Each week, The Athletic asks the same 12 questions to a different race car driver. Up next: Hattori Racing Enterprises’ Tyler Ankrum, who will make his 100th Craftsman Truck Series start later this month at North Wilkesboro Speedway. This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity, but the full version is available on the 12 Questions podcast.
1. You have to pick one chore or obligation to do every day for a year. But if you make it the entire year doing this, you never have to do it again for the rest of your life. So what would you like to pick?
Oh, Lord have mercy. I was subjected to weed-whacking when I was an infant.
An infant?
That’s what it feels like at least. I’d have to go weed-whacking. Weed-eating during the summer is terrible. Heaven forbid you forget your sunglasses, so now you’re getting rocks in your eyes and your clothes are now green because of the grass.
2. Can you describe how you are as a passenger in a street car?
So, you gotta break this down. If I’m in the car with my girlfriend and it’s raining, she can’t see the lines on the road. She never wears her glasses and she should. So when I’m in the passenger seat, leaving dinner, and if she’s driving when it’s raining, she goes, “I can’t see the lines.” I start grabbing things, I’m terrified.
But other than that, cars put me to sleep. A 30-minute car ride? I’ll fall asleep. I’m pretty quiet.
I’m glad that you don’t get that level of drowsiness while driving yourself.
No, I don’t. But it’s funny: Back when we had practice or even when we had test days, a crew chief’s favorite thing to do is say, “Hey man, this is gonna be a five-minute change. Stay in the truck.” And then 45 minutes later, we’re still making the change. So it’s always been super easy for me during practice or an open test day to just fall asleep in the truck or the car.
3. What is an app on your phone that you love using and think other people should know about?
Etsy. It’s my guilty pleasure. I look on Etsy for stuff almost every single day. I’m remodeling my basement right now and there’s some guy who makes L-shaped bars on Etsy for a really great price. It’s like, “I want a bar now in my basement.”
So you’re talking about buying bigger stuff, not just crafts or whatever?
Yeah, there’s clothes and actually really cool antiques. There’s a ton of NASCAR stuff and memorabilia. Here’s one I just bought: a 1998 Daytona 500 Dale Earnhardt shirt (shows picture on his phone). Etsy is an awesome place. Here’s a Winston Cup hat. Here’s a Rusty Wallace NASCAR trucker hat. It’s just a bougie Craigslist.
4. What do you do to make yourself feel better when you’re having a crappy day?
I’m 21 now, so I can say alcohol is probably the first pick. (Laughs) No, I’m joking. If I’m having a rough day, I just find something to do. … The nice thing about living on a ranch is that’s very easy to do. There’s always something to do — and weed-whacking will no longer be one of those things after this year of chores.
I’d much rather do that than just sit there on the couch and stew. I know quite a few drivers who live in apartments and it’s like, “I don’t know how you do that. What do you do all day? You’re not at the race shop all day, so how do you not go crazy from boredom?” There’s only so many video games and iRacing you can do before you just go crazy. I love spending time outside and I’d much rather get away and get my mind off things than just sit there and be bored.
5. For this next question, I’m asking drivers to answer a Dear Abby-style question that was submitted by readers. This person says: “My friend just finished getting his degree a few months ago, and he wants to get a job as an actuary. However, he’s only sent four applications in four months and complains to our friend group every week about his current job stocking shelves at a grocery store. We’re trying to drop subtle hints that he would not have these issues if he was working a job he had the qualifications for, but he continues to mope around. How do we approach him and tell him bluntly that we are unsympathetic to his issues with the grocery store since he has made minimal efforts to improve his own situation?”
Well, if you’re living in a place where there’s not a lot of job opportunities to become an actuary, then you need to move to a place that has a lot of opportunities. It’s no different with being a stock car driver; if you want to become a NASCAR driver, you’ve got to move to North Carolina. If you want to become a country singer, gotta move to Nashville. You want to be a movie star? Gotta go to Hollywood. So if you live in an area where there’s not a lot of opportunity, you’ve got to look at moving.
But also, four applications in four months is not a lot of effort. You’ve really got to push your friend to put more effort into his career. Honestly, a true friend would do that. A true friend would want you to be better, do better, improve your life and get the job that you know they’re capable of having.
I’m not saying you have to do anything for them — you shouldn’t have to. But you should want to encourage them to improve their life.
6. The next one is sort of a pop culture/societal debate I’m switching up for each person. I know you’re a big cowboy boots guy, but I’m pretty much ignorant to the world of cowboy boots. What is some of the boot etiquette you feel strongly about? When can you wear them? Are you supposed to tuck your pants into them like some people do?
I’ve gotten a lot better about this as I’ve gotten older. As an 18-year-old, if I bought a brand new pair of gators and they were kind of like my dress boots, me being a dumb kid, I was like, “Well, I don’t have time to go home. I’m out here on the ranch, so I might as well just wear these.” That’s terrible etiquette. Like, go get your damn work boots and quit being lazy.
Etiquette-wise, don’t ever step on anybody else’s boots. You can just look at some of these boots and know they’re $5,000, $6,000, $7,000, $8,000 boots. So that’s a big deal — don’t step on them.
To answer your question about how to wear them, the really big trend right now — and I think it’s more of a Nashville thing — is the skinny jeans and boots. I’ve got my work boots on right now (lifts leg on the table to demonstrate) and (the pants) should not be skin-tight around the crown of the boot. Find some relaxed jeans. If I go to a rodeo or cowboy bar and I see a guy walking around with the spurs on and skinny jeans, he’s just trying to be “Yellowstone.” You can kind of just write him off.
