Each week, The Athletic asks the same 12 questions to a different race car driver. Up next: Team Penske’s Austin Cindric, who has become one of NASCAR’s top superspeedway racers and won at Talladega Superspeedway earlier this season. This interview has been edited and condensed, but a full version is available on the 12 Questions Podcast.
1. What was one of the first autographs you got as a kid, and what do you remember about that moment?
There’s no way I can pinpoint the very first autograph I ever got, but it would have been from either Gil (de Ferran) or Helio (Castroneves) at an IndyCar race. I would run around and get autographs from everybody on the team — mechanics, truck drivers, it didn’t matter. You were signing my Marlboro Team Penske coffee cup with the Sharpie I gave you.
If we got on the podium, my dad (former team president Tim Cindric) would give me the Firestone hat, so that was always kind of my mission for a while.
2. What is the most miserable you’ve ever been inside of a race car?
It has to be the 2020 Bristol Xfinity race. Chase Briscoe won that race. I passed Ross Chastain on a restart to take the lead and drove off. It was a 40-lap run, but five laps into the run, I lost power steering. At Bristol. Old car. And I held on to the lead until six laps to go.
I was bending the steering wheel in my hands. Like physically, there was nothing I could do. I had gone through all this pain just to lose it with six laps to go. I’ve never been in tears because of physical pain and strain before — but just to lose like that, it sucked hard.
The tough part about being miserable in a race car is you’re trapped in the car, alone. No one can help you. You don’t get to stop and say, “Hey, somebody else come do this for me.” That is an impossibility. You’re lost within your own head, really.
I did learn a lot about myself in that Bristol race — how bad do I want this? I kept trying to prove it to myself. I didn’t really know to what scale of how badly I wanted it, and obviously I wanted it pretty badly. …
The worst part was going to the media center afterward, and Briscoe came up and asked, “Hey man, did you just get tight? What happened?” He had no idea! I was like, “Sure, I got tight. Leave me alone.”
3. Outside of racing, what’s your most recent memory of getting way too competitive?
Card games. Ryan (Blaney) and I were flying to a sponsor event and started playing, and I got way too jacked up about it. That should be no surprise.
Also, video games every night. It’s aggressive. My friend group rotates between Rocket League — which gets overly competitive and someone’s always on the verge of rage quitting — and PGA, which is our chill game. Still get wildly competitive, but not as intense. Not as much name-calling.
4. What do people get wrong about you?
I don’t really know. I stopped paying attention to what people think a long time ago.
I feel like I’m always 100 percent myself. There’s no “public Austin” and “not public Austin.” Maybe a filtered version of me in terms of what words I choose, but who I am doesn’t change. At the same time, I don’t feel the need to project. And in a public space, as an athlete or a performer, you’re almost expected to project. But I’m here to show up and go racing with my team. I honestly keep it that simple.
Most of the time, fans just hit me with the “Wow, you’re way taller than I thought.” Past that, I have no guess on the rest.
“The tough part about being miserable in a race car is you’re trapped in the car, alone,” Austin Cindric says. “No one can help you.” (Chris Graythen / Getty Images)
5. What kind of Uber passenger are you, and how much do you care about your Uber rating?
I’m not afraid to fall asleep in your car. If you’re picking me up at 5 a.m. to go to the airport, I’ll say hello, buckle in and go straight to sleep. Maybe that means I’m overly trusting of strangers, but what’s going to happen? I put my seatbelt on. If we crash, we crash. I’m not going to affect this anyway.
6. I’m asking each person a wild-card question. Last time we talked, you were trying to break 100 in golf. Now you’ve done it. So what’s next for your golf goals?
Breaking 100 was the goal. That was the entire activity. I was confident I’d achieve it, but I honestly thought I would achieve it a little bit sooner. But I’ve been doing this with a set of my dad’s golf clubs that are almost 20 years old. Everyone has been like, “You need to get fitted (for new clubs), you’re wasting your time,” but I said, “If I can’t break 100 and get to where the average golfer is on any set of clubs, I don’t deserve nice stuff.” I was going to keep using found balls in the woods and Noodle (balls) from Walmart until I did it.
Now I’ve broken 100, so the next step is getting fitted for clubs.
