Kasey Kahne Endures Tough Times, Upheaval With Positive Attitude

It had been awhile since I caught up with Kasey Kahne, so I decided to check out an event he was doing on Tuesday at Charlotte Motor Speedway.

Kahne, I figured, was nearing the end of the most turbulent stretch of his career – a miserable 2010 at Richard Petty Motorsports and a disappointing 2011 season at Red Bull Racing – and could finally see a light at the end of the tunnel.

That light, of course, being his future at Hendrick Motorsports.

But Kahne didn’t necessarily see it that way. Not that the Hendrick opportunity isn’t exciting; it is. Kahne, though, said the last two years could have been worse.

After visiting with Charlotte public school students who were participating in a Bank of America-sponsored event (a STEM program that linked racing with math and science), Kahne said he didn’t necessarily share my perception of how rotten things had been for him.

“At the end of the day, I don’t feel like anything’s really been that bad,” Kahne said. “It could have been much better at times, but I still get to race every weekend and I have a lot of friends in the sport. I like that. I’m happy with the last six years, seven years.

“I want it to be better, I want to perform, I want to win more. But I’m glad I’ve done everything I’ve done and had to go through some of the scenarios and situations I’ve been through.”

He thinks about his future at Hendrick Motorsports often (“There’s no way I can’t think about it,” he said) and he believes joining NASCAR’s top team will be both “exciting” and “the perfect scenario.”

At the same time, he’s not counting down the days as if it were the end of a prison sentence. When he signed with Hendrick a year and a half ago, he thought it would take forever for the new opportunity to finally arrive. But it’s gone a bit faster than he expected, he said.

And to hear Kahne tell it, this season (ten top-10 finishes, average finish of 17.2) has been easy compared to the end of his tenure with the team formerly known as Gillett Evernham Motorsports.

“I knew (Red Bull) was a positive change for me, from last year,” he said. “So this has been a positive year.”

It was one year ago this weekend when Kahne, who had been at his breaking point, left the track before the race was over (he said he was sick).

RPM had become such a poisonous environment, it seemed his cars were falling apart weekly. When the season was over, he wasn’t exactly sad about it.

“When I was first leaving Evernham, when that first started to come about, I was thinking, ‘Man, this is going to be really hard – there’s a lot of people here I’ve really worked with for a long time and become friends with,’” he said. “And then when it actually happened, it was so much different because RPM was involved, the Gilletts were involved and there were so many people I just wanted to get away from. So it was such a different feel.

“This year, there was a positive outlook going into the deal this year from the way it all ended at RPM. It was kind of cool, something to look forward to, a one-year deal. And I think we’ve done a pretty good job with it. There’s spots where we could have done better, but overall we’ve done a decent job.”

Kahne said there have been weekends “when we haven’t showed up” this season and said there were some “growing pains” with adjusting to a new and also temporary team.

“But, you know, you’re going to have that,” he said. “It’s what it is. I knew what I was involved in.”

The tone of his stay at Red Bull changed, obviously, when the team went up for sale in June. At the time, Kahne said he was worried how the impending sale or closure would affect about the team’s performance.

But it hasn’t been so bad, he said. The team has stayed relatively focused heading into the final six weeks, and Kahne is trying his best to be positive even when things don’t go his way.

For example: At Kansas last week, a jack broke during a pit stop while Kahne was running third. He dropped all the way to the back of the pack, but kept a good attitude and rallied to a runner-up finish.

“It was kind of shitty to break a jack and go from third to 40th,” he said. “But at the same time, it was kind of lucky to break it then rather than later in the race and not get back to the front.”

You don’t hear too many drivers mention being “lucky” about a bad pit stop, but Kahne shrugged it off.

“It’s just different ways to look at it, I guess,” he said.

In some ways, that means Mission Accomplished this season for the 31-year-old driver. Kahne said he headed into 2011 wanting to go out in the best way he could and “try to be as positive as I could be about this season.”

“And we’ve done that,” he said.