D.J. KENNINGTON’S BIG BREAK
Can a journeyman driver from small-town Ontario make Canadian racing history at the Daytona 500?
TORONTO To borrow a metaphor, auto racing has long been in D.J. Kennington’s blood, roughly since the time his father was shooed from the St. Thomas Municipal Airport for driving on the runway.
With the southwest Ontario town’s smoothest stretch of asphalt ruled off limits, Doug Kennington turned to a backup plan: He persuaded a local businessman to open a dragstrip for aspiring racers like himself, and volunteered to run the facility. Under his stewardship, the St. Thomas Dragway broke ground in 1962. Years later, his son started steering go-karts down the track at age four.
At 39, D.J. Kennington is one of this country’s premier stock car drivers, with 26 wins and two Canadian NASCAR championships to his name. He has raced 50 times at NASCAR’s second-highest rung, the Xfinity Series. When he debuted in the top-tier Sprint (now Monster Energy) Cup Series in November, it was seen as a latecareer coronation, a hurrah for a minor-league lifer who topped out just shy of his sport’s highest level.
Until next week, that is, when he goes to the Daytona 500.
“It’s the biggest stock car race there is in the world,” Kennington said. “It’s still hard to believe I’m going to get a shot to try to qualify.”
Unbelievable is an apt description, given that his attempt has no precedent in Canadian history.
The Daytona 500 is indeed a very big deal. Marty Gaunt, the team owner backing Kennington’s qualification bid, calls it the Super Bowl of stock car racing, as do most fans. It marks the start of the new NASCAR season, and Kennington has watched every single one for 35 years, usually alone or with a small group of friends at his home, dissecting each of the race’s 200 laps in turn.
There have been 58 Daytona 500s, and only seven Canadians have ever made the cut — the last in 1988. The oldest debutant of the bunch, Toronto’s Vic Parsons, was 33 when he first qualified. Six of those drivers started at least 15 Cup Series races in their career, and Montreal’s Dick Foley, the first of the group, started seven.
It is rare enough for anyone to jump from NASCAR’s secondary circuits to Daytona; 36 of this year’s 40 starting spots are allotted to Cup Series regulars. To crack the field on Feb. 26, Kennington will have to prove his mettle in one of two preliminaries: a Feb. 19 time trial, from which the two fastest challengers will advance, or the Feb. 23 Can-Am Duel, a pair of 150-mile heats whose results determine the final two qualifiers.
And yet, if any Canadian is to buck the odds and break a threedecade drought, it makes sense that it would be him.
“He runs very well and wins a lot of races and championships,” Gaunt said. “He just needed a break to be able to compete at Daytona, and we felt we could give that to him.”
Of all the traits that coalesced to make Kennington a fixture on Canadian podiums, a subtle one stands out: He doesn’t miss races.
Not in 204 straight starts on NASCAR’s Canadian circuit, the Pinty’s Series. Not on the day after his 16th birthday, the first time he took the wheel in competition. And certainly not on a spring Friday night in 1995, as the graduating class of St. Thomas’ Parkside Collegiate Institute donned tuxedos and gowns for their senior prom.
“I didn’t even think about going,” Kennington said. It was a wise choice: He finished first that night at Delaware Speedway, the track west of London, Ont., where he came of age as a driver.
Through 19 pro seasons and Pinty’s championships in 2010 and 2012, Kennington has won all across the country, from Edmonton, Saskatoon and Vernon, B.C. to Antigonish, N.S., Bowmanville, Ont., and Delaware Speedway — to draw from his second title season alone. The win he calls his biggest was also his most recent, when he passed Jacques Villeneuve in the waning laps of the 2013 JuliaWine. com 100, in Trois-Rivieres, Que.
To Gaunt, to his father and to longtime opponent Andrew Ranger, Kennington has a couple advantages behind the wheel. One is his innate, “old-school” knowledge of whichever car he’s driving, Gaunt said, honed through years of teaming with his father to fine-tune each vehicle at the Kennington family race shop in St. Thomas.
“We’ve been a low-budget team all along. We did all the work ourselves: I built the engines, he built the rear ends and transmissions,” said Doug, a Canadian Motorsport Hall of Famer. “We made a go of it.”
