By: Ashley McCubbin

Sometimes when you stick a microphone in front of a driver’s face – especially when they’re mad, you have no clue what they may say and a couple of times you’ll hear something that surprises you or gives you a bit of a perspective.

Throughout the NASCAR Canada Series season, there were quite a few of these moments. So it seems only fitting we take a glance back through the year at what was said.

“I think in these days in NASCAR, you can’t take credit. You need a car, you need a team. It’s so competitive that on a weekend when you don’t have all the pieces of puzzle even if you’re very comfortable and even if you’re good, it’s too tight – you need everything. Today, we had everything.” – Alex Tagliani after winning the Honda Indy Toronto

“Well, Toronto is a really tough road course. It is really, really technical. Last year I was really impressed by the speed we had there and how you have to be on you’re a-game. So coming there for a second time now is going to be a great evaluation to see how I’ve improved on the road courses. I feel I was decent at Mosport (Canadian Tire Motorsports Park) at the beginning of the year, so Toronto should be good as well. Just hoping to go there and get a good points day to recover from the two bad races that we had. I was involved in two separate incidents in the past two races so we’re trying to move on from that and have a good result there.” – J.P Bergeron going into the Honda Indy Toronto weekend

“It’s the only thing I know. Honestly, it’s just as a kid, we didn’t have the money to do karting or go up the ladder like other drivers. We’ve worked our way up. We’ve worked really hard in the racing industry and I don’t know. I feel blessed to have WeatherTech and all of my sponsors with me and I feel blessed to have the people around me that have been helping since day one, and I just want to do well. I want to keep proving that they were right to get involved with me and that is one thing. As well, I love it. I just love it. I love the competition. I love the challenge. I love the preparation behind it. It’s a lot of work but I like that, too. It’s a big challenge. It’s hard and when it’s hard like that, you want to do well, and it gets really additive. That’s what we do. Then you wake up, eat it, dream it, and just keep doing it. For me, I want to keep doing it as long as I can.” – L.P. Dumoulin on what keeps him motivated going into another season of racing

“There’s potential for that, but I’ve said before in other interviews that I want to build the right way, don’t just want to go full bore and all at once and have a bunch of failures and get discouraged and not be able to perform well. So we’re going to start every year, build a little bit more, build a little more, and if the performance starts to fall off, then we’re starting to spread ourselves thin somewhere and we need to concentrate on slowing back down to speed back up.” – Daniel Bois on whether we could see him run the full schedule in the future 

“We were looking at it for this year, but I don’t feel like we had the right program that we could do this year. So instead of running the whole season and not having chances to win every race, I’d rather not do it. If I had the opportunity to run full-time and not be with a top-tier team that wants to win, I wouldn’t do it. I’d rather pick and choose a few different races like I did this year and the odds to win a little higher than just running the whole season to turn laps. I’m over that now. We’re really trying to win some races. About a year ago, we started think about the best possible way to get a championship deal together, and Jason and Ed – we’ve been talking for maybe a year or two, just on and off, just trying to figure some stuff out. Things just got more together at the end of this year. We talked more in detail about the possibilities and stuff and we have good sponsorship on-board with me and the team so we made it happen for two years. I’m really happy about that.” – Alex Guenette on the decision to return to full-time competition in 2023