On July 15, Cup Series part-time driver Brendan Gaughan became the second NASCAR driver to announce that he has tested positive for COVID-19.
After two weeks of quarantine and negative testing for COVID-19 twice over 24 hours apart, Gaughan has been medically cleared to race again.
And he does not even have to wait until the final of the Cup Series regular season on August 29 to do so.
Originally planned to compete only in the four superspeedway races of the season with Beard Motorsports, Gaughan will fit to ride the No. 62 Chevrolet in Sunday’s race on the Daytona Highway (3 pm ET on NBC ).
He joined Jimmie Johnson in having positive tests for COVID-19 and returned to racing. While Gaughan last competed in the June 22 race at Talladega, Johnson missed the Brickyard 400 just before returning to the track.
“I feel fantastic,” Gaughan said in a press release. ‘I’m finally out of the house. The hardest part of the whole order was the mental aspect. I really feel for people who are struggling with depression and having to deal with COVID-19 because this thing is difficult. You are literally stuck yourself in a location. Luckily for me I had my puppy. I missed my two kids terribly. But it’s great now because we live in the time of the Jetsons we can pick up a phone and look at their faces. ‘
To get clearance for race, Gaughan tested twice for COVID-19 in more than 24 hours and also had to get a note from a doctor who said he was okay to go.
“That was it,” Gaughan said. ‘As long as I’m negative, they’ll be fine with it. They still have their protocols in place, so when we get to the track, we’re all still divorced. The drivers are currently unable to mix with the teams. NASCAR has done a phenomenal job with it and they have been able to stay open to business while having very, very little effect here. “
While he would originally just race on Talladega and Daytona’s Oval, Gaughan says the weekend’s race “technically counts.”
“We said all the Daytona races,” Gaughan said. ‘What happened is that, as soon as it was added to the schedule, my mind went off,‘ Wow, I would love to race the Daytona roadway. There are a few of our Cup riders who have experience on that race track. And without practice and no qualification, that gives about 10 of us a very big advantage over the field. ”
Gaughan competed on the road and earned a class victory in the 2011 Rolex 24 at Daytona, with his team defeating second place by a full lap. He ran twice in the Rolex 24, finishing third in 2016 in the Prototype Challenge class and 14th in 2018 in the Prototype division.
“I was immediately drawn to it,” Gaughan said of the race for the track. ‘Then you know how much I always talk so loudly about Richard Childress Racing. Richard yelled and said, ‘Hey, come on man, you know you want to do this,’ and I grumbled, because everyone knows I love my road racing. I spoke to the Beard family and said, ‘Hey, you want to add a race to the schedule?’ It did not sit in the budget. It was not originally planned, but the Beards were on board.
‘They’re in the same boat as me. This is a retirement year like mine and they have the same fun as me. They went, ‘Ooohh, we can do good there.’ So we called Richard and he built me a brand new Beard Oil Distributing / South Point Hotel & Casino Chevrolet Camaro from RCR that we could rent for Beard Motorsports to race. ”
Gaughan, who will start last in the race due to his lack of ownership points, dissected how different it will be to navigate the roadway in Cup compared to the sports car he last rode.
“I have to remember that the last time I drove there in an LMP car, I was able to get up at the ‘1’ sign in the chicane on my back right away,” Gaughan said. “Now if I lift the ‘1’ in a Cup car, I’ll end up at the airport. So I have to remember that I will need a little more room for braking zone. But you basically know the line already and you know where you want to be. You know the feel of the place.
‘You know where some zones are over. You kind of know how to run this race, that’s the big advantage that comes with it. Having a car built by Richard Childress means I do not have to worry that it will have parts and pieces that are not good. And I still have Darren Shaw, my crew chief, with whom I worked at Beard Motorsports. We still have our boys at work and our boys do it, so I have the best of all worlds here. And there’s an advantage for people who’ve been there. I also gave myself a bit of an insurance policy. I have offered to sponsor Andy Lally in the Xfinity race. To me, Andy Lally is the premier sports car racer in America.
‘I do not think anyone can claim to be better than Andy Lally. So, I offered to sponsor Andy because he’s racing on Saturday. I told him he should stay over Sunday and do some coaching and give me his notes. Not only do I have experience on the track, I will have notes from a stock car on the track earlier in the day. ”
