The Untitled Jeff Gluck Podcast

This is the latest in a weekly feature called “How I Got Here,” where I ask people in NASCAR about the journeys to their current jobs. Each interview is recorded as a podcast but is also transcribed on JeffGluck.com. Up next: Truck Series driver Jordan Anderson. We’re in your trailer that made it all the way across the country to Las Vegas. People followed that on social media as you drove it out here yourself. This is it. You hear the quote, “If homes could talk, the stories they would tell” — and if this trailer could tell stories on all it’s been through, it’s crazy. I bought this trailer back in 2009 when I was racing dirt Late Models, so this trailer’s seen two years of dirt Late Models, it’s seen two years of asphalt Super Late Models, some K&N races, and then a full year of the Truck schedule back in 2015, a full schedule last year in 2017 and we’ve got it back on the road again this year. So it’s pretty cool to be sitting here. I’ve got my guys here, I’ve got Dan (Kolanda, crew chief), Dylan (Corum, car chief), and Cody (Barrett, mechanic) that rode out here with me (from North Carolina to Las Vegas), so I’m very fortunate to have some cool guys that don’t mind riding in the dually for 48 hours like we did coming out here.  One of the first times I heard of you, I was doing an interview with Carl Edwards at Bristol, and he’s like, “You know who you should go talk to? You should go find this Jordan Anderson guy. He has a really inspirational story. He’s just making it. He’s willing it to happen.” I don’t know a ton about all your background, but it seems nobody’s handed you anything. This is all stuff that you’ve really had to work for and fight for. So how did this whole dream get started? It’s cool that you mentioned Carl Edwards, because Carl was one of the first guys that I really met and got some advice from. I was probably 13 or 14 years old and racing Legend cars, and I gave him one of my business cards and saw him a year later and re-introduced myself. He’s like, “Yeah, I remember, I got your card sitting on my desk there.” So that was cool, and Carl always gave some great advice. But it’s been a journey. I’ve been very blessed and fortunate to pursue something that I love. I think I first told my mom and dad at 4 or 5 years old that I wanted to be a race car driver, and being from Columbia, South Carolina, that wasn’t really a big thing. It wasn’t a hotbed for any racing, and nobody in my family had any involvement in racing. Mom and Dad took me out to a go-kart race when I was probably 7 and we went and sat next to a family. We got talking to this kid, he was four or five years older than me, and his name was Nick Hutchins. He’s actually working at Stewart-Haas now on that 98 Xfinity car. He’s the car chief over there. But Nick was racing go-karts at the time, had a broken arm and was out of the go-kart, and we got to talking. He basically goes, “I’m getting my cast off next month, would you like to come try out one of my go-karts?” And before Mom and Dad could say no, I said yes, and we were headed out there. So I got one of his go-karts, and I think I was 7, 8 years old around the time we started racing in the WKA series, and we had no idea what we were doing. We would show up with a truck and like a long trailer and go race go-karts. I still remember somebody told us that our toe was out. We looked down at our shoes, thinking our toes were out. So we had no idea what we were doing. But it’s one of those things that we’ve been able to do together as a family. We’ve been through go-karts and Bandolero cars and ran Legend cars for five, six years, won the pro championship out there at the Charlotte Motor Speedway two years in a row. I think it was ’07 and ’08. We never really had the funding to go out and run the best of everyth...

