By: Ashley McCubbin

When the year began at Daytona back in February, Brendan Gaughan stated this would be his last year of NASCAR competition. Though since then, plenty of things have changed. The sport has been dealt the COVID-19 pandemic, and the delay of the Next-Gen car has been delayed to 2022.

So, does that mean we could possibly see the Las Vegas native come back for another season? Not quite.

“I highly doubt it,” he stated. “Listen, the world is a different place than we started in January 2020. I’ve been so busy with business obligations and family obligations, I’m just afraid that I couldn’t give it enough time. It’s not like it takes a ton of time for me to do it now for the Beards’, but I don’t know. The Daytona 500 is always the carrot that dangles in front of you and that’s such an amazing, spectacular race that is hard to say no to.

“But as of right now, my answer is no. I’m still sticking to my guns and not going to be racing next year. If I did, it would probably only be the Daytona 500. Even then, it’s going to be a mighty-long stretch to get back there for the 500 next year.”

He has been asked, though, as Mrs. Linda Beard has suggested him returning, and he admits it’s hard to say no to her, and “she’s even offered to cook me chili.”

Even though he will be stepping out from behind the wheel, his commitment remains there behind Beard Motorsports and what the company is doing. Other than driving, Gaughan says he is “one thousand percent on-board with the Beard family.”

“Now that there’s going to be an extra year of this car, I was telling them that they didn’t need to go to the Next-Gen car – that it wasn’t something they needed to be a part of,” he commented. “But now that they have one more year of this race car, I might try to help them pick a driver better than the old guy they had and see if they can’t get a little bit of sponsorship money, even for some young gun out there.

“I’m not going to say it’s up to me, but if they gave it to me, I definitely know two names right off the top of my head that I would like to put in a race car for that family because I respect them a lot and I would only want very few people doing it for them.”

Through the past couple seasons, Gaughan says he has been honored to the drive for the family.

“Come on, my last Daytona 500, I got a seventh-place finish,” he commented. “The only thing better would be to win! But a seventh-place finish for this little team – our press release said ‘David versus Goliath’. And I said, us versus Front Row Motorsports is David versus Goliath. The fact that we can compete with the Penske’s, the Gibbs’ and the Childress’ of the world – that’s just unfathomable.

“I love the opportunity that they gave me. I appreciate every bit of it. I’ll try to squeeze in a race car a couple more times and do what I do best for them, which is be there at the end of superspeedway races.”

He will be driving the same very car that he drove to a seventh-place finish at Daytona come Sunday at Talladega Superspeedway, thanks to some hard work by Darren Shaw.

“Our race team is absolutely the greatest race team in the history of mankind at social distancing, so Darren was able to do all the work in the shop himself with the updates NASCAR required – the extra bars, plates, those sort of things,” he stated. “Darren was able to get those done.”

Ultimately, though, the last trip to Alabama did not go as smoothly as Daytona did, with Gaughan flipping through the air after battling up front for the lead. Hopefully this time around, he can stay on all four wheels while being up front once again as he writes the last chapter of his career.