Conversation: L. Cassill

Landon Cassill began racing 15 years ago, which is more impressive when you consider he turned 18 in July. A multiple national go-kart champion, the Iowa native went on to become the youngest driver to win a modified feature at Hawkeye Downs. He then drove three seasons in the American Speed Association Series.

Cassill signed a development contract with Hendrick Motorsports in December, and was promptly put to work testing the Car of Tomorrow. He made his Busch Series debut at Gateway in July, finishing 32nd.

Q: You come from a very athletic family. What does everybody do?

Cassill: Well, my little sister, Echo, is 12 and she's a figure skater. She just won the National Showcase in Colorado. She skates every day. She gets up about 4:30 in the morning and she's on the ice at 5 every morning before school. My older brother, Zachary, is a tournament bass fisher. He travels all over the Midwest, anywhere he can go catch a bass. He's pretty dedicated to that. Plus, he's also studying geology at Winona State University. We're definitely passionate in what we do.

Q: Your folks certainly had a busy schedule, going from skating rinks to racetracks.

Cassill: Yeah, I don't know how they did it but it took a lot of dedication and a lot of time to make our dreams come true and let us do what we wanted to do. I can't thank my parents enough for that.

Q: You also were accomplished in a different sport in high school, correct?

Cassill: I don't know about accomplished in golf. I always say my love for the game exceeds my ability to play. I played golf my freshman and sophomore years in high school and just had a good time, just because I love golf. My best friend Danny and I play golf together a lot and it wasn't something that I was really good at, but tournaments that I played in, I actually played pretty well because I was so nervous that I was afraid to hit the ball too hard. I just have a good time playing golf. I'm not terribly good at it or anything.

Q: There are a lot of people in this sport who play golf. There are a lot of similarities, particularly the mental aspect of the game.

Cassill: Absolutely. It's important for racecar drivers to know how to play the game. You don't have to be good at golf, but it's important to know how to play golf, how to have golf etiquette, have golf clubs and golf clothes because there are a lot of times when you get invited out to golf outings with very important people. I've played golf with executives from sponsors that may not expect you to be good at golf, but you want to impress them by at least showing respect to their sport.

Q: There's an old adage that you can learn a lot about the personality of an individual by playing a round of golf with them. Is that true?

Cassill: Oh, yeah. You can see how they react when they hit the ball, how they respond to how you play. It's pretty interesting.

Q: How much of golf is a mental game?

Cassill: It's very mental. If you step up to the ball thinking you're going to slice off into the woods, there's a good chance you're going to do just that. Sometimes I try to think about hitting it straight and it still doesn't go straight, but I'd like to think that it's a mental game -- especially putting and the short game. You just want to picture the ball going into the hole.

That's just like in racing. Before qualifying, you want to visualize how you want the car to go around the racetrack and where you're going to lift. If you didn't visualize how you want to drive the car and just jumped in the car, everything that's coming up on you would be for the first time. So you want to run through that lap in your head, as many times as you can.

Q: So you want to be proactive rather than reactive?

Cassill: Everything that you do in a racecar -- practice, qualifying and racing -- is almost thought of a lap before it actually happens. As far as restarts, I always try to visualize how I want to do a restart. If I try to pass a guy, if he backs up, I may try to go to the outside or inside, the places I want to shift. Stuff like that. If you weren't prepared and they just throw the green flag, you're making it up as you go and that's just not the way it works.

Q: Is that more critical when you're going to a track for the first time?

Cassill: It's so important to know the track even before you drive on it. That's why I use things like a racing simulator. I can practice these tracks in virtual reality rather than actually going there. I also watch videotapes. It really shows in the results because before I ever did things like that, I'd go around the racetrack and have to make a couple of slow laps just getting used to it before I could go fast around it. For instance, this weekend I had a lot of laps on the simulator before I actually got to Dover and watched lots of laps about Dover before I actually drove here. Then I got out there and got up to speed my first time out. I was able to go hard right out of the pits. You sometimes can almost feel where the bumps on the track are before you even drive on the track.

Q: Are you more relaxed in a golf cart or racecar?

Cassill: Probably being in a racecar.