The series of 12 Questions interviews continues this week with Alex Bowman of Hendrick Motorsports. Bowman, a Tucson native, is returning to his home track at ISM Raceway this weekend. This interview is recorded as a podcast but also transcribed below. 1. How often do you have dreams about racing? I guess it just depends on previous racing experiences. I feel like after Phoenix two years ago (when he almost won), I dreamt about that ending going a whole lot differently every night for a while. But recently, not very often. If I’m going to play a game on my phone — if I play a lot of Candy Crush or something, I have Candy Crush dreams. I was thinking that since you’ve been in the simulator so much… No, I definitely didn’t dream about the simulator, that’s for sure. But yeah, that’s kind of odd — you might want to get that checked out. 2. If you get into someone during a race — intentional or not — does it matter if you apologize? It depends on the situation. And there’s pros and cons to when you apologize as well. Like if you run up right after the race is over, it’s gonna be on the TV highlight reel and TV loves it, the media loves it — but sometimes it gets blown out of proportion, because there are a bunch of angry crew members around and people start yelling and it becomes a bigger mess than it could be if you let the situation calm down first. So I think it really is just situational. 3. What is the biggest compliment someone could give you? I think for me, I guess it’s easier to ask the biggest compliment I’ve gotten, and that was from Jimmie Johnson in 2014 when I first started running Cup cars. He came up to me after the Vegas race, and he’s like, “Man, when I was lapping you at Vegas, that thing was terrible, out of control. I don’t know how you were driving it.” So just to hear a guy say you’re doing a really good job with what you’ve got to work with, that meant a lot. Had you ever talked to him before that? Not really, no. So it was pretty cool. 4. NASCAR comes to you and says, “Hey, we are bringing a celebrity to the race and we’re wondering if you have time to say hi.” Who is a celebrity you’d be really excited to host? That’s a tough one. Obviously Peyton Manning, but we’ve already gotten to do that. Jennifer Aniston, I’d be pretty excited about. (Laughs) She’s newly single, by the way. Is she? You’re way more up on this stuff than I am. I read it on Snapchat — they have the Daily Mail tab. I don’t even know how to get to that. It’s over on the news side. I mean, Snapchat’s gotten so confusing lately. What happened? Yeah, I might be done with it unless they switch back. It’s like the same thing that happened to Jayski. Like, what happened? 5. In an effort to show they are health-conscious, NASCAR offers the No. 1 pit stall selection for an upcoming race to the first driver willing to go vegan for a month. Would you do it? I saw this question on the previous one. Heck no. Heck no! No takers so far on this at all. I mean, it’s such an advantage. I guess honestly, if that really happened, you’re gonna get sat down at your team meeting and be like, “Hey, you’re gonna be a vegan now.” But personally, like…no! 6. It’s time for the Random Race Challenge. I have picked a random race from your career and you have to guess where you finished. Oh gosh — 36th. (Laughs) This is the 2015 Dover spring race for Cup. Oh, we ran really good that day. I mean, for what we had. Did we finish 20th? Yes! You did finish 20th! I mean, we got the ol’ 7 to run 20th, we were winning. That was high fives all around after the race.

Brant James joins me to help hand out imaginary awards in 10 categories, including: Best NASCAR Twitter Feud, Crankiest Interview of the Year, Biggest Disappointment and Most Valuable Driver.

Martin Truex Jr., Kyle Busch, Brad Keselowski, Jimmie Johnson, Chase Elliott, Kyle Larson, Matt Kenseth, Denny Hamlin, Erik Jones, Austin Dillon and Sherry Pollex play along as I ambush them for a podcast at Champions Week in Las Vegas.

My mom and dad return to the podcast to share their thoughts on the recently completed NASCAR season with a look ahead to 2018.

My former USA Today co-worker Brant James joins me to break down all things Homestead, including how the championship was decided, the final career moments for Dale Earnhardt Jr. and Matt Kenseth and what’s next for both NASCAR and Brant.

With two fewer sets of tires available to teams this year, will Homestead turn into a tire strategy race? In this special edition of the podcast, the championship contenders sound off on the positives and negatives of the potential tire situation on Sunday.

The 12 Questions series concludes for 2017 with Landon Cassill, who has been in the last-but-not-least position for six consecutive years now. Cassill will end his tenure at Front Row Motorsports this weekend at Homestead-Miami Speedway and is currently looking for a new ride. 1. How much of your success is based on natural ability and how much has come from working at it? I’m (leaning) more heavily toward working at it than natural ability. There’s a lot of people out there that are just good at everything and I don’t think I’m one of those people. I think I’m good at a lot of things, but I definitely am a person who learns through my mistakes and fixing my mistakes, so I feel like I kind of have to work at it. 2. Jeff Gordon, Tony Stewart, Carl Edwards and now Dale Earnhardt Jr. and Matt Kenseth have all either retired in the last couple years or will retire soon. What’s your pitch for fans of theirs to become fans of yours? I feel like I’ve made that pitch almost every day through my social media activity in the way I communicate with fans. I mean, you just have to meet me at the racetrack and kind of see and understand how I kind of conduct myself, the way my sense of humor works. If you’re looking for a driver on the entertainment side of things, someone you’d like to follow off the track — and I think my on-track story is kind of cool and compelling as well. I think I’ve been through a lot in the Cup Series and had unique opportunities. I haven’t had that breakthrough opportunity yet, so I think it’s kind of, as Mark Martin put it awhile back, I’m kind of coming up the old-school way and I feel like that’s the way I’m doing it. So that’s a cool story to follow on-track. 3. What is the hardest part of your job away from the racetrack? I think balancing the work between, “How do I make myself a better race car driver?” but also “How do I market myself?” and “How do I brand myself and spend time on social media?” Things like that. It’s kind of going back to Question No. 1 a little bit. I work pretty hard on my feedback and my post-race reports and try to reflect on what I did at the races, how I can use that for the next race. Sometimes it’s busywork, like office work, and so much work that you have to get done at a desk. A lot of it is writing; I have an iPad Pro and a pencil and write a lot of my notes, whether it’s on the plane on Mondays or whatever. And it’s time sensitive, too, because I tend to forget what my car did as the week goes on. So I don’t write as well on Wednesday or Thursday after a Sunday race as I do on Sunday night or Monday morning. So balancing that kind of stuff, getting that work done versus trying to be sponsor-friendly or fan-friendly and keeping up a solid brand and a good personality — because that stuff takes time, too — that balance definitely is a tough part of the job. 4. Let’s say a fan spots you eating dinner in a nice restaurant. Should they come over for an autograph or no? Absolutely. Yeah, just form a line and we’ll stop eating our dinner and I’ll sign autographs and take pictures until everybody is through. I do that on Wednesday nights at the Brickhouse in Davidson. You have a big line, huh? Yeah. (Laughs) I’m just kidding. I’ve never ever been to the Brickhouse in Davidson, that’s just the first restaurant I thought of. Yeah, I don’t care. I’m totally fine with it. I really appreciate people who know who I am or know something about me — like if you feel like there’s one thing you know about me and you see me out in the wild, you feel like, “Landon, I want to remind you of this funny thing you did,

