Sargeant tapping into open-wheel lessons
LAKE Testing open-wheel cars in Europe and racing sports cars in the United States did little to help prepare Dalton Sargeant to pursue a career in NASCAR.
Except, maybe, on weekends like these. And then only a little. “There’s definitely quite a bit of rust,” Sargeant said Friday between testing session for Sunday’s 100-mile ARCA Series race at 4-mile, 14turn Road America. “It’s definitely different than the oval racing.
“The longer I go from being on a road course, it takes me that much longall er to kind of get back where I need to be and remember the tricks and the traits that go along with road-course racing. OverELKHART it’s going to take me a couple of sessions to figure it back out.”
The ARCA race is set for noon Sunday, two hours before the NASCAR Xfinity Series Johnsonville 180, the weekend’s main event.
Sargeant, 20, a threetime winner this season on short tracks, is chasing Austin Theriault for the ARCA championship, trailing by 225 points with six races to go.
Sargeant started in karting, winning in his home state of Florida and then won a U.S. championship that provided an opportunity to race karts abroad. Three years ago Sargeant began the season with a podium finish in IMSA Prototype Lights sports cars and finished it as runner-up in the Snowball Derby, the country’s
most prestigious latemodel stock-car race.
“Looking at racing in the United States, NASCAR was the place to be, it seemed,” said Sargeant, who ran four Camping World Truck Series races in 2015 before doing a 15race ARCA schedule last year.
“They have more of the attention there, and it just seemed like it was the best opportunity at the time, and that’s what made me make the switch over.”
Eye on the sky: To prepare for his NASCAR Xfinity Series debut, Austin Cindric is entered in the ARCA race as well. A little extra experience wheeling a heavy stock car around a challenging 4-mile, 14-turn layout can only help, right?
“It looks like it’s got a 90% chance of raining all day on Sunday, so I feel like it’s going to be more valuable than I thought,” Cindric said.
“I’ve got plenty of experience racing in the rain, but it adds too many variables especially going into a debut with Team Penske in the Xfinity Series. I’d rather have a smooth day for that.”
Cindric, the 18-year-old son of Team Penske president Tim Cindric, has more experience at Road America than much of the ARCA or Xfinity fields. He has three race weekends of weekends — two in a Ford Mustang in the IMSA Continental Tire Series and one in a McLaren in Pirelli World Challenge — totaling upwards of 4 hours on track.
Cindric’s road-course schedule has been limited this season by a full-time run in the Camping World Truck Series. The Xfinity Series first hits the track Saturday, which made the extra half-day of ARCA track time Friday all the more beneficial.
“I love driving stock cars on road courses,” Cindric said. “Skinny little tires, not much grip, lots of horsepower, an H-pattern gearbox, so you’re having to drive the thing every single lap. Getting used to curbs, jumping around, picking up wheels … it’s a good time.”
Learning experience: Given she races only sporadically in ARCA and never had been on a road course, Natalie Decker was grateful for the test day and eager to see how she would progress throughout the weekend.
“The first session was a little scary; I’m not going to lie,” said Decker, 20, of Eagle River.
“My first lap I went really slow, looked at the track, looked at everything. And then I slowly brought myself up to speed. Probably by the end of the session I was at 80%, 90%.”
Decker watched video and went through on-track training at Road America with Trudell Performance to prepare. Last year she attended the weekend to cheer for her cousin Paige Decker in the Xfinity race.
“I knew Canada Corner and the Carousel and Turn 1, and I knew where they all were but I didn’t know anything other than that,” Decker said. “When I was here, I never thought at the time that I’d be racing the next year in an ARCA car, so I wasn’t like, ‘Oooh, I gotta learn for next year.’”