Ryan Bergenty Joins as Columnist
We are glad to welcome Ryan Bergenty to the site. He will be contributing a column about life as a Car Chief in the Monster Energy NASCAR Cup Series. The Plainville, CT native works for the No. 1 team Chip Ganassi Racing of Kurt Busch.
Struggling to type, grammar is horrible, sentences run on for days, punctuation is wrong and we’re most likely going to lack the structure of some sorts. But the one thing I can promise is that I speak the truth whether my choice of words are correct or not. Yes, that is how I decided to start my very first blog. My good friend Nick Teto asked me a few weeks back if I would be interested in starting a blog to try and reach out to people and tell them about my weekends at the track. As I have spent more and more time thinking about how and why I would want to do this one thing kept coming to my mind. And that is to try to connect the dots and give all the details I can to the younger generation about what the NASCAR Cup series life consists of. I cannot promise that I have the keys to success but can rather translate how my hard work and good fortune has got me to sit on an airplane for hours every week flying around the country to work on race cars.
This blog may be longer than most because the flight I am currently on is longer than normal (Fontana bound) and I am going to have to try and pack and an offseason along with the first 4 races into one blog. Oh, and the wife and I had our first child too! Pressly Rae
December, Meet your new driver Kurt Busch. For most, it’s a sign of a guy who is hot-tempered and loses his cool when things don’t go his way. But for me, it’s a sign of relief. Growing up racing with both Mike and Ted Christopher I have been trained to accept this kind of passion. Racing is all about trophies and if you don’t get them you’re not doing your job. I was lucky to work with Kurt in 2013 at Furniture Row and when CGR announced KB1 was coming to the #1 car I was secretly really excited. Water bottles, seats, mirrors, belts, headrest supports, brakes, gas pedals, leg boards, shifters and an interior guy who looks for perfection has had my hands full in the driver department. Not to mention NASCAR had a rules package change this offseason and has had every other department on full swing. For those that do n’t know NASCAR increased the downforce significantly going into the 2019 season and with that comes a whole line of issues. More downforce means more stress on chassis, more stress on suspension and every other component of the racecar will react differently now. Oh, and BTW Kurt’s your driver this season which means…..there isn’t “a few races” to get our shit together. We need to come out of the box at Daytona and Atlanta ready to win! All of that made for a busy but fun offseason.
Now we roll into January. This was going to be the month in which we started to finish up Daytona cars, go to a test in Vegas and spend as much time supporting my wife as we get ready for the birth of our first child. The month wasn’t all to exciting until we got closer to the time that Preslly was going to be born. With having a baby you don’t exactly get to pick a day and time for them to come into this world. Rather you just communicate and try to plan for every possible option. So it goes like this, the first thing you do is pray that momma and baby stay healthy and she goes into labor at the right time. Then you pray that she goes into labor before Daytona. Then you pray she goes into labor before the Vegas test. And if all goes smooth I get to spend time with my wife, go to the Vegas test (which is our first on-track session with KB1) and then go off to Daytona with mommy and baby at home nice and healthy. Somehow or another I managed to hit all my targets and on Jan. 23 rd our little Pressly was born. Which in turn meant I got to spend a few days at home with them and still be able to get to the Vegas test and so on. I don’t plan to go much into detail about my personal life but I will tell you that I am very lucky to have a beautiful family. As far as the Vegas test goes…I knew after about 10 on track laps that our team was going to be relevant this season. I am not going to sit here and say this and that about how good it’s going to be because the bottom line is we need to perform. Hopefully, as I write weekly blogs there are more high notes rather than me cussing about how we screwed up the weekend.
February has been frustrating but yet a lot of fun. It’s only been frustrating because we wrecked at Daytona while I thought we had a car good enough to contend. For those of you reading this that don’t know how it feels to go to a speedway race. It sucks! You spend the entire offseason trying to find .005 of lap time and then end up in a heaping pile of junk from someone else’s mistake. I feel like I haven’t been part of a clean speedway race since like 2010. So now you understand where I stand on speedway tracks right? Sure I would love to win the Daytona 500 but if you told me I never had to go to another speedway race and could win a Cup race at Loudon I would take it any day. Yes, 2019 Daytona 500 we had damage again and we spend most of the race trying to repair. After we spin the driver comes on the radio and says, “Minor left rear damage. We should be fine” Ya OK! As the car comes down pit road all of the damage is in the worst situation. The fuel probe is bent, rear bumper bar is dragging the ground, rear bumper cover is hanging off, quarter panel is crinkled and all the support braces are broke. Ok so let’s back up. NASCAR mandates at speedways that you must have a bumper cover and lower tail extension on the car to compete. Yep…good luck to the boys and I to repair this thing in under a minute or so. Let me throw the last wrench in the mix that makes it even more frustrating. All of the damage is on the left rear. Oh, yea that’s the corner that all the fuel spills on. Oh, yea this is a speedway car that has been getting paste waxed all week. If anyone has a simple answer of how to get it to stick to it please send me a message. Gahh I don’t like plate races. Let’s move on to when we can actually start racing.
Atlanta, Vegas, and Phoenix. 3rd, 5th, and 7th. Solid but not nearly good enough. Again let’s refer to a few lines up. This is a performance-based business and anything less than winning is unacceptable. Ok Ryan stop being so tough on yourself. I get it. We have had a solid start to a season so far and I am very grateful for that. Atlanta was fun because the team came out of the gate working at a high level. A lot of people during the offseason wrote stories about how Kurt was getting into a sub-tier team. Go ahead and tell TC he wasn’t going to win starting last in the World Series at Thompson in a super modified. All it did was make everyone look like a fool when he drove by all the big names to grab the checkered. If anyone has a picture from that day can you please get it to me? What I am getting at is for those of you that don’t know about the guys behind the scene on the #1 car. That’s us! So to come out of the gate the first weekend and since then with a nice little stretch of runs is a little feather in the cap for the guys. Were here to contend this year. And if not for having to save a little fuel at Phoenix we would be looking at three top 5’s in a row. But that’s the name of the game and we move onto Fontana.
In all reality, I really want to use this blog to connect with other people that need advice, help or anything that pertains to following your dream. It feels like yesterday I was standing along the fence in turn one at Stafford waiting for the racecars to come over the top of the track and down the hill into the pits. It feels like yesterday I was begging my dad for a $10 spot so I could go to the picture stand and get some pics of the old 13 and 82. It seems like yesterday I was waiting to run across the front stretch into victory lane to stand with Wild Bill. It seems like yesterday I was sleeping on the couch at Teddy’s looking at the 200 Play Boy magazines under the table. It feels like yesterday I was packing up my truck to move south to chase my dreams.
We are narrowing in on arriving in Fontana. The team is headed over to the Monster Energy Headquarters for a team lunch. Monster is a new sponsor to our team this year and so this will be the first time we get to meet some of the employees that work on the product side of things. These types of events are a lot of fun and where some really cool relationships are born.
If you have made it this far into my first ever blog I will give you a lot of credit. If you have made it this far and haven’t said something along the lines of “this dude has a 4th-grade education” then we can become friends. Let’s hope that Fontana treats us well this weekend and that next week’s blog starts with something about a trophy and not about how Ricky Stenhouse is a weapon!
Cheers,
RB