cindric said on Sunday night. “He’s probably 10 years old and racing really isn’t the way I want him to go. I told him when he was in high school that we could help him until then, but he’s going to have to go to college or if he’s going to race, he’s going to have to find his own way in racing.”
Roger Penske, the owner of the Daytona 500-time Indy 500 team and now the owner of the 500-time Daytona team, has confirmed that story to be true. But he also recalls seeing young Austin play with race cars in his bedroom back home in Ohio. And he remembers when Austin was just ten years old when he got his first win in the Bandolero Series. Penske and longtime right-hand man Walt Czarnecki weren’t there for that first win, but they showed up the following week, and Austin won again.
“I’ve known him all my life and watched him grow up. His family,” said Penske. “But I think anyone who knows me knows that I’m not in the business of just putting people in racecars because I know them or I’m close to them. They have to perform – simple and straightforward. He did it. If we hadn’t put him in one of our cars, someone else could have done it.”
“He’s been the biggest influence in my life aside from my parents, and it’s not about racing,” Austin Cindric said of the boss, who he was quick to say not only that, the boss of me. “That’s how he treats other people. That’s how he treats his family. I learn from him all the time. To let him drive his cars with confidence, that’s a big compliment. as much as I can.”
Cindric sports car racing. He won the Truck Series race in 2017. Then he took a shot on the Xfinity Series ride, and he wasn’t great: “If you had come to me in 2018 after the I turned in front of the entire field of Xfinity [at Watkins Glen] and say, ‘Hey, one day you’ll win a Daytona 500!’ I would say, the bulls —. “
It took him 54 tries to finally win a race. He then won 12 times in the next 79 races. When Keselowski, who had hired Cindric to drive his Truck Series team, left Team Penske after the 2021 season to become a driver owner with Roush Fenway Keselowski Racing, Penske decided to put Cindric in the legendary No. 2 Ford, famous by Rusty Wallace, Kurt Busch and Keselowski.
Cindric’s hitting 1,000 in that car.
“Yes, he has a lot of opportunities,” Cindric’s team leader, Jeremy Bullins, explained on Sunday night. “When the opportunity came, he took it. He won. He studied. He worked very hard.”
It’s reminiscent of a great quote many years ago from Richard Pettywho got his first Cup Series ride through the NASCAR Hall of Fame, his father, Lee, and then went on to put his son and grandson in race cars under the family banner: “That race car can’t care what your last name is or who your dad is. You can drive it or you can’t.”
Austin Cindric can drive it. Those who follow motorsport closely or make a living from motorsport, they already know it. So does Roger Penske. Now, the whole world knows it.
“I’m not an externally motivated person or an externally intimidated person,” Cindric said on Sunday night when asked about people who had whispered about the promotion that would come through his last name. “My mind is on the game pretty much 24/7. I don’t think about anything other than racing. I don’t have a lot of social activities. I just go to the racing shop…if there’s anything else. nothing to prove, I’m not sure what it is.”