7. This is my 16th year doing these 12 Questions interviews, so I’m going back to an earlier one and seeing if your answer has changed. Back in 2019, Ross Chastain asked you what your personal alcohol policy was on race weekends. But you were only 20 at the time, so you said that explains that. Now that you’re legal age, what’s your answer?
It’s still the same personal alcohol policy I had when I was 19. As far as after that, there are coolers of Keystone Light that will satisfy the No. 2 team.
8. Other than one of your teammates, name a driver you’d be one of the first to congratulate in victory lane.
Todd Gilliland. He’d be the one I would be the most excited for. It started with a relationship with Harrison Burton — who was really close with Todd — but he’s gone (from the Cup Series). So it’s kind of weird: It’s like I’m babysitting someone else’s dog. (Laughs.)
He’s sort of the adopted friend?
Well, Todd has more friends on the grid than I do, so maybe it’s the other way around. At driver intros, I’m either alone or sitting next to Todd. There are other guys on the list, like Tyler Reddick or Chase Briscoe, but those guys have won enough that it would be more of a “good job today” fist bump. But with Todd, it would be a pick-him-up-and-shake-him and “Holy s—, dude!” type of thing. I look forward to that day.
9. How much do you use AI technology in your life or work?
I started using ChatGPT in the last month and a half, and I wish it existed when I was building my project car. It’s an incredible tool for all projects. … I have a thought — bam! — you have answers. I’ve tested the accuracy on specific car-related questions, and it’s pretty reasonable.
10. What’s a time in your life that was really challenging, but you’re proud of how you responded?
The Bristol story (from Question No. 2) fits here, too. I just wish I could describe that feeling of being pushed to the extreme. If I think of somebody who is my age (26), there are not too many times when you’ve had a reason or experience to absolutely push themselves to the physical and emotional limit to achieve a goal.
Outside of sports, who gets to experience that very often? There’s a lot of growth that happens in that. Upon reflection, it was like, “Wow. I went through all of that. … Dude, I could be a Navy SEAL. I could do anything.’”
11. What needs to happen in NASCAR to take the sport to the next level of popularity?
More horsepower! (Laughs.) No. That’s the copy-paste answer to every problem we have. TV ratings? More horsepower!
NASCAR doesn’t give itself enough credit as an industry. There are a lot of professional sports below our level, but we live in this bubble comparing ourselves to stick-and-ball sports. Other sports don’t compare themselves to NASCAR, but we’re constantly comparing ourselves to them.
I don’t want to say I’m content, because you’re always trying to build. But there’s a lot of good that’s happening and a lot of uniqueness in what our product is. The more we’re actually able to believe that and project that instead of negativity, the more other people will start to believe it.
If you take a respected journalist that says “NASCAR is dying” or one of these ex-drivers or ex-crew chiefs in the booth saying “They’ve got all these problems and the sport needs to grow,” fans will think, “Oh, the sport needs to grow. It’s not doing great.” We control the narrative, 100 percent of the way. It’s that easy, in my opinion.
12. Each week, I ask a driver to give me a question for the next interview. The last one was with Denny Hamlin, and he said: Name one lap of one race you wish you could take back.
The lap that motivates me most is Sonoma, 2016, in Pirelli World Challenge. I held off Johnny O’Connell in the Cadillac for the entire race and he passed me on the last lap into the hairpin. If I’m in a tough workout, all I think about is Johnny O’Connell. I don’t know if that’s just a core memory and nothing is ever going to replace that, but that’s the one for me that really twists my insides up.
Winning that race in Pirelli World Challenge, as young as I was and against the caliber of drivers I was against, would have been a huge step for me. That would have been a major sports car win for me. Just losing sucks, but losing at a high level like that … you’re racing against pros, so you’re not going to beat anyone better and you just want to prove as early as humanly possible that you’re the damn man.
They actually had to wait on me for the podium celebration. The worst part about losing in any of those series is you have to go celebrate on the podium. And I stayed in my car until somebody got me and said, “Hey, the podium is about to start,” because I was so upset.
Do you have a question I can ask the next person?
What TV show character do you think your loved ones would think you most embody?
(Top photo of Austin Cindric: Sean Gardner / Getty Images)