Next Friday at Richmond International Raceway, NASCAR will introduce their new group of NASCAR Next stars. NASCAR chooses a group of young individuals coming up the racing ranks that the fans should keep an eye on the future.
Dylan Kwasniewski was part of one of the previous classes while racing in the K&N Pro Series and says that it helped him with getting used to handling the media.
“You get to talk to the media and make friends off the track that you wouldn’t normally want to since you have to compete against them,” Kwasniewski commented. “So you get to know your competitors well. You get to know, hopefully, the people that you’ll be racing against for a very long time.
“But I think the biggest thing, like I said, getting used to the cameras, being more acclimated to talking with everybody, and kind of just getting used to being in the spotlight because hopefully we will be in it in the future to come.”
Kwasniewski is hoping what he learned from that experience will be beneficial now that he is in the NASCAR Nationwide Series with Turner-Scott Motorsports.
For Kwasniewski, though, moving up to the Nationwide Series from the K&N Pro Series hasn’t been an easy transition. The rookie has struggled so far at the different tracks with outside of the top 10 finishes, and a couple races where he had to go to a back-up car. In moving up, Kwasniewski noted that it’s hard to log laps and know when to be conservative and when to go all out with the longer races.
“It’s hard to log laps and get used to not only the characteristics of the track but how the car handles on it,” Kwasniewski commented. “Especially the radio rubber compared to last year. So trying to adapt to these tracks as quick as possible so you can get up to speed and start to compete, and then you fine tune on your car after that. I think that is the toughest part about my jump this year.”
While it may be frustrating to go through those times, but you can’t hold on to that frustration.
“You’ve got to move on,” he commented. “You’ve got to know that there’s going to be many more races to come. It’s a very long season, and you’re going to have time to improve on that.”
Kwasniewski added that you also have to ignore what everybody else is saying or doing and stick to your game plane so that way you can work at improving yourself.
