Matt Kenseth discusses his final season
“Certainly wanted better things than that,” Matt Kenseth stated to Dave Moody on Sirius XM Speedway. “But we ran ok. I thought a best case scenario we were a 4th or 5th place car.”
“We tried a strategy that the #18 was on and a few other guys. Just kinda caught a caution at the wrong place. But, it just didn’t quite work out. It was worth a try.”
With the run at Homestead, the #20 driver ends his season with 4 top 10’s, in a row. It’s a streak that might be his last. Matt Kenseth doesn’t have plans for 2018. He’s still competitive, yet he’s announced he’s stepping away from the sport.
That leaves us all to scratch are head. Matt Kenseth included saying there’s some things about the sport that he “doesn’t understand.”
“The win at Phoenix was really special for a whole bunch of reasons. We had run pretty good for the last couple months of the year. That’s the way you want to finish it up. I don’t think anybody want’s to go out kinda limpin’ around in the middle of the pack. [I’m] thankful that we had some good performance.”
“I thought to get back to 7th in points was a pretty good accomplishment really. Considering, I think we had 6 DNF’s and we had 2 or 3 other races where we were all beat up and really riding around at the end of the race.”
“We had a lot of trouble. Especially early in the year, we didn’t collect any stage points. Crashed out of I think 4 or 5 races in the first 30% of the season. We felt like we got stronger as the year went by.”
Happy with the career numbers?
“You always wanna do better.”
“You feel bad about the ones you let get away more than the ones that you actually did the right things. It been way more than I ever dreamed when I started driving race cars.”
“I never thought I’d even have a chance to even race at this level. Much less, be competitive and have that kind of success and win races. It’s defiantly been way more than I ever dreamed it would have been.”
“I have no idea how it all happened.”
“I was just hoping to someday either work on race cars or drive race cars for a living. Get paid enough to go keep doing that. I loved working on them probably as much as I loved driving them,” Kenseth describes his early racing career.
“It just seemed like a long ways away. We never really traveled as a family. Never really got to the South and saw a NASCAR race in person. It just seemed like a different world, that was far away.”
But, Matt Kenseth staked claim in that world. He spent 20 years living the life as a NASCAR driver.
Will you be back at the track?
“I cant, at this moment in time, envision myself at the race track, if I’m not driving race cars.”
With 650 starts and 39 wins he’ll be back in the NASCAR world if he likes it or not, when he’s inducted into the NASCAR Hall of Fame.
Related: Matt Kenseth’s final race