The second edge is his patience, far from a universal trait on crowded NASCAR tracks. Kennington is a “gentleman racer,” Doug said, an approach he adopted for practical reasons in the early 1990s at Delaware. Kennington’s first stock car cost his father $25,000, and he knew repairs would not come cheap if he drove recklessly.
“He’s an aggressive guy, but at the same time, he’s not touching you for nothing,” said Ranger, who has raced against Kennington — and won two Canadian championships of his own — since 2007. “What I really like about him, he always finishes the race, (usually) in the top five. He’s very, very smart. He calculates the points a lot. At the end of the season, you know he’ll be top-three.”
Sunday’s time trial will not be Kennington’s first go at Daytona International Speedway; he competed there three times in the Xfinity Series late last decade, with a top finish of 17th. None of those races were longer than 300 miles. Still, if he is able to nudge his way into the course’s main event, his self-control could serve him well for the gruelling duration.
“It’s 500 miles, so a lot can happen,” said Cole Pearn, the crew chief for Cup Series veteran Martin Truex Jr. “Really, it’s just about surviving the race.”
Pearn is from Mount Brydges, Ont., a few minutes west of Delaware Speedway, where he cut his teeth as a driver in Kennington’s early years as a pro. Later, he decided to prolong his career from trackside as an engineer, and eventually joined Truex as crew chief in 2014. Last February, they placed second at the Daytona 500 — one-hundredth of a second behind Denny Hamlin, the narrowest finish in history.
“In (Kennington’s) position, it’s just getting through the (qualifiers) clean and racing smart,” Pearn said. “He’s always done well when he has run the speedway races. If he can stay out of trouble, they should be able to make it, for sure.”
Kennington’s partnership with Gaunt, another one-time racer at Delaware, was more than a little serendipitous. Kennington said he started seriously mulling a run at Daytona after his Cup Series debut in November, a 35th-place finish at the Can-Am 500 in Phoenix. He phoned Gaunt’s North Carolina shop, Triad Racing Technologies, in search of an engine. He learned Gaunt was in search of a driver.
Alliances like these are a fundamental quirk of auto racing. Kennington would not have reached the Cup Series without Dwight Kennedy, whose Alberta-based company, Northern Provincial Pipelines, backed his entry in Phoenix. And he could never have pursued Daytona without Castrol Canada and B.C.-based Lordco Auto Parts, his longtime sponsors. (“Without them, we can’t even take the car out of the trailer,” his father said.)
In the same vein, the key to qualifying at Daytona may not be anything Kennington actually does on the track. To stand a chance in the time trial or the 150-mile warmups, his car — a 2018 Toyota Camry — has to be fast enough to hang with NASCAR’s best, which comes down to money and engineering.
Kennington’s father, his righthand man in the shop for his entire career, believes the Camry will be the most powerful vehicle he’s ever driven. And his owner isn’t cutting corners: Gaunt summoned Kennington to Triad headquarters in Mooresville, N.C., earlier this month for a week of testing.
“There isn’t a bigger race out there than the Daytona 500,” Gaunt said. “If you look how (NASCAR drivers) brand themselves, they’re the Monster Energy Cup Series champion, and the only other thing that they brand themselves with is that they’re the Daytona 500 champ.
“I’m looking forward to qualifying for the race,” he added, “and then after we qualify for the race, we’ll start thinking about how we’re going to win the race.”
After Daytona, Kennington will return to the Pinty’s Series for the start of his 20th pro season. Tongue mostly in cheek, he says he’ll keep racing until the age of 80 as long as he can stay competitive, which he figures to be for the foreseeable future. His legacy is ironclad: He has more top-10 and top-five finishes than any driver in Pinty’s history, and before he takes his leave, he’d like to pass Ranger for most wins.
“A lot of people might look at this and say, ‘Look, he’s got sponsorship, and the only reason he’s there is because of that,’ and so on,” Kennington said. “It’s been 25 hard years of a lot of work, a lot of racing — well over 1,000 races. As far as I’m concerned, we deserve it.”