KENNINGTON PROVES IT’S NEVER TOO LATE TO CHASE A DREAM
Veteran Canadian NASCAR driver thirsts for another taste of the big time after Daytona 500 debut, writes Nick Faris.
For all the professional blessings directed his way in the last several months, D.J. Kennington has had his share of foul luck.
Take Canada Day, when the small-town Ontario NASCAR driver jaunted to Florida for a race in the top-tier Monster Energy Cup Series and watched his engine give out after 14 laps. Take early May, when he travelled to Talladega Superspeedway in Alabama and beat three opponents in qualifying, but missed the cut for the GEICO 500.
Or take Feb. 26, when Kennington realized a decades-old dream by raring off the starting line of the Daytona 500 — only for more prolific drivers to spin out on the 127th of 200 laps and claim his trailing Toyota Camry as collateral damage.
Still, he’s not exactly sweating those details.
“It’s still kind of surreal. I love talking about it,” Kennington said Wednesday. “I’m just a small-town kid from St. Thomas, Ont., that used to race go-karts on the dirt and made it to the Daytona 500. It’s a pretty cool story.”
Kennington is here this week for the Pinty’s Grand Prix of Toronto — the fifth stop of the Canadian NASCAR season, bookended by visits to Mirabel, Que., and Saskatoon. The Grand Prix, set for Saturday afternoon, is a prelude to the open-wheel Honda Indy Toronto, which IndyCar drivers will contest Sunday on the same segment of downtown streets near Lake Ontario.
It’s a track Kennington knows well, the byproduct of showing up for 208 straight races on NASCAR’s Canadian circuit, the Pinty’s Series. Coincidentally, that streak will tick to 209 on his 40th birthday. He has competed professionally in Canada for half his life with 26 wins, 117 top-five finishes and season championships in 2010 and 2012 to show for it.
Over the years, he’s also driven 55 times in NASCAR’s minor American tiers, the Xfinity Series and the Camping World Truck Series. But only now is he getting the chance to savour life at the apex of the sport — and to make history in the process. Last November, he made the first Cup Series start of his career. And when he qualified for the Daytona 500 a few months later, he became the first Canadian to do so in almost three decades.
“I don’t consider myself better than anybody else here in Canada. I don’t claim to be. I was just the lucky guy that was in the right spot at the right time, put the right program together and got an opportunity,” said Kennington, who clinched his spot in the main field at Daytona by passing Elliott Sadler, the last opponent he needed to beat, in the final straightaway of a do-ordie qualifying race.
“I still play it back in my mind: it was like the seas parted,” he said. “I shot up the middle in the last 150 metres and got ahead of him by a nose.”
From a cynic’s vantage point, it seems like a memory he’ll never be able to duplicate. Kennington says it has only left him wanting more.
“At the end of the day, when you sit down and you think about it, obviously you would think you’ve done it all,” he said. “But now I want to go (back to Daytona) and do better. I want to win more NASCAR championships here in Canada.”
Indeed, Kennington’s commitments north of the border have kept him busy. Recently, he filmed a promotional video for his longtime sponsor Castrol in which he test-raced a Zamboni, a double-decker bus, an ice cream truck and an 18-wheeler.
More pressingly, he’s trying to scrape his way up from seventh place in the Pinty’s standings, a deficit he dug for himself with a 17th-place finish at the season opener in Bowmanville, Ont. Since then, he has crossed the line in third, fourth and eighth — though a win continues to elude him, as it has since the JuliaWine.com 100 in TroisRivières, Que., in August 2013.
Now that he’s finally made inroads in the Cup series, Kennington plans to drive in three more top American races this fall at Talladega, Martinsville, Va., and Phoenix. And if he can lock down sponsorship for next February, he’d love to take another shot at Daytona, NASCAR’s answer to the Super Bowl.
His priorities, for now, are the eight dates left on the Pinty’s schedule — starting with Toronto, an unpredictable street course that can coax even the most seasoned driver into mistakes.
“We’ve been at it so long. We’ve won two national championships. We’ve got to get back to the top of the heap,” Kennington said.
”That’s the hardest part. There’s such good competition here in Canada. We’ve just got to do our homework and get back to being fast every week and leading laps and winning races.”
I’m just a smalltown kid from St. Thomas, Ont., that used to race go-karts on the dirt and made it to the Daytona 500. It’s a pretty cool story.