ESPN.com’s Bob Pockrass makes his return to the post-race podcast to break down a crazy day in Phoenix, including the significance of Matt Kenseth’s win and what lies ahead at Homestead.

The series of 12 Questions interviews continues this week with Trevor Bayne of Roush Fenway Racing. Bayne is carrying a career-best 19.6 average so far this season and is 21st in the Cup Series point standings. 1. How much of your success is based on natural ability and how much has come from working at it? Growing up, most of it came from natural ability — but once I got to this level, I realized that you’re gonna have to work at it. I sat down in the office with (Roush Fenway competition director) Kevin Kidd probably two years ago and we talked about that exact topic: How far is your natural ability gonna get you versus your work ethic? You look at the best guys and they work hard. So I’d say in the last year, I’ve ramped it up to about my max. This year, I said my goal was to try and burn myself out, to try to work as hard as I could and see if results came from that and see where it got me. 2. Jeff Gordon, Tony Stewart, Carl Edwards and now Dale Earnhardt Jr. have all either retired in the last couple years or will retire soon. What’s your pitch for fans of theirs to become fans of yours? I don’t know if I have a pitch. Man, I just always try to be myself, try not to compromise any of my values or anything like that. So, if they want somebody that’s just gonna be themselves, that me. That was weak sauce, wasn’t it? (Laughs) 3. What is the hardest part of your job away from the racetrack? The hardest part of my job away from the racetrack is just managing time with family. I know everybody in our sport has that. I bring my two kids (Ellie and Levi) and my wife (Ashton) with me every weekend. (The kids) were screaming on the (team) plane this weekend on the way here, and I felt so bad for my team having to listen to it. They act like they don’t mind, but… My family means so much to me, so it just requires so much time and so much effort. Listening to Carl Edwards in his retirement speech or whatever you want to call that, he talks about how racing requires every bit of your attention all day, every day. And like I said, I’m working at it, I’m giving it all my attention. So just managing family and racetrack (is difficult). Most people, if they have screaming kids on a plane, they don’t know anybody and it’s all strangers. If you’re on a plane, and it sounds like it’s all your friends and your team and you’re like, “Oh no!” We sat on the plane last night, and (Trevor and Ashton said to each other), “We’re flying commercial the rest of the year, because at least we won’t know the people.” (Laughs) They can’t be mad at us. I think dragging your family around 38 weekends a year, four days a week and having them cooped up in a motorhome, I just feel bad about that. But it’s probably harder on my wife than it is for me. 4. Let’s say a fan spots you eating dinner in a nice restaurant. Should they come over for an autograph or no? That’s fine with me. Actually here in Dover last year, my wife didn’t come for some reason and I was up in the restaurant right there on the backstretch, and a fan recognized me and I sat down and ate dinner with him the whole time. He bought my dinner; I thought that was really nice. So I sat with him and ate with him and his wife. They’ve been coming here for years and got to know him a little bit. But I think stuff like that is cool and it doesn’t really bother me. So they were eating and you sat down with them, or they sat down at your table? We were in line together and they were kind of doing the look — looking back, trying to be not obvious — and then finally they just turned around and said, “Hey, are you Trevor Bayne?” I said yeah.

