For starters, you go shopping.
“More button-up shirts, jackets and all that. I’m working on it,” Ben Kennedy said Friday, a few days after NASCAR officially announced he’s joining the Suits.
Kennedy, unlike many aspiring racers, never lacked for a Plan B. Born into the fourth generation of NASCAR’s France family, he had no fears of ever pawning his helmets and reporting to the bay at Jiffy Lube with wrench in hand.
But that doesn’t mean it was an easy decision to pull the chute at just 26 years old and trade the cockpit for a desk. Official title: General Manager, NASCAR’s Camping World Truck Series.
“Definitely, a really tough decision for me. Very tough,” said Kennedy, who was 14 when he started racing on the local short-track scene. “I just kinda weighed everything out. I’d been thinking about it for years, probably, but not to this level of seriousness.”
After graduating from New Smyrna Speedway and other Florida venues to NASCAR’s official “minor leagues” (K&N East and West), he showed enough ability to warrant a move into the national touring circuits. Between 2014-17, he ran 90 races in NASCAR’s Truck (73 starts) and Xfinity Series (17), with the highlight being a truck win at Bristol in 2016.
“I think I’d always had a real passion to continue racing, had always been passionate about it,” he said. “I hope I can get behind the wheel of a late-model someday, or do something on the racing end like that. I enjoy it a lot.
“That being said, I felt like this was the right time to do this. I figured, in the long run, this makes more sense.”
Each generation of the family, it seems, does a little better on the entry-level NASCAR jobs. Kennedy’s great-grandfather, NASCAR founder Bill France Sr., also quit racing to “go to work,” and his first organizational jobs including hanging posters, selling tickets and, in the real old days, sticking those “Beware of Snakes” signs into the dunes along the beach course.
Bill Jr. sold snow cones at Darlington and, later, physically helped build Daytona International Speedway. He also pasted promotional signs to barns along the Carolina highways.
Lesa France Kennedy, Ben’s mom, graduated from Duke in the mid-’80s and her first racing job was in the Speedway ticket office with her grandmother (“Annie B,” Big Bill's wife).
Once the 2018 season starts, Ben will be on the road and alongside another former racer-turned-administrator, Elton Sawyer, a NASCAR VP who serves as competition director for the trucks.
“I’ll be touching all aspects of the truck series, from competition to the business side, working with the TV partners. Probably be doing a little of everything,” Kennedy said.
His mother, he said, didn’t push or pull him on this career move.
“She wants what’s best for me,” he said. “She kinda sits back and asks all the right questions and helps me come to a conclusion.”
And like boys of all ages whose dads are no longer around, Ben said “kinda in the back of my mind” he’ll occasionally wonder what his father would be thinking and suggesting. The late Dr. Ben Kennedy died in a 2007 plane crash.
“You definitely think about that, whether they’re proud of you and whatnot,” he said. “But at the same time, selfishly, I have to do what’s best for me right now, right here.
“It’s tough to say. I think it’s tough to sit here today and say, ‘oh he’d say this or say that.’ Both my parents were always supportive of me and what I wanted to do.”
Meanwhile, just in case those button-up shirts and blazers create a rash, Kennedy is keeping the doors open on the Daytona Beach shop that houses his Late Model team that races at New Smyrna with young local racer Carter Stokes. The team owns more than one car, by the way.
“Nothing is changing there,” he said. “I wouldn’t be opposed to running locally sometime down the road.”
Meanwhile, however, “it’s full speed ahead right now; been so busy, haven’t had time to think about it.”
Reach Ken Willis at ken.willis@news-jrnl.com.