Trevor Bayne talks stability amidst a changing NASCAR landscape

Seven years removed from his amazing Daytona 500 triumph, Trevor Bayne hopes he has the pieces in place to take the next step forward in his career.

Of all of the amazing things about Trevor Bayne winning the 2011 Daytona 500, maybe the most surprising is that until recently, he had never watched a replay of the race.

It’s a sight most NASCAR fans have seen often enough to be etched into their memories: Bayne bringing the iconic Wood Brothers Ford to the finish line first, becoming the youngest driver ever to win the 500. Now a relative grizzled veteran at 26, the Roush Fenway Racing stalwart says he only recently watched his career highlight, and something stood out to him right away.

“When I went back and watched the race a few days ago,  I was like, ‘wow, there were so many of these pirate teams out here just doing it,'” Bayne said to FanSided by phone from Daytona earlier this week. “Now you don’t really see that as much.”

Bayne hasn’t had to worry about that for a while. Though it took him several years after his big Daytona triumph to become a Cup Series regular, he’s been under the Roush Fenway umbrella since the latter part of the 2010 campaign. This will be his fourth season behind the wheel of the No. 6 Ford, the car once driven by Hall of Famer Mark Martin.

So far, the team has had only modest success, with Bayne finishing 29th in points in 2015 and 22nd for two consecutive years after that. He hasn’t made the playoffs (or the Chase before that), nor has he returned to Victory Lane.

But there have been some encouraging signs. Teammate Ricky Stenhouse Jr. won twice in 2017, and Bayne began the year with a top-10 finish at Daytona and a string of decent performances before hitting some rough patches later on. It’s not hard to imagine the No. 6 team finding a way to improve just enough to turn those top-15s into top-10s since the margins involved aren’t that big, but it’s going to take something they haven’t quite seized upon yet.

“A little bit goes a long way,” Bayne said. “It is a huge team effort, and I really hope this is a season where we can meet our goals. We want to win races, we want to be on poles, we want to make it to the final round every week on qualifying, be collecting stage points, make the playoffs. We want to do those things, and I really hope this is the year we can go do that.”

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What could help is that while many other teams have been swept up in a flurry of changes, Bayne’s group has been a relative pillar of stability. Not only had AdvoCare, a company whose products he actually uses, been around to sponsor his ride for his whole time with Roush, Bayne enters the 2018 season with the same crew chief, Matt Puccia, for the third straight season.

That kind of continuity is something he’s never experienced, and the working relationship has blossomed to the point where it’s benefited both of them — maybe more than ever at a time when ride heights, pit crew rules and more have all been in flux.

“Man, it’s really crucial,” Bayne said. “Matt Puccia is the first guy I’ve had for more than one season — people go to different places, get different opportunities — but Matt and I have really clicked well. He’s been great for me, and hopefully, I’ve been good for his career. We kind of came to each other at a good time. He has been in a situation that wasn’t great for him, same for me, and we were both able to build each other back up. I think that’s been good”

At the same time, Bayne has watched as an even younger group of drivers has come into the sport’s top level. During a time when NASCAR’s biggest storyline is the youth movement vs. the old guard, he’s squarely in the middle.

So who does he gravitate toward more? And does he have a dog in this particular fight?

“I can relate more to Joey Logano a little bit, I can relate to Stenhouse and Austin Dillon,” he said. “I feel like those are kind of the guys I came in with. The next wave under me, with Chase Elliott and William Byron and Erik Jones and Daniel Suarez, they’re definitely a different group, and I feel like social media had kind of taken off when they came in, so it’s a different era. So it is kind of crazy, but I definitely talk to both, hang out with both. You’ll see us all hanging out on a group cycling ride. I can definitely see all the different sides of it.”

Next: Jeffrey Earnhardt interview: Starting over at Daytona

As Bayne and Puccia try to concoct a way to recreate his Daytona 500 magic, working from a stable base, there’s always the possibility of another Trevor Bayne emerging, someone coming out of nowhere with one of those “pirate teams”  he mentioned.

Because of rules changes over the last seven years, he things it will be harder now, as the best and fastest cars have more advantages while leading the race than they did in 2011, the year of the infamous tandem drafting. And of course, Bayne would prefer to have that little bit extra to spoil the dreams of the underdogs by winning the Daytona 500 again and generally taking the next step forward in his Cup Series career.

“It doesn’t take a ton,” he said. “It takes a few spots. A tenth of a second sometimes in qualifying can move you 10 spots. So we’ve got to keep working at it, keep our heads down and keep our heads into the details.”