Matt Kurzejewski not planning a return to NASCAR – NASCAR news
21-year-old Matt Kurzejewski, who made his NASCAR debut in 2009 while competing in the NASCAR Camping World East Series, known as K&N Pro Series East these days, is not planning on giving NASCAR a try again.
In 2009, Kurzejewski planned on pursuing a full-time racing career in NASCAR’s top formats but his hopes did not come true. An accident while racing marked the end of 2009 Camping World East Series for Kurzejewski. In the 2010 season, Kurzejewski joined S K Motorsports as a Nationwide Series development driver but never got an opportunity to drive following the fold up of S K Motorsports before the Nationwide Series.
This subdued Kurzejewski’s NASCAR aspirations and he kind of let go of the idea of pursuing a NASCAR career. According to Kurzejewski, even with 2 years passed, he does plan on starting afresh in pursuit of a big-time racing career.
“I kind of wrote off my racing career. I was in talks with a Nationwide team (for 2011 season) and got burned on that deal,” Kurzejewski told Star Gazette. “After that, I said, ‘I had enough.’”
Although Kurzejewski has not competed in a major race for over three years now, but this does not mean that he has lost the potential or the racing skills to race in a major racing event. Kurzejewski ended his absence from the racing arena when he participated in an ARCA Racing Series open test at Daytona International Speedway last weekend and to the utter surprise of a lot of people, did exceptionally well.
Driving a No.54 Arrington Racing Dodge, Kurzejewski finished with the fifth-fastest time to his name out of a total of 61 drivers taking part in the test. According to Kurzejewski, he had planned to be in top-15 but to be in the top-5 was by all means an extraordinary effort considering the fact that Kurzejewski had never driven on a super speedway before.
On Friday, Kurzejewski’s best speed was 170.470 mph which was the 17th best. The following day, he dominated most of the afternoon session posting a top speed of 184.121 mph until in the final moments of the session, when the four Toyotas from Venturini motorsports beat Kurzejewski’s top speed by less than 7th hundred of a mph. The Mansfield’s driver skipped testing on Sunday, the final test day.
With the ARCA test finished, Kurzejewski will now be racing in the ARCA 200 at Daytona scheduled to be held on Feb. 16, 2013. He is looking forward to have Bob Keselowski, former ARCA champion and father of reigning Sprint Cup Champion Brad Keselowski, back as his crew chief. Bob Keselowski was the crew chief for the ARCA test.
According to Kurzejewski, nothing is final about his racing plans after the Daytona ARCA, but the thing Kurzejewski is sure about is that he will not be following a full-time racing schedule.
Kurzejewski said, “It depends on what we want to do. We’ve had some discussion of doing a handful of (Camping World) Truck aces and a limited ARCA schedule but I will not be running a full-time schedule. This is just for fun.”
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