Trevor Bayne making progress in Nationwide Series, has momentum heading into to race at ORP
Trevor Bayne heads into Turn 1 during the Missouri-Illinois Dodge Dealers 250 at Gateway International Raceway Saturday. Bayne scored a career-best third-place finish in the NASCAR Nationwide Series race. // Dilip Vishwanat, Getty Images for NASCAR
Lost in the final-lap dustup between Carl Edwards and Brad Keselowski in last week’s Nationwide Series race at Gateway was a career-best third-place finish by Trevor Bayne.
That finish, coupled with some recent good runs and a solid performance last year at O’Reilly Raceway Park, gives Bayne some momentum and confidence heading into Saturday’s Kroger 200 at the 0.686-mile short track in Indianapolis.
Being overshadowed by the Edwards-Keselowski battle was fine with Bayne – his focus is running up front rather than getting recognition.
“It doesn’t bother me at all, man,” said Bayne, 19. “The biggest thing is we’ve got momentum. Third-place finishes are great, but I’m looking forward to those wins that we’ve got coming ahead, hopefully. ... The momentum that we build off of that is the most important thing – and just showing we can do it.”
Bayne, in his second season, has two top-fives and four top-10s in 19 starts. He’s 11th in the standings. He had no top-fives and two top-10s in 15 races last year.
“We’ve made progress all year long, and now we’ve got a top-five, a top-three, we’ve been fast every weekend, and now we’re learning how to put a whole race together.”
Bayne and his No. 99 team hope to do that at ORP, a track where he won the pole and finished seventh last year in his seventh race in the series. And with that brings “real confidence,” he said, not the kind of brashness he had when he started in the Nationwide Series.
The confidence he has is now based on the belief he knows a lot more about what he’s doing in races, he said.
“That has to do with the competition,” Bayne said. “When I was racing Camping World East and Hooters Pro Cup, if you had a fast car at the beginning of the race, you could leave it there and be the fastest at the end of the race as well. People didn’t make that huge step of progress like they do in the Nationwide Series throughout the race.
“These Cup guys, they don’t get complacent with how their car is. Brad Keselowski, I’m sure the whole time he was leading (at Gateway), he was probably complaining about something and getting it better.
“You know that these guys are going to get better, and that’s what I had to learn, is how to make these cars better by the end of the race. And I’m still learning that.”
