Kenseth to avoid post-Daytona 500 drought with humble attitude

Daytona 500 winner Matt Kenseth didn't bother packing extra clothes before the race for a possible victory tour. AP

Matt Kenseth approached his 10th Daytona 500 with a Midwesterner's sensibility. Just like everything else.

After finishing 20th or worse at NASCAR's grand premiere six times, coping with blown engines, being involved in wrecks, having pushed Kevin Harvick to a last-lap victory in 2007, the 36-year-old former series champion expected his post-race itinerary to include a jet trip back to his Charlotte-area home with his wife, Katie, and a few days of decompression. He didn't even bother to pack a bag for a possible post-victory media junket this time. Ah, well, such a glitzy to-do wasn't much in keeping with the understated Kenseth anyway.

But there was Kenseth on Monday morning, looking just a bit bleary, not from a wild not of celebration, but the late-night flight he'd caught home to throw together a bag. And the crack-of-dawn return trip.

"We didn't have our motorhome down here, so we didn't have hardly anything. I wasn't prepared for it kind of on purpose," Kenseth said at the traditional winner's breakfast. "One year I was kind of thinking, 'You know, they take you to all these places and don't let you go home afterwards. You're gone all week, so I'll bring some clothes down here,' and I think that was the worst 500 I ever had, so I told Katie, I said, 'If it happens and we win, I'll worry about it then,' so I had to worry about it last night. So we just went and got all of our stuff. We haven't been home since Wednesday when we came back down here, and they're not letting us go home until after California, so I needed to go home for a few hours."

Luckily, Midwesterners don't mind a nice long trip, too. It's even better if they have to drive it. And this trip, in the broad sense, had been plenty long. Six seasons after he won a 2003 Sprint Cup championship deemed so mundane (or was is workmanlike) by his critics that the Chase for the Championship playoff system was instituted the following season (NASCAR asserted no connection) Kenseth was suddenly the face of the sport again, if only for one week. It's not that he'd gone away. He's won 17 races since his rookie year in 2002, is solidly among NASCAR's leaders in top-5 and top-10 finishes since, and with three-time defending series champion Jimmie Johnson is the only driver to qualify for the Chase each of its five seasons.

But Kenseth's career is built on workaday consistency, not big splashes like Daytona 500 wins. One never needs an extra set of clothes after winning at Michigan. And you get the feeling he's fine with that.

But Kenseth's NASCAR experience has always been about performing in obscurity. After the Rockingham, N.C., spring race in 2002, Dale Earnhardt Jr. found himself trapped by a mob of fans after taking a wrong turn out of the motor coach lot. Suddenly a Mustang screeched to a halt behind him and the passenger side door swayed open.

"Get in," Kenseth said.

Earnhardt obliged, the escape made.

Somewhere along the leisurely drive back to Charlotte, Kenseth wheeled into a McDonald's for dinner. It was jammed with race fans. Virtually every one of them spotted Earnhardt Jr. when he pushed open the doors to the restaurant. Another mob scene.

The Kenseths happily strode to the suddenly open counter and ordered. Thanks Junior.

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Kenseth seems almost ideally suited to work for Jack Roush. Some couldn't thrive in an atmosphere were five drivers are seemingly pitted against each other to vie for the affirmation of a stoic, demanding boss, but drivers like Kenseth and Greg Biffle seem to do well despite occasional bouts of melancholy. They've both signed extensions to stay aboard. Kenseth's Daytona 500 win might finally salve Roush's unpopular decision to separate Kenseth from his longtime crew chief -- Robbie Reiser -- and install him as general manager. While other Roush drivers such as Carl Edwards have benefited from Reiser's expertise -- finishing second in points last season -- Kenseth seemed to flail for the kind of success he had with his friend, partner and fellow Wisconsinite.

Moments like Sunday conjure nostalgia in Roush, a former Ford engineer who transformed an affinity for sports cars into a racing empire. But the humor remains dry, the love tough.

Kenseth recently informed Roush he'd signed his new contract, to which Roush responded, "What contract?"

But seriously, folks.

"I told him, I said, 'With the standing that you've got and the friend that you've been and the potential that you've got in this business if you decide you don't want to race with me, I think I'll just quit'," Roush said. "I'd have to think very seriously about it, but Matt is the tail end of the Mark Martin era. Matt would not have been on my radar screen if it hadn't been for Mark when he was struggling with Robbie for their Busch program. Mark came to me one day and he says, 'I've been talking to Matt Kenseth. He thinks straight and he's really a good guy and you need to think about trying to help him.'"

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One of Kenseth's first phone calls following the victory on Sunday was from his father, Roy. Fitting, because the tough-minded former race promoter/video store-laundromat-owner from Cambridge, Wisc., instilled the tenets that still dictate the race car driver's behavior. Roy Kenseth bough Matt a Late Model when he was 13, but wouldn't let him race it for three years. Matt worked on the car as Roy raced with his brothers at a few quarter-mile short tracks.

"Matt earned his way there and I think a lot of those guys did not earn their way," Roy Kenseth told the St. Petersburg Times in 2006. "They just have it handed to them. That's just my opinion. I know where Matt came from. I know how hard he had to work, and then coming from Wisconsin you got two strikes against you to begin with because you're not part of the California or Southern people. But again, that's OK. In fact, I think we enjoy it more because of the work we put into it."

Roy Kenseth often spurns interviews and makes no secret that speaking with reporters gets him "kind of fired up." In the past he has never been more defensive about his son when discussing the apparent lack of credit he has accrued, the reputation for being "boring," that enough is never enough. When asked by the Times in 2006 how a second title by his son, one under each points system under which he'd competed, would be received, he responded with a blend of paternal pride and scorn.