Austin Cindric entered the media center for his post-race press conference wearing the ceremonial wreath given to those who win races at the Alabama Superspeedway.
Rumor has it that he is still wearing it.
“If you won the Talladega 500, wouldn’t you try to wear this as long as you can? … I’m going to try to get on the airplane like this.”
But seriously though, Cindric is going to cherish every moment because the expectation to results ratio hasn’t totally been where he has wanted it to be with Team Penske over the past four years.
On one hand, he opened his full-time tenure with a victory in the Daytona 500 and has won once in three of the past four seasons but Cindric is also routinely found outside the top-15 in the regular season championship standings each year.
Cindric performs in the shadow of Joey Logano and Ryan Blaney — teammates who have combined to win each of the past three Cup Series championships.
“I want to be better. I want to be the best, right,” Cindric said. “Just being as good in my mind, as farfetched as it might be as a two- three-year Cup driver to say I want to be better than the champion. That’s how you have to think.
“I commit way too much of my time. I ask a lot out of the people I work with. I try to reciprocate with that. The ‘as good’ is not good enough in my mind. Is a motivator? Perhaps. I look at it as an example, as a competitive advantage for us to be able to have that type of example in-house.”
Cindric has started to put more consistent results together but even that was offset in the championship standings this year by an intentional right rear hook on Ty Dillon at Circuit of the Americas.
If not for that, Cindric would be 13th in the standings and in the hunt for even more playoff points come September. Cindric was a different series of circumstances away from a second Daytona 500 victory. The same can be said of the race the very next weekend at Atlanta.
There have been shoulda, coulda and wouldas in both directions this season. But still, Cindric has won again and will again be in the Round of 16, simply living and learning from the ups and downs.
“I think to your point, it’s kind of been a roller coaster, kind of been one thing keeping us from excellence on a lot of weekends in a row,” Cindric said.
“I think there’s a lot of different avenues you can take with it. One, what I started off with, how difficult it is to win in the Cup Series, be in the Playoffs. Two, how many of these races I feel like we would put ourselves in position in as a company, let alone just on the 2 car. All those stacked up together definitely have some emotions behind it when it’s all over.”
And certainly, unlike a lot of other superspeedway races, this one was the result of a total team effort between the Ford strategy, crew chief Brian Wilson’s over the wall pit crew and what the driver did behind the wheel.
“Even with the surprise, you don’t know until you get to the last couple feet of these races,” Cindric said. “To win under green, do it all the right ways as a team at the end. I don’t see a more complete team win at some of these racetracks than what we had today.”
Team Penske’s president of NASCAR operations Michael Nelson says Cindric is a case study of preparation meeting opportunity.
“I’ve known Austin for a really long time, since he was a kid,” Nelson said. “Watched him grow and develop over time. The amount of work he’s put in, in multiple series.”
Cindric is the son of longtime Penske president Tim Cindric.
“Once getting into the Cup Series, the amount of effort that he’s put in and everything that he’s gone through,” Nelson said. “I know he was really frustrated to not have won a couple of these races so far.
“Yeah, it’s really rewarding to see people go through, put the work in and achieve something that they set out to do.”
Again, this was ‘preparation and opportunity’ and not the other phrase it sometimes goes by.
“I don’t believe in luck,” Cindric said. “I believe in the law of averages. My faith continues to be restored. Sometimes I have to have more patience in the law of averages. You keep swinging the bat the right way, eventually you’re going to hit a homer. Like I said before, the guys on the team, everybody knocked it out of the park there that final stage.”
Read More: How the race was won and lost, takeaways
So again, Cindric will be the first to tell you he is not a finished racing product at 26-years-old but the 2020 Xfinity Series champion is getting closer every week and every year.
“I think if you’re not building, you’re failing,” Cindric said. “For us, it’s been a constant progression. I feel like you saw that in the Playoffs with this team.”
Cindric is one year removed from advancing to the Round of 12 and having a shot at the cutoff race to make the Round of 8.
“There’s not a single man on this team, on this 2 car, that I would change or swap out, think that somebody else could do a better job,” he added. “I think the belief is there. The process is there. The mentality is similar. We’re all pushing in the right direction. The same direction.
“I feel like a race like this just continues to solidify that for us. It’s what makes going to work exciting for me. It’s why I show up to the shop most days. It’s why I put so much into it. I believe that’s reciprocated from everybody from the top down on this 2 car.”
That team gave him the car, the pit stops and the strategy and now he’s somewhere in the air with a wreath over his shoulders.
