By: Zach Catanzareti, Staff Writer
Every year has a new crop of rookie drivers kick off their first NASCAR seasons. In the K&N Pro Series East, 2018 is Ryan Vargas’ year to shine.
Being selected in the 2018 NASCAR Drive for Diversity Combine, Vargas was also included in the NASCAR Next class for this season, beginning his stock car career for Rev Racing in the East Series.
And with a 14-race schedule in front of him in February, the 17-year-old had a lot to learn.
“These cars are very difficult, I had to re-learn everything I had been taught,” Vargas told Kickin’ The Tires. “You really have to hammer these things into the corners and that’s something I never had to worry about. It’s a very unnatural feeling.”
But after 11 races in 2018, Vargas has gotten a hang of his No. 2 Toyota. Scoring five top 10s, Vargas sits sixth in the championship with only three events remaining.
And of those five top-10 runs, there are a few that stand out for the California native. At Iowa Speedway, a tandem race among the East and West series’, Vargas ran as high as third before a freak deal took him out of the podium position. For a young racecar driver, it was just one of those heartbreaks.
“We ran through the field,” he said of the run. “We were following a car that lost its tailpipe and it went straight through our nose and out our hood. It made the car essentially a parachute.”
From there, Vargas still managed a seventh-place finish. Even still, he was thrilled to run up front.
“We needed a run like that,” he said. “We were running top three and that was a first for me. To be that close to the front was a big deal for me as a driver. I know it’s a big deal for us as a team because we’ve had the speed all year, we’ve just lacked the luck.”
But Iowa wasn’t even his best finish, as Vargas scored sixth at New Jersey Motorsports Park in June.
“With how we’ve been running, New Jersey, New Hampshire and Iowa; those are three tracks I feel upped my confidence,” he said.
Another avenue to increased confidence spans further than just learning the car, the track of avoiding bad luck. It comes from the team. Rev Racing is known to bring in a plethora of new drivers into the sport every season and has a talented group for 2018. One that includes Vargas, race winner Ruben Garcia Jr., Chase Cabre, Super Late Model racer Nick Sanchez and others.
Traveling together for most of the year, the group has become even closer as the East Series season hits its final few races.
“We are all a team and we are really good buddies,” he said. “We all hang out, we were all just at the lake earlier this week. This is probably the best group of guys I’ve ever been with. It’s really cool to be friends with them and also work alongside them.
“You want to see each other succeed but you also want to beat each other.”
Racecar drivers strive to beat their teammates, and more so, beat everybody to Victory Lane. And though this is certainly true for Vargas, 2018 has also been his best opportunity yet to spread awareness for craniosynostosis, a condition that affected Vargas at birth in 2000.
Craniosynostosis is a birth defect where an abnormally early fusion of soft bones on the skull develops. To this day, Vargas carries the scars from his early surgery.
But he is not alone in the NASCAR garage.
“Today, someone approached me, their son had craniosynostosis,” he said from Friday at Watkins Glen International “They talked to me, I let the kid sit in my car, he had the same scar as me. It’s pretty neat to see that.
Moments like that have continued to give Vargas perspective throughout his growing racing career.
“It’s cool to show that it’s not just some random scar, it actually is a big deal if not treated correctly,” he said. “I’m really happy to represent that in the racing community.”
https://www.instagram.com/p/BmEGD-7FKI3/?taken-by=rtrv23
(Below is a video capture of our conversation with Ryan Vargas)