I have really flat feet and actually have plantar fasciitis in my right foot. It’s one of the main reasons why I wear boots, because the crown in the boot gives me a lot of support. If I wear tennis shoes for 30 minutes, my feet hurt. That’s one of the reasons why I wear boots at the racetrack, even though they’re heavy and they kind of suck to walk in.
7. This next one is a wild-card question I’m mixing up for each person. When we last spoke for the 12 Questions in 2020, you talked a lot about your farm life and at the time you had 15 cows. I don’t know if that’s the same number now, but three years later, how’s farm life going?
We’ve grown. When we last talked, we had 40 acres. Now we have 474. We’re continuing to build our herd right now; we have 127.
Wait, you went from 15 cows to 127 cows since we last talked?
Yeah. Well, we’re calving right now, so we probably have close to 90, but once we’re done, we’re going to be anywhere between 120 and 127. Then we’ll sell quite a few of those and buy back some young, yearling cows — heifers, we call them — and then we’ll breed them back and continue to grow our herds that way with a cow-calf operation.
And when we last talked, we probably had one or two tractors. We have six or seven now. And a bunch of haying implements; we’re about to have the first cut of our haying season and the grass is growing like crazy right now.
It’s funny because people always think “hobby farm” and it’s not. It’s a legit operation; we do it to make money. So it’s always very funny when people from our sport come to see what my life is about and they go, “Oh, so the boots aren’t fake.” (Laughs) Yeah, that’s very much real.
8. In your career, what is the deal that came closest to happening that ended up not working out?
I was 14 years old and I’d been in North Carolina for a year or two. I started racing Late Models for David Gilliland and my dad wanted to start his own Late Model team, so we started a team up in Asheboro, North Carolina. Kyle Busch was starting his late model team (as well). We had just bought all these cars, we just got a big trailer, pit boxes — my dad just invested a ton of money into our Late Model program and we were gonna go do it legit. And I was offered to go race the second Late Model at (Kyle Busch Motorsports).
That was super intimidating to go do that. We were new and I had no idea. So we turned that down. Looking back, we wish we would have taken that deal. But coming from a family who really knows nothing about the sport and knowing who Kyle Busch is and what KBM meant as an organization, it was a really scary thing.
Later it was the exact same situation: We were starting a Super Late Model team and I was offered to go race the second Super Late Model at KBM. Same thing: Super scary and we’d just bought one or two Super Late Models and had all this equipment now. Because we had already invested so much money into our own program, we were like, “Sorry, no…”
This was around the time when Kyle broke his leg (in 2015) and my mom broke her leg jumping off a brick wall. They actually ended up running into one another at physical therapy. I forget how the story goes, but Kyle cracked a joke to my mom about us not taking the deal.
9. Who is someone you would get starstruck by when meeting them?
Note: We somehow forgot to ask this one. Our apologies.
10. What is the single most important skill a race car driver can possess?
If you were to ask me this question in 2019, I would have said patience. But the way the racing has become today, I would say that’s probably the least important skill. We’re still only going 40 laps on tires, so from the second you put new tires on to the end of the run, it’s, “go as hard as you can for as long as you can.” This year, even watching the Cup races and Xfinity races, it feels so different from last year. Everybody is anxious all the time on the racetrack; everyone seems to race stressed out, even in the Cup Series.
So I would say the single most important skill to have right now across the board is being able to make really smart decisions consistently. … If you look at the guys who are low-risk, high-reward drivers, they don’t get impatient and they make really smart decisions. They always seem to run the most consistent. They don’t ever seem to get themselves in tight spots.
Because a lot of those times (with the opposite approach), it’s a flash in the pan. They’re really fast and they get a win or two. But the more you’ve got to work on equipment, the further behind you get. So you’ve got to be able to mitigate and make really sound decisions.
11. What life lessons from a young age stick with you and affect your daily decisions as an adult?
Never assume. That’s a lesson I learned the hard way while racing quarter-midgets. For the longest time, my dad was my car owner, crew chief, everything. I helped him work on our cars at the track. We were racing in Albuquerque or Tucson, and I assumed he had just bolted on the right rear (tire). So we push out on the track and the tire goes flying.
My dad looked at me and said, “What happened?” I said, “I don’t know.” He goes, “Well, did you not tighten it up?” I go, “No, I assume you did.” So that’s a lesson I hang onto almost every single day: Never assume.
12. Each week, I ask a driver to give me a question for the next interview. The last one was from Ryan Truex, but he didn’t know it was for you specifically. His question is, if your life depended on it, what song could you sing 100 percent correctly, every word?
“The Chair” by George Strait.
Do you listen to that while you’re working?
I listen to country while I’m working out. People don’t know how I do it, but it’s about all I listen to. Every once in awhile, I get on a kick of hair metal rock from the ’70s, ’80s. On the way over here, I was jamming out to some Def Leppard and some L.A. Guns. For whatever reason, those are my two bands right now.
I don’t know who the next interview is going to be with, so you can either give a question any driver could answer or when I know who it is, I can double back with you.
(Ankrum said he’ll think of a specific question for the next person.)
(Top photo: Sean Gardner / Getty Images)
Credit: Source link
