Being a NASCAR driver outside one of the Big Four teams is pretty much like being an unnamed cast member in one of the "Saw" flicks -- you know you've got an expiration date, you just don't know when it'll arrive. Case in point: Regan Smith, who went from Rookie of the Year to Next Big Thing to part-time driver in the space of just 18 months.
Scene Daily has a fine piece up now on Smith, who's driving the No. 78 Furniture Row Racing Chevrolet ... just not very often. And Smith simply doesn't know what to do with himself.
"I'm bored out of my freakin' mind. It's brutal," he said ... "Somebody said to me the other day, ‘Well, that can't be that bad. You get the off weekends; you get the chance to do some other stuff when you're not at the track' ... It's worse than that bad. It's horrendous. I'm a racer. I'm 25 years old. I haven't known anything other than being at the race track every weekend of my life. This is the first year in a long time, probably since high school, that I've had weekends where I just twiddle my thumbs, wondering ‘What do I do?'"
Smith is best known for last year's fall Talladega race, in which he raced Tony Stewart to the finish but was ruled to have gone beneath the yellow line. That's him up there storming into the NASCAR hauler to plead his ultimately unsuccessful case. Now, he's one of a number of highly talented drivers who, for whatever reason, can't squeeze into a higher-profile ride. It's partly lineage; guys like Joey Logano and Brad Keselowski were spotted and locked up by big teams years before they were ready to ride in Sprint Cup. And it's partly (bad) luck; Smith had himself a prime slot in the DEI No. 01 car before that team imploded and merged with Ganassi, leaving Smith on the outside looking in.
He's currently sitting in 39th position, having qualified for all 10 races in which he's run. (He also has never posted a DNF.) But it's likely he'll only run four more races this season -- Richmond, Dover, Talladega and Phoenix -- and that's not nearly enough to keep you in game shape.
His new team sympathizes: "I have no other way to describe it but horrible, absolutely horrible," says Joe Garone, the team's GM. "Not everybody understands that. Talk to your average fan or your friends and they think you have more time at home, you can be with your family, you can do normal things. We're not wired that way, we're not geared that way. That's not what we do. And it takes you out of your comfort zone and your element of racing every weekend. It tips everything over, it really does."
In theory, the economy's going to turn around someday, and when it does, guys like Smith ought to get a shot at the top spots -- especially since so many current drivers are having such trouble. Till then, though, it's got to be rough.
Part-time Cup racing doesn't sit well with Furniture Row's Smith [Scene Daily]
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