12 Questions with NASCAR driver Brennan Poole

Jeff Gluck | USA TODAY Sports

Our series of weekly NASCAR driver interviews continues with Brennan Poole, who has a 17-race Xfinity Series schedule in the No. 42 car for HScott Motorsports with Chip Ganassi. Poole, 24, has three top-15 finishes in his first six career races.

Q: If NASCAR allowed you to listen to music while you were racing, would you want to?

A: It's probably not a good idea for me to listen to it, because I like to be as calm as possible in the car. Maybe if I could listen to some classical music or something silly like that.

So you'd want to hear something soothing?

Yeah, because that's when you make your best decisions. You don't want to be like WAAAH, amped up, listening to some screamo music or something. You want to be like, "I'm at home in my La-Z-Boy, chillin' with some water and some classical music."

Is that how you spend your time at home?

(Laughs) That's not how I spend my time at home.

Q: Where did your first paycheck come from?

A: Wow. My first paycheck? I guess my first real paycheck came from when I was filming Dartfish (a video service that helps drivers analyze their laps) for a company that was doing it for (Richard Childress Racing). That was my first job that wasn't driving a race car. It wasn't my dad being like, "Good job this weekend, here's a couple hundred bucks." It was actually working.

When you're filming Dartfish, do you film every car? How does it work?

We had two cameras and I was on one camera and I'd film all the RCR cars. Then we'd film the guys we thought were going to be fast, and we'd just compare the laps. They had a guy up there on a computer and he'd take a card out of the camera, put it on the computer, process all the laps, match them up and then send them down to the infield where a guy would hand them to Austin (Dillon) or Ty (Dillon) or Kevin (Harvick) when he was there.

They'd have live Dartfish on an iPad, so while practice was going on, they could sit there and watch Dartfish and see where they were better than somebody else or what needed to be worked on.

It was cool. I learned a lot doing it, too, because I got to watch all these different guys with their different laps at all these different tracks before I'd even been in a car there.

Do you keep that in mind now when you go to the track?

Yeah, it helped me a lot. Especially at Pocono: I have the track record there in ARCA, and I've sat on the pole every time I've been there except once (three poles in four races). And I led almost every lap there in 2012 (77 of 80 en route to a victory) and I feel like the Dartfish experience helped me a ton.

I watched Jimmie Johnson and Kevin Harvick's Dartfish for Pocono before I got there. Jimmie would drive the corners way less aggressively but then his straightaway speed would be way faster, where Kevin was kind of like attacking the corner. And you could see it all on the film.

So when I got there, I was easy into the corners and I made up all of my time on the straightaway. I think that was why I had so much success there, just watching the film and doing so much stuff and being around it.

Q: Who is an autograph you got as a kid that seemed to be a big deal to you at the time?

A: Jeff Gordon's for sure. I started at the same track he started driving at for Quarter Midgets (Capital Speedway near Sacramento, Calif.), so I felt like that was always something I had in common with him. Growing up, he was my guy. My first Quarter Midget was painted just like the old DuPont Rainbow Warrior car. So to me, it was super cool to know that I started where my hero started.

I ran him down at Texas Motor Speedway when I was 10 or 12 years old – I grew up in Texas – and he was there watching sprint cars race. I saw him and he was kind of walking back toward the track by himself. So I just sprinted after him and had this Quarter Midget hat with me and said, "Jeff, will you sign this for me?"

He stopped, because it was just us two. There was no one else around. And he signed it for me, and I still have the hat in my closet right now.

I heard you recently got to talk about your roots with Jeff when he was an analyst for the Xfinity Series broadcast on FoxSports 1. What was that like?

Yeah! He wanted to talk to me at Texas, which was crazy to hear that he wanted to talk to me in the first place. So we just started talking and he wanted to know my background and how I got into racing, and I said, "Well, I started racing Quarter Midgets at Capital in California. Isn't that the same place you started at?" He said, "Yeah, that's the first place I ever drove!" Then he was like, "Well where were you born? Where are you from?" I told him I'm from Sacramento – Folsom is where I was born and my mom is a California girl. And I started racing out there.

My dad took me to this thing when I was 4 years old where the guy sits on the back of a Quarter Midget and controls the gas and the brake, but I could drive the car. And it was at Capital. I kept trying it and doing it over and over again and getting back in line. So my mom was like, "You've got to get in a car." When I turned 5, my dad got me a car and painted it up like Jeff Gordon's because that was who I liked, and I've pretty much been doing it ever since.