Portland-area NASCAR fan Justin Bukoski returns for another appearance on the post-race podcast to help me break down the Charlotte playoff race from afar.

Each week, I ask a member of the racing community about their social media usage. Up next: Justin Allgaier of JR Motorsports. You’ve been on social media for a long time now. I feel like you’ve been through the ups and downs of it. How has your personal use evolved over the years to what it is now? I think that there’s a fine balance of what you put out and what you choose to not put out. I was on social media before I had a child, and I think that having a child changes how you spend your time and how much time you have to devote to certain things. And just the stresses and the pressures and the time allotment of what we do here right now is a lot greater than what it was when I first got onto social media. So I’m probably not on it as much as I would like to be. I take that back. I’m on a lot, I just don’t necessarily post a lot. I struggle because I love the interaction of it and I love being a part of it. To be honest with you, my wife (Ashley) is great at social media and I learn a lot from her on a daily basis. On the flip side, I’m kind of living in the moment of things instead of documenting them. In some ways that’s good, but in other ways it’s kind of bad. So I’ve struggled with social media on and off because there’s times where I wish I was better at it and then there’s other times when I wish I had never started it and just kept off of it. But I love the interaction with the fans. My challenge is that 140 characters is just not necessarily enough to communicate with our fans, and that’s tough. At Chicagoland alone, I went through like 800 tweets of people just sending congratulations (after he won). Well I went through 250 text messages, so it’s like, there’s no way you can ever respond to every one of them and not get lost. I had people that were like, “Man, I texted you after Chicagoland,” and I’m like, “You did?” And one of them was one of my pit crew members, and I was like, “I didn’t even see it.” So I think that there’s a fine balance there and I kind of struggle with what that balance should be. So you touched on this, but being a dad, how much does that take you off social media? Even if you wanted to be on it, how much less time do you have for it? Now I find myself getting on and scrolling to the top (of the feed), right? Like “What’s going on right now?” If I have a few free minutes, I’m looking at what’s going on in the current moment. The challenge of that is, I want to go through every tweet until I get to the top, or if it’s Instagram or if it’s Facebook. I’ve got to read all of them and see what’s going on, and I have to go in order and I have to go at my pace. So my wife gets so mad at me because she’s like, “You literally need to get off of Twitter without scrolling to the top, it’s not the end of the world.” I’m like, “No, because if I get off, I don’t know where (I left off). Like when you come back on, it refreshes, and I’m gonna lose all that.” I’ve kind of gotten into the habit of trying to get out of that and scrolling to the top and being done with it. But on the flip side of it, especially Instagram, if you’re on Instagram, there’s a lot you miss because it doesn’t necessarily come in order, it comes in whatever it thinks you want to see. Like I’m missing a lot of things that would be things that I would want to see and usually seeing the crap that nobody wants to see on my feed. So I struggle with that part of it. My wife posts a lot of videos and pictures of my daughter. And it’s not like I don’t want to post those pictures and videos, but she’s usually the one taking them, and then I’m gonna end up posting the same photo she post...

