At 18, Kyle Benjamin’s stock car career is still relatively young, but he’s already made his presence known on short tracks around the country. A winner in many different racing areas, including the ARCA Racing Series and the NASCAR K&N Pro Series East, Benjamin has been dominant in 2016 with his No. 40 Chevrolet for Rainer Racing with MDM.
Racing role models
“Kyle Busch and Jimmie Johnson - it’s hard to beat those two for different reasons. Kyle, he’s phenomenal behind the wheel and makes so many good decisions, and so does Jimmie. He’s very methodical with what he does, and I like that, too.”
Outdoor adventures
“I like to snowboard. That’s my favorite thing to do away from the track, and that’s in the winter time. In the summertime, it’s mostly wakeboarding and mountain biking.”
Injury prone
“All the crazy stuff I do and the ways I get hurt, it doesn’t match up. I get hurt doing regular, everyday things like falling down the steps and things like that. I don’t really get hurt doing the crazy stuff that I do do.”
Forward focus
“It definitely does because you go back and you think what you should have done differently, and that will eat you up. Especially when you lose a race when you had a good car. But you got to shake it off; you can’t let it hang over your head, and you can’t go into the next week still feeling the effects of what happened the last weekend.”
Dealing with disappointment
“Usually, I’ll think about it that night and maybe the next day then I’m like, all right, I’m not going to think about it anymore. It’s in the past; it’s already happened, and we’re going to move on and do what we do best.”
If not for racing …
“I would be some sort of stunt or daredevil type. Like a Travis Pastrana because I’m always doing crazy stuff like that. Racing kind of keeps me tame because I can’t get hurt, so I can’t go as crazy as I want to do sometimes. Definitely, have to tone it down doing this stuff.”
