Top Nationwide rookie Landon Cassill ready for next step in NASCAR
Landon Cassill remembers telling his teacher in the third grade about wanting to be a NASCAR Raybestos Rookie of the Year someday.
That day came last weekend for the 19-year-old, part-time Nationwide Series driver.
Now, Cassill is hoping he’ll get a chance down the road to fulfill another elementary school dream: Winning a NASCAR Sprint Cup Series championship.
“To be honest, I told my teacher in second grade that I wanted to win 10 Winston Cup championships,” a grinning Cassill recalled earlier this week at a luncheon honoring the top rookies for 2008 in each of NASCAR’s three national series.
But before winning a Cup title or even making his debut in NASCAR’s premier series, Cassill has his sights set on a full-time Nationwide or Truck series ride for the 2009 season. So far, though, neither has panned out for the driver who made all but three of his 19 Nationwide starts this past season in the No. 5 JR Motorsports Chevrolet.
“It’s really kind of up and down and back and forth,” Cassill said. “It’s hard to say. I feel like we’re definitely working hard on trying to get something for me to race. I feel like if I spilled any beans it would be getting the cart in front of the horse. We’ve just got to continue working hard.
“The economy’s tough right now. There’s a lot of people in trouble in our sport right now. I can sit and pout about not having a ride or not having something to race next year, but there’s a lot of good people and good workers that are out of work that need to find jobs.”
A lack of primary sponsorship for the No. 5 JR Motorsports team may prohibit Cassill from returning to that car at all next season. As of now, the company plans to only enter the car in select races. It competed fulltime in 2008 as Cassill shared the seat with several drivers, including team owner Dale Earnhardt Jr., Mark Martin and Jimmie Johnson.
Cassill made his series debut in 2007 after meeting NASCAR’s minimum age requirement of 18 that summer. He ran six races for Hendrick Motorsports, where he is a development driver.
“If you look at somebody with the whole package, Landon has really got it,” said Rick Hendrick, who now co-owns the two JR Motorsports Nationwide teams with Earnhardt Jr. “He is so good out of the car with sponsors, and sponsors love him. I mean they absolutely think he is the greatest thing since sliced bread. He’s good at motivating the team, and every time he gets in the car he’s better, so he’s got a tremendous future in this sport.
“There are a lot of veterans out here who could take some lessons from how he handles sponsors and how he handles the team and the way he tries to make that whole group work together. He’s mature way beyond his years.”
In addition to his select Nationwide appearances in 2008, Cassill also competed in seven Craftsman Truck Series races, all for the team now known as Randy Moss Motorsports.
“Just really, seat time’s made him better,” Hendrick said. “Getting in the car, getting in traffic, racing other guys and just experience – that’s what he’s needed, and that’s what he’s got this year.”
In his 19 Nationwide starts this past season, Cassill collected one pole – at New Hampshire in late June - and five top-10 finishes, including career-best sixth-place efforts at Gateway International Raceway and Phoenix. Cassill was paired with four different crew chiefs over the course of the year.
“It’s tough,” he said. “Fortunately the crew chiefs that I worked with were all people I knew. … They’re all people I knew and people I’ve worked with. … I got to work with all of them. I knew their personalities, and they were, for the most part, smooth transitions.”
Cassill, who beat Chip Ganassi Racing’s Bryan Clauson by eight points for rookie honors, became only the third driver to claim that honor without running a full schedule.
“It’s tough, but you’ve got to make the best of it,” Cassill said of his partial slate. “You want to race every week, but you’ve got to use it to your advantage.”
Cassill is also learning a lesson in patience as he tries to nail down plans for the 2009 season.
“It’s tough because I don’t know,” he said. “I suppose if somebody said, ‘If we don’t find a sponsor, you’re not going to be a NASCAR driver anymore,’ yeah, I’d probably be losing sleep. But you just don’t know. Nobody knows right now what’s going to happen.
“So I’m almost a little more relaxed because I know that we’re working as hard as we can right now to get what I need to get, and there’s nothing more that we can do.”