So we got to talk about coming from the same roots a little bit. Although Jeff went into sprint cars and I went into the full-bodied cars on dirt – I ran dirt modifieds and Late Models. But being able to start at the same place as a guy who has meant so much to me in my life and in racing, it's cool to have that in common. And to get to talk to him about it? That's just nuts!

Q: Where's a place you've never been that you'd like to go visit?

A: That's a tough one, because I'm kind of boring. (Laughs) I've been to pretty much everywhere in the United States except Hawaii and Alaska. Hawaii seems like a fun place, but if I wanted to leave the country and go see someplace cool, I think it would be awesome to see the pyramids in Egypt. That just seems like something so amazing to be able to witness in person.

Q: Do people ever accuse you of being addicted to your phone?

A: I have not had that! I've accused some of my friends of being addicted to their phones.

I'm nerdy, so I like my video games and stuff. You know, you asked me where I'd want to go visit. Honestly, I want to visit my game chair in my living room for the next several hours. I'm usually not on my phone a lot; I'm usually on Xbox a lot more than I'm on my phone. That's just what I do in my spare time.

And when I'm out with friends – this sounds super nerdy, too – I'm still playing games. Like I'll be out somewhere playing Golden Tee golf. Or I'll be on the lake surfing or skateboarding. There's not a lot of time to be on my phone.

What Xbox games are you into?

Lately I've been playing Battlefield Hardline a lot. All my friends play it, so we all squad up and play on there constantly. We'll play for a couple hours a night.

But then I'm a huge basketball fan, so I have like every NBA 2K game. I like doing the career mode and creating my guy and coming up through the league.

Q: If a genie promised you a championship in exchange for never being able to do your favorite hobby again – which sounds like it could be video games -- would you accept that offer?

A: I probably would, because a championship seems like it's forever and I'd definitely want that to be attached to my name – especially at the Sprint Cup level. My whole life, everything I've done is just to be able to have a shot to be one of those guys who can contend for it. I feel real grateful to have an opportunity now to have a shot to get to that level. So yeah, in a second I would give up anything to be able to have a championship.

Q: What's your preferred method of dealing with an angry driver after a race?

A: Usually if they come up to me before I'm out of the car, I like to say, "Wait a second, let me get out of the car and we'll talk." And then I just talk to them like normal, because I'm not real confrontational. I mean, don't get me wrong – I'll door-slam someone or move them out of the way to win a race, and if you want to get confrontational after, then I'll handle it in my non-confrontational way. (Laughs)

If they don't want to talk it out, that's fine. But I'm a pretty approachable guy, I feel like. This just happened a few weeks ago at Bristol, too.

Who was mad at you at Bristol?

Austin Dillon. We worked it out right there. It didn't take too long. I was racing for a top-10 spot and he was a couple laps down, and he was racing me really hard.

I was like, "Man, none of us can pass or do anything at Bristol because we're stuck against the top. And here I am battling Elliott Sadler for a top-10 spot and you're two laps down; just let me have the line so I can try to pass, you know?"

So that kind of cost me getting a top-10, I feel like (he finished 11th). But he actually came to me first! He was mad at me because we bumped a little bit and it cut his right rear tire down. So he came over to me and wanted to talk about the situation, but after we talked about it, we both kind of understood each other. We were both like, "I see your point" and it was fine after that.

Q: Do you ever get mistaken for another driver or celebrity?

A: I haven't yet. Maybe it's because of my (long) hair. I haven't been confused with anyone.

I did have one cool thing. I was at the drive-thru at Bojangles' and I was getting my Chicken Supreme combo and one of the guys in the drive-thru noticed me! I shook a guy's hand in the drive-thru. I thought that was cool. I was like, "I never thought that would ever happen."

Maybe you might get mixed up for Ricky Stenhouse Jr. since you have long hair in the back.

Yeah, but see, people ask me about the Stenhouse hair, but mine isn't really a mullet. It's long up here (points to the top of his head), but it's just my hat makes it look like a mullet because I've got to tuck it in so it's out of control. But I want to keep the long hair going. I like it. I'm into the skateboarding and surfing and I play guitar, so to me it's just kind of part of the culture.

