Our series of weekly NASCAR driver interviews continues with Trevor Bayne, the 2011 Daytona 500 winner who returns to the scene of his victory Saturday night for the Coke Zero 400. Bayne and his Roush Fenway Racing No. 6 team are 19th in the Sprint Cup Series standings.
Q: What is an errand or chore in your daily life people might be surprised to learn you do yourself?
A: I do the grocery shopping and cooking in our house. Monday morning, (wife) Ashton and I meet at the grocery store in Huntersville (near Charlotte). I get done working out and she gets done with her women’s Bible study, and we meet and I ask her if she’s all right with everything (on the shopping list). And then I do all the cooking. She does the dishwashing and cleaning, so it works out good.
What do you cook? What’s your specialty?
We cook all kinds of stuff, but you definitely keep coming back to certain things. We really like to make tacos at home, and we just found out about spiralizing vegetables and stuff. You can make noodles out of zucchini. It sounds really fancy, and this is probably going to get me made fun of in the garage. But zucchini noodle pasta with spaghetti sauce is really healthy and it’s what I’ve been making lately.
Q: If you could do any race over again, which race would you choose?
A: Well, probably Texas in 2014. We were leading the Xfinity race and blew a right front tire, and that was a pretty tough one. It was a chance to win a race for AdvoCare in their backyard there in Texas, and I had a pretty good lead and a really good race car, but I blew a tire and went up in flames. I’d like to have that one back and have a shot to win that race.
Could you have done anything differently?
I moved to the top sooner than anyone did, and I think the track wasn’t ready for that yet and it wore the right front out. I probably could have run the bottom a little longer and managed the right front. If I had known what I know now, I would have just gone ahead and pitted and took the lumps.
Q: The longest race of the year is 600 miles. How long of a race could you physically handle without a driver change?
A: That’s a tough question, because I’ve never really been at the maximum. At the end of the 600 this year, I felt really good. I jogged out to my car and tried to beat some of the traffic. So I’d say I could probably do that race twice and feel all right. I’ll say 1,200 miles and reevaluate at that point.
AdvoCare is obviously big into nutrition, and during long races you have to get some calories in while you’re going. In the insulation padding on my door, I have it built in where I can put AdvoCare Rehydrate Gel packs and I can tear them under caution.
It’s funny you say that, because Blake Koch said the same thing a couple weeks ago during a 12 Questions interview. He tears them off and eats them during races also.
So Blake actually introduced me to AdvoCare five years ago. He gave me one of those gels on a bike ride and that’s how I found out what AdvoCare was. Eventually it led to our partnership with AdvoCare.
Q: Let’s say president of NASCAR was an elected position voted on by the drivers, and you decided to run. What would one of your campaign promises be?
A: One thing I really enjoy is being at home with my family, and I know (crew) guys do, too. That’s the biggest thing with our race teams, is these guys don’t really get off days. They work Monday through Thursday (at the shop) and then fly out Thursday evening and work until Sunday (at the track). So if we could compact the schedule, where you have more events going on throughout the day — like I think it’d be kind of cool if you had a Saturday daytime Xfinity race and a nighttime Cup race. That might limit some of the drivers from being able to run both series, but I think it would be cool for the fans to be able to watch two races in a day.
Q: At the start of this year, exactly 2,900 drivers had ever raced in the Sprint Cup Series. Where do you rank among those 2,900?
A: That’s a lot of drivers. I wonder how many of those ran full time or how many just ran one race? This is going to sound arrogant, but I hope I’m somewhere in the top 25%. If I can be somewhere in the top 10%-25%, that would be cool. When I do triathlons, I try to be in the top 10% of the overall signups. So that would be my goal.
Q: What do you think your reputation is — and is that reputation accurate?
A: I would say I get a little bit of a reputation as a Christian, where fans think I’m somebody who doesn’t race hard. I think to drivers, they know I race hard because they have to race against me every weekend. But at the Showdown (when he qualified into the All-Star Race with a bold pass), I remember hearing everybody talk about, “Man, Trevor is finally being aggressive!” But I’ve been that way since I was 10 years old. Finally, this year I have equipment where I can go and race like that. The drivers already know that, but to the fans, they kind of question that sometimes.
Q: A famous chef wants you to invest in the new restaurant he’s opening, but he wants you to pick the cuisine. What type of food would your restaurant serve?
A: I’m going tacos, man. Ashton and I are all about tacos everywhere we go. You can’t go wrong with it. You can put anything on one.
Are you talking about simple tacos or the specialty tacos where they get really creative?
Yesterday, I had a taco with steak, fried egg and French fries on it. So that was pretty different. But my favorite are just simple, Mexican street tacos.
Q: What is the most daring thing you’ve done outside of racing?
A: The most scared I’ve ever been doing something in my life was with Carl Edwards in Mexico. We were in Monterrey at these orphanages. There was a thing called Via Ferrata, and it was this crazy mountain climb. It took us like eight hours. You climb up this rebar on the side of a mountain in the middle of nowhere and you get to the top, and they didn’t tell us we were going to have to zip line across to the other mountain. This is like thousands of feet in the air, and the zip line was all rusted — sketchy!
There was no option around it. So we zip-lined across, and then you have to repel down the other side of the mountain. When they were hooking up the rope, we looked down and the rope wasn’t long enough to make it to the next platform. They’re like, “Oh, it’ll stretch — your weight will make it stretch by the time you get to the bottom.” And Carl and I looked at each other, and that’s the most scared I’ve been in my entire life.
Q: In a move to generate more excitement, NASCAR decides in an upcoming race it is going to require every driver to have a passenger in the car. You get to pick the passenger. Who do you choose?
A: I think I’d put Jack (Roush) in the car with me for a little bit. I was going to say Ashton, but she freaks out and she’d probably yell at me too much. So I’d put Jack in there. Then he couldn’t be hard on me in the Monday meeting, either. He’d see what happened out there.
Q: How often do you talk inside the car without hitting the radio button?
A: Never. I hit the button all the time, Matt (Puccia, his crew chief) says.
Puccia, who happened to be walking by: Is that a real question, or is that just because I’m here?
Bayne: He doesn’t let me have AdvoCare Spark or coffee before practice because I talk too much. (Laughs)
Q: Who will win the Sprint Cup in 2021?
A: I hope we do. I think in the next two to three years, we could really be contending. In five years, we could really be where we want to be.
But if it’s not us, I don’t see Chase Elliott going anywhere. I think he’s in a really good situation.
Q: I’ve been asking each driver to give me a question for the next interview. The last interview was with Clint Bowyer…
A: Oh boy!
Well, he couldn’t come up with a question for you.
Clint didn’t have a question? Man. Well, I was kind of worried knowing Clint was before me and could ask anything. That’s funny.
Sorry about that. But do you have a question for the next interview?
If you could add a short track to the Cup schedule, what track would you add?
Follow Gluck on Twitter @jeff_gluck
