Ryan Preece explains why it's important for young drivers to work on their cars

Within NASCAR, there is sometimes the perception that the younger generation doesn’t work on their cars enough. It becomes a generational divide in many circumstances and, as Ryan Preece explained, there is value lost in not working on your car more often.

During an interview with The Athletic, Preece shared why it’s so important for young drivers to take work on their cars.

“That depends, and you can look at it in multiple ways,” Ryan Peece said. “We’re in a time where you can pretty much go out and rent race cars, right? You don’t have to worry about that. So a lot of racers have shifted toward being team owners and renting race cars to young, up-and-coming drivers who have funding.”

Ryan Preece explained that you can be a great driver but without a fast car, it really doesn’t matter. So, you need to work on your car to be successful.

“But my thing, and the reason I’ve done (work on his own cars), is 10 years ago we were leading the points. We had won five races in the season for the touring series at that point. And I was at Thompson (Speedway in Connecticut), which was one of my better racetracks — and I was running in like 28th. And I shouldn’t have been running 28th. Why is that? Well, it hit me that no matter how good of a race car driver you may be, you need to have a fast race car. That was when I was like, ‘OK, I need to figure out how to give myself fast race cars,'” Peece said.

“So you don’t have to (work on your own cars), but you need a big budget if you’re not going to. If you want to be a successful race car driver and not necessarily have the funding or a lot of money to go along with it, you’d better figure out how to give yourself a fast race car. That way, when you win races, owners are going to say, ‘Hey, I want that guy in my race car.’ And that’s from a local short-track hero to moving up into a touring series or anything beyond that. You’d better have the respect of owners and the people you’re racing against.”

Ryan Preece explains what his wife went through following his Daytona wreck

A little over a month ago, Ryan Preece suffered an incredibly scary wreck at Daytona. Recently, he opened up about what that crash put his wife through.

“Well, I would never want her to feel like that again. As a race car driver, we don’t think about the consequences. Because we love this sport and we’re very competitive. That feeling, that high of highs when you’re successful, that’s all we chase. Now on the other side, if some of us have wives or girlfriends, they’re the ones who are sitting there helpless, right? And I know after talking to her, when she watched that happen, as violent as it was … I can imagine how she felt. I don’t want to say she felt, ‘He’s dead,’ but she felt I was really hurt. So seeing me get out obviously felt good for her,” Preece said.

“My first thought was, ‘I need to let Heather know I’m OK.’ Even when I watch that wreck to this day, as a race car driver, it’s just another wreck. But I do understand to my wife and to many people out there, when they see that, that’s not a normal thing. I’ve wrecked a lot of race cars in my day, like we all have. We’ve all destroyed race cars. So, we don’t think about the consequences. But when I look at that and I put her hat on and see it from her eyes, I can understand why she was so nervous.”