NEWTON — Confidence is the driving force in all forms of motorsports. An old-school saying that floats around the garage area is, “confidence is worth 10 extra horsepower.”
Cedar Rapids native Landon Cassill is brimming with it after the last few weeks, topped off with his 10th-place finish in the NASCAR Nationwide Series Get to Know Newton 250 on Sunday at Iowa Speedway.
It was Cassill’s second straight top-10 after an eighth at Talladega, marking the first time in JD Motorsports’ and Cassill’s Nationwide history.
“In consecutive races, putting a team together, this is a quality back-to-back top-10, for sure,” Cassill said. “This is how you do it.
“The this is the (result) of the time and effort it takes to be an overnight success.”
Cassill ran between seventh and 15th throughout the majority of the race, but at one point saw himself in the top five after a two-tire pit call. He held on to a top-10 running position for a few dozen laps before giving way to fresher tires. Still, he felt like it was a chance worth taking.
Making a call like that with 100 laps to go at a track where tires were very important takes — what else? — confidence.
“It was an option we talked about all weekend, and we wanted to see if it was something that would work,” Cassill said. “It was just almost good enough. You really had to have a strong car to pull it off.
“It obviously wasn’t something that could win the race. Four tires were needed to win the race, for sure.”
Fellow Cedar Rapids native Joey Gase started and finished in 29th, ending his race with some left-front damage after an incident with rookie Chase Pistone.
His Jimmy Means Racing team is still in the growing phase, but said he feels they’re continuing to grow as a team as much as he’s growing as a driver.
“Our crew came together, and the car ran pretty good all day. It just wasn’t our day, and we got in trouble with the 31,” Gase said. “We started off a little too snug. We got it freed up and I thought we were going to be pretty good there at the end. But when we came in (at the end) we couldn’t put tires on and just had to try and fix the left front. So we had a lot of laps on those tires. When we put a good set on, we were pretty decent.”
NO STRESS FOR ELLIOTT
Maybe it’s just his personality, or maybe he has the perfect team and family around him, but Chase Elliott swore this weekend wasn’t a stressful one for him.
The 18 year-old flew back and forth between Iowa and Georgia for his high school graduation. He was the favorite heading into Sunday’s NASCAR Nationwide Series Get to Know Newton 250 at Iowa Speedway and finished fourth after battling pit road troubles a few times during the race.
“It really wasn’t stressful, honestly,” Elliott said. “Just the time it took to go home and come back was the only thing. We had enough practice time from last Tuesday (’s test) to this past Friday, if we couldn’t figure it out by then, we needed work to do.
“We ran as good today as we were going to run, whether we had been here for practice yesterday or not. Definitely proud of the effort on that side.”
YOUTH MOVEMENT
To many NASCAR fans, 34 years old is definitely not considered old. But behind the wheel in NASCAR nowadays, 34 can seem ancient — especially when the NASCAR Nationwide Series points leader is 18 and just graduated high school.
Sam Hornish Jr. is that 34 year-old, but made a case for the experience in his years with his win on Sunday.
He traded the lead throughout the day with 20 year-old Ryan Blaney, who led the second-most laps behind Hornish with 80. Blaney, Elliott, Dylan Kwasniewski, Ty Dillon and others represent the youth movement and the future of the sport.
But that doesn’t mean guys like Hornish are going anywhere quietly.
“I keep looking in the mirror and saying ‘I don’t look that old,’” Hornish said through a laugh. “Then Ryan Blaney and Chase Elliott come up for driver introductions, and I’m like, ‘Yeah, I’m getting older.’
“I think you’ve seen this for years. You look at guys at the top of their game and as long as their head’s in it, there’s a lot of guys that their longevity exceeds where I’m at as far as age goes. The thing that makes it difficult is you know that the older you get, the less amount of opportunities you’re going to have in the future — no matter what they’re going to be, because you have less time to do it.”
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