The 12 Questions series of interviews continues this week with Chase Briscoe, who is currently fifth in the Camping World Truck Series playoff standings entering next week’s race at Talladega Superspeedway. Briscoe, 22, drives for Brad Keselowski Racing. 1. How much of your success is based on natural ability and how much has come from working at it? I think to a certain extent, natural ability can carry you a certain way, but you’re not gonna get good at pit stops or restarts just by natural ability. You have to work at that, and I think that’s where you see guys win a lot of races — they do that extra work and they do their homework. I feel like that’s what kind of separates the champions from the non-champions, is the champions work at it in all areas and know where they can win and lose races. 2. Jeff Gordon, Tony Stewart, Carl Edwards and now Dale Earnhardt Jr. have all either retired in the last couple years or will retire soon. What’s your pitch for fans of theirs to become fans of yours? I feel like me personally, I’m kind of that old-school driver. I don’t have family backing or a big sponsor. Literally straight out of high school, I moved to North Carolina, sleeping on couches and volunteering at race shops and somehow convinced a team to let me drive for them. So I feel like that’s kind of like the old days, how all those guys were. That’s probably my sales pitch, is that I’m kind of a throwback guy that’s kind of one of the few that’s done it that way, at least in the last 10 or 15 years. So that’s why I should be your guy. What was the limit for sleeping on somebody’s couch? Did you overstay your welcome at times? I stayed at one in particular for a really long time, and we worked a deal — like $50 for two months. So I could at least afford that. But yeah, after awhile you could tell he was kind of getting upset. I stayed there for a year and a half; I was there for a long time. But he was nice enough to let me stay there. If I wasn’t staying there, I don’t know where I would have been. I would have been on the streets, I guess. Whose couch was this? His name is Ross Wece. Me and (Christopher) Bell actually both stayed there for a couple of months. (Wece) works for the World of Outlaws, so I know him from sprint car racing. He always says that if me and Bell ever make it to Cup, that couch might be in the Hall of Fame or something crazy. 3. What is the hardest part of your job away from the racetrack? Just the sacrifice you have to make, not being able to be at family events or family holidays. That part of it is tough for sure. I don’t think people realize how much goes into it outside the racetrack. I personally didn’t realize how busy NASCAR guys were. I thought they raced on weekends and had the whole week off, and that’s definitely not the case — it’s not the case at the Truck level and I know for sure it’s not at the Cup level. It’s just tough to balance everything outside of the racetrack, I think. 4. Let’s say a fan spots you eating dinner in a nice restaurant. Should they come over for an autograph or no? Yeah. I’d be surprised if anyone even recognized me, though, honestly. (Laughs) But I’m all for that. I always try to go out of my way, even when we’re walking out to the starting lineup or whatever, I at least try to stay there as long as I can. So yeah, absolutely. 5. What’s a story in NASCAR that doesn’t get enough coverage? I think the behind-the-scenes guys, the guys at the shop. I feel like you’re only as good as the race car that you’re in, and there’s a lot of people that put countless hours in it. There’s guys who stay in the shop until 10 or 11 at night who never even get recognized when it comes down...

NASCAR.com’s Holly Cain joins me to break down the unpredictable finish to the Dover race and the rest of the upcoming playoffs as Round 1 comes to a close.

Each week, I ask a member of the racing community about their social media usage. This week: Rutledge Wood from NBC Sports. You have a really special ability to connect with people. That makes social media perfect for you in a lot of ways, because you have a very positive spirit. How do you feel like that comes through in your daily social media use? This may surprise you a little bit, but I was a weird kid. (Smiles) I’ve always been weird, a little bit different, and I was really lucky that my parents were always there to support me and make sure that I knew it’s OK that I’m not like anybody else. That’s not a weakness, that’s your strength, so go be that person. I always believed in standing up for people who couldn’t stand up for themselves and that certainly has gotten into a few dust-ups in my life. Social media is this funny place where — good, bad or indifferent — we have opened this thing that we call “social” that is in fact completely anti-social, and we’ve allowed people to have this influence on us. I’ve definitely seen over the years there are really positive influences on social media and there is the total opposite; in that range between is where you hope most of your stuff lies. So for me, it’s not about following people that I believe everything that they do politically or on any kind of scope. I just try to follow a lot of people that bring joy to my life, bring joy to other people’s lives, and I think I will find those right things through there. I’m a person who came from the fan base of this sport. I started at Speed channel in 2005 from a Craigslist ad. I had gone to school for marketing and they basically needed somebody for the marketing department who could do all their on-site marketing and be an MC. So I would ride around the campgrounds and go meet fans and say, “Come to the stage, we’re having this big party later, it’s called Trackside.” And what they started to notice is that people started to hang out with me when there was nothing going on. So I would have a crowd there and they said, “Hey, we know you’re kind of different, but fans seem to really like you. We should do more.” And the more time I spent out there, (they) realized I come from this huge car background, I love cars, I love racing. I really came from a place where I didn’t know much about NASCAR in the beginning, but everything great that’s happened to my career has happened because the fans of this sport have supported me and supported it. The way that Top Gear (the History Channel show that ran from 2010-16) found me was a race fan loaded something that I did for RaceDay at Atlanta Motor Speedway with John Schneider from the Dukes of Hazzard onto YouTube illegally. And because that person sat down and said, “This was fun to me, I want to share this with other people,” that person forever changed not just my life, but my wife’s life, my children’s lives — all the things I’ve gotten to do are because of moments like that. And that person didn’t have to. So I try to use social media in a way to share joy, to have fun, to tell people, “This is what I’m doing, here’s where I am, these are the car projects I’m working on.” Someone asked a long time ago, “Why do you post pictures of your kids?” because I certainly some people do, some people don’t. And for me, I did enough stuff during Top Gear and I’ve been on enough weird flights where I think everyone has those kinds of moments of, “What happens if I don’t make it out of X, Y, or Z?” And I wanted to make sure that people never had any doubt what was actually important to me. Because work is really fun, and I’m so fortunate to get to do stuff that I love — but life is what I l...