I grew up in a school where you couldn't have your hair long. I had it kind of long and they're like, "No." Every once in awhile, the principal would be like, "Getting pretty close, you better cut your hair!" So I never got to really do it.

But I've been growing it out for a couple of years now and I've gotten it to this point.

Q: If you had a time machine and you could travel to any year and race, where would you go?

A: Man, that's pretty crazy. That's an interesting question. It would be tough, but I think it would be cool to race against Dale Earnhardt himself. Any one of those races where I could have gone and gotten into a good car and beat and banged on him, it would be great.

Probably toward the early '90s or so, I think that would be cool, back when you could make a lot of contact and still keep digging. Now it's real aero-sensitive, so you can't just lean on people all the time. Back then, man, you could just door-slam someone and keep going. It's not like that anymore because of how advanced we've all gotten with making the cars so fast.

Q: Would you rather have the ability to fly or be invisible?

A: Oh man. Probably fly. I have a lot of friends who live far away since I grew up in Texas, so it would be kinda cool to just say, "Alright, see you guys!" and just be somewhere quickly. And my girlfriend would probably like that, too, because she lives in New Jersey and I live in Charlotte. So I could just be like, "Peace!" and fly there.

And then I could get a Philly cheesesteak, too. She lives 20 minutes outside Philly, and that is my favorite part about Philadelphia – going to Pat's. There's Pat's and Geno's, and I'm on the Pat's side. I like going and getting "Whiz Wit" and putting some peppers and ketchup on it. That's my thing.

How'd you choose Pat's over Geno's? That's an endless debate for many people.

A lot of extensive research. I've eaten at both places several times. I just like the bread at Pat's a little bit better and the steak just seems to have little more flavor. And it seems like the peppers are fresher at Pat's. I'm not going to argue with some of the Geno's fans, but I just feel like it's about the bread and the flavor of the steak. Pat's is a little more my style.

Q: I've been asking each person to give me a question for the next interview. The last interview was with Justin Allgaier, and he wanted to know: You've been climbing the ladder for awhile; has your progression happened at the pace you thought it would be?

A: That's a tough question for me, because my journey for the past couple years, I didn't know if I was going to race again. Each year at the beginning of the year for me, it started out with no races for me. I was just fighting to stay alive in the sport. When I was younger, I didn't think it would go that way. I didn't think I'd have to fight with everything I have left in me to stay involved.

I mean, I was living off a credit card to the point where I was like, "I'm in trouble here if something doesn't happen." I was filming Dartfish, I was driver coaching, I was spotting. I've pretty much done every job you can do on a race team other than call a race from a pit box. And that was just to try to stay involved in the sport.

I got a couple opportunities where I won Michigan (2013 ARCA race) and I won Kentucky at the end of the year last year, and that's what really kind of got me to this point here.

I didn't have anything in January and Harry Scott and (Chip) Ganassi called and asked what I was doing. I said, "I'm not doing anything, you know?" I was kind of in shock. They said, "Well, we want to try to sit down with you and figure out how we can make this happen." And so I'm like, "OK…" I was still a little bit in shock.

But we went and talked with everyone and worked everything out and D.C. Solar came on board to sponsor the 15 races and it's jumped up a couple more after how well we've been doing in the first few runs. So I ended up having a 17-race schedule.

I'm still just in shock! After I ran Kentucky last year, I was like, "That may be the last time I sit in a car." You just don't know. So to be able to have this opportunity, it's pretty emotional and hard to put into words.

It's been a long journey. I felt like I was working toward this goal and believed in my heart I'd get there somehow, so I just kept believing and pushing toward it, even though I didn't know if I'd be in a car. And then the greatest opportunity of my life came along.

So I don't know if I really put a timetable on it. I'm just glad it's gone the way that it's gone to be with the guys I'm with and be in the car I'm in. I feel like it's a great opportunity and we're doing good so far. I have to keep building on it so I can stick around and contend for wins and championships in the future.

Q: And do you have a question I can ask the next driver?

A: What would I ask somebody? Man. (Thinks for awhile) I guess it would be: If there's one area you need to work harder in for racing, what would it be?

Q: Finally, how did this interview go on a scale of 1-10?

A: (Laughs) I don't know, I guess that's kind of for you to answer, right? I talk a lot, so maybe I talked a little more than I should have. But it was fun, so I'll give it a 10.

Follow Gluck on Twitter @jeff_gluck