Kenseth leaving NASCAR
2003 champ doesn’t know if he’ll be back
Wisconsin’s most successful stock-car driver is hanging it up ... at least for the foreseeable future, and quite possibly for good.
Matt Kenseth, the 2003 NASCAR champion and a two-time Daytona 500 winner from Cambridge, told NBC Sports on Saturday he’ll step away at the end of the year after 18plus seasons in the Cup Series.
“I mean the retirement word doesn’t really make a lot of sense in this sport really because ... it’s not like the NFL where you get a pension if you officially retire or you do any of that stuff,” Kenseth said later at Texas Motor Speedway in Fort Worth.
“Mostly it’s for people like (Dale Earnhardt) Jr. that got to fill the seat and have a sponsor and all that stuff. For me it’s just different because I didn’t really have that option, my seat got filled before, before any of that so there’s really no reason to talk about it.
“I’ll just take some time off, whatever that means. I don’t know if that’s a year, two years, three months, four months, I mean you never know what happens. Maybe something comes along that really makes you excited and it feels like it’s going to be a fit,
you might go do.
“Certainly not gonna rule that out, but for now, I’m not making any plans for 2018. I just plan on having some time off.”
Kenseth has won 38 times in NASCAR’s premier division, including the 2009 and 2012 Daytona 500s. He also won 29 races in NASCAR’s second division.
Kenseth, 45, has been among the top free agents this year after being told last season Erik Jones would replace him in the Joe Gibbs Racing No. 20 Toyota.
He said in the NBC interview he knew after Hendrick Motorsports hired 19year-old William Byron to replace Kasey Kahne “that should have been the cold water in my face” that it was time to move on.
Kenseth won a career-high seven races in 2013 after moving from Roush Fenway Racing to Gibbs. He has won seven more times for Gibbs in the four seasons since but has not won since July 2016 — 50 races ago. He was eliminated from the Monster Energy NASCAR Cup playoffs two weeks ago in the cut from 12 to eight.
In an interview with the Journal Sentinel in September, Kenseth said:
“Once I don’t drive, I don’t know what I’m going to do, to be honest with you. I do not envision myself being at the racetrack at all. But I’m not sure exactly what I’ll do. I will say it’s fairly busy around my house just being Dad and getting to actually be home and raise your kids. I’m good with that.”
He and his wife, Katie, are expecting their fourth child. They have three young daughters, and he has an adult son, Ross, who also raced.
Kenseth got his break in NASCAR in what was then known as the Busch Series when he joined the team of former Wisconsin short-track rival Robbie Reiser in 1997.
Kenseth also caught the eye of Mark Martin, now a NASCAR Hall of Famer, and Martin paved the way for him to join Roush Racing. He then became the Cup Series rookie of the year in 2000.
“He came in and immediately upped the pressure,” Jeff Burton, a former Roush teammate and now an NBC analyst, told the Journal Sentinel recently. “He brought raw speed. And Mark and I felt like that was a good thing.”