Pastrana’s NASCAR stint was short, bittersweet
Travis Pastrana has flung himself out of and over an innumerable number of things in a career as an action sports star, careened around treacherous roads as a multiple-time rally champion and launched his cycle end over end in a credentialed career as a freestyle motocross rider.
Every one of those moves came with calculation and an expectation of success. And as has often been his mantra, if he actually was trying to commit suicide by jumping out of an airplane without a parachute, he’d like to think he’d have been better at it.
So it’s with the requisite amount of disappointment that the 33-year-old reflects on a fulltime NASCAR ride he ended in 2013 after posting four top-10 finishes and a pole in his lone full season with Roush Fenway Racing in the second-tier Xfinity Series.
Pastrana cited family responsibilities — his wife, Lyn-Z, gave birth to their first child, Addy, that year — and a need to tend to his lucrative Nitro Circus franchise as the reasons for stepping away. Roush Fenway also was laboring to sponsor the car despite Pastrana’s massive appeal stemming from his previous career.
Pastrana doesn’t regret the endeavor or the final decision.
“NASCAR was the least successful of any venture I’ve gotten into. But I tell you, it was an awesome experience,” Pastrana told USA TODAY Sports.
Perusing the Monster Energy NASCAR Cup Series standings reinforces his assessment of how much time would have been required to transition to NASCAR, where his long-honed skill sets to race on dirt no longer applied. He had competed in developmental NASCAR circuits with much younger drivers who have just re- cently rounded into weekly threats at the sport’s top level.
“Look at guys like (Cup Series points leader) Kyle Larson (24) and Chase Elliott (21), guys I was racing against in the K&N Series, and look at how much they were driving, literally sometimes six races a week,” Pastrana said. “I had a kid my first year in NASCAR and wife and everything, and I needed to pretty much go back to the basics and learn from go-karts and dirt track and learn all that stuff those guys had learned. So it was an awesome experience, but it was too far out of my wheelhouse.”
Pastrana in part chose NASCAR, he said, because it was the next most available challenge with the best chance of not upending his personal and business lives. And NASCAR, he said, was the ultimate test even given that his experience had been so different from oval racing on asphalt.
“When I went to NASCAR, I had won four consecutive (Rally America) championships,” Pastrana said. “And for me, even though the competition was great, I was like, ‘OK, it’s either go world rally and see if we have what it takes there, and basically live in Europe, kind of uproot the family and go there or try something new.’
“Where do all the best drivers in the U.S. go? As much as the general public doesn’t want to admit it or doesn’t understand it, the best drivers in America and the best drivers in the world, they go to NASCAR. It is the most competitive form of auto racing on the planet. So I said, ‘All right all right, let’s see what it is.’ ”
Pastrana last competed in NASCAR in a 2015 truck race at Las Vegas Motor Speedway for NTS Motorsports — finishing 15th — and still fields occasional calls about one-off NASCAR opportunities. He talked last week with a team about the potential for another one-off in the Sept. 30 truck series race in Las Vegas. Pastrana is intrigued but knows the conditions that produced his previous results have not improved. He resumed his rally career in multiple regimens after his NASCAR junket. And he seemed perfectly content making machines fly through the air with another former NASCAR aspirant, Scott Speed, in a commercial shoot for Oberto last week.
“For me, I made my living and my talent was more being able to analyze risk and taking more chances in the right areas,” Pastrana said. “In NASCAR, the more chances you took, the slower you would go.
“The hardest part for me is I know I can go out there in the trucks and even in Xfinity, I know I can go out there with a really good car I can be a 10th- to 15th- place driver, which is fun. But to be the best, I’m going to have to really dedicate every second of my life, and that’s to say if I even could get there.
“But that’s the bare minimum, every second and every minute of every day for a couple years, and as much as I would love to, I have so much fun and we have so much going on with Nitro Circus and I like the rally, especially since the U.S. rally championship is only eight races. I can do that, be a father, be a husband and still do the Nitro stuff as well.”