In 2009, Parker Kligerman burst onto the NASCAR scene as the next big thing. He was a 19-year-old development driver for powerhouse team Penske Racing and a competitor in the ARCA Series, a developmental step on the NASCAR ladder. He won nine of 21 ARCA starts in his rookie year, and he thought: “This is easy.”
“I like to say if ARCA was Cup, I'd have a private jet,” Kligerman said. “But that's not the case."
Fifteen years later — as in, last Thursday — Kligerman announced that he’s retiring from his full-time racing career. Kligerman’s currently racing in the second-tier NASCAR Xfinity Series with Big Machine Racing, a team owned by record executive Scott Borchetta, but he's had more than a hundred starts in Truck series and 30 in Cup. As his opportunities in the sport evolved, so has the way he looked at being a pro driver.
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“When you're thinking about doing this as a career, it's your sole objective to try and win races,” Kligerman said. “All you think about are the great passes, the wins, the championships. The part that comes afterward is so far away in many ways. It could never happen to you. Like, ‘There's no way that ever ends that sort of thing.’
“[But] you get older, and you start to understand the world better. I think sometimes I perform better than I ever have, because I'm not afraid of the other side. I've been there, I've already seen it. I know you don't die. There's life out there. You're not that young phenom anymore, but there are a lot of awesome things in growing up.”
In his episode of Motorsport's "Behind the Visor," Kligerman gets into how he broke from expectations around what a race-car driver is meant to be. "As I got older, it was like: ‘I don't care, screw it. I'm just going to be me.’”
Kligerman also dives into what it's like to switch from teams that have deep pockets, to teams looking for change in the couch cushions.
“[Driving for] the smaller teams often was out of necessity to keep going,” Kligerman said. “When you're at the big teams, what you're fighting for is tiny fractions of a second to outdo the other top teams: to have a dominant race car and to find things three months in advance of where you're actually going to be going."
Watch the full interview above or on Motorsport's YouTube page.
