Now retired from NASCAR racing, Brendan Gaughan has handed off his superspeedway driving duties to a fellow Las Vegas resident.
When the No. 62 Beard Motorsports Chevrolet takes to the track this week, Noah Gragson will be behind the wheel, preparing for his NASCAR Cup Series debut in Sunday’s Daytona 500 (2:30 p.m. ET on FOX, MRN and SiriusXM NASCAR Radio). The first Cup start for the full-time JR Motorsports Xfinity Series driver comes in the aftermath of the death of team owner Mark Beard Sr. on Jan. 31.
The original plan was for Gragson to race conservatively until the end of the Great American Race, but that changed recently.
“It started off as, ‘You need to go ride and take your time and just be there at the end,’ but now it’s transitioned into Mrs. (Linda) Beard giving me the thumbs up to go,” Gragson said. “She told me to ‘drive the piss out of it.’ Those were her exact words. I’m excited, because I feel like that’s more of my driving style.
“It’s definitely going to be a new challenge, a new opportunity. There’s going to be adversity, but I know the car will be strong and, hopefully, I’ll be able to adapt sooner rather than later with the package for the Cup car being so much different from the Xfinity car. I’m confident in my ability at superspeedway racing. In fact, I’m a lot more confident than I was at this time last year.
“I’ve been able to run up front at these superspeedway races, lead laps at pretty much all of them, win stages, and I won the race at Daytona last year in the Xfinity Series. It’s going be a great opportunity. I’ve been dreaming of it my whole, entire life to make a Cup start, and now I have that opportunity, and it’s all thanks to the Beard family and Brendan and all the partners involved.”
Greg is the author of "The Nuts and Bolts of NASCAR: The Definitive Viewers' Guide to Big-Time Stock Car Auto Racing" and has been published in major publications across the country including the Los Angeles Times, the Cleveland Plain Dealer and the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. He was also a contributor to Chicken Soup for the NASCAR Soul, published in 2010, and the Christmas edition in 2016. He wrote as the NASCAR, Formula 1, Auto Reviews and National Veterans Affairs Examiner for Examiner.com and has appeared on Fox News. He holds a BS degree in communications, a Masters degree in psychology and is currently a PhD candidate majoring in psychology. He is currently the weekend Motorsports Editor for Autoweek.
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