1,000 Greatest Drivers: Matt Kenseth

Chat with Matt!

For some reason this decal that used to appear on Kenseth’s dashboard in front of his in car cameras when he was sponsored by Lycos in the Busch Series in 1998 enchanted me and stuck with me. I’m not sure why. Maybe it was because it was the first examples of interactivity in the NASCAR world. NASCAR.com already existed then obviously as did Jayski, and I visited both of those sites in the first year or two of their existence, although I usually used to access them at first from some fan’s Geocities page if I recall correctly. Maybe it just stuck with me because it epitomized an Internet culture where people actually believed the delusion that Internet communication would bring people closer together than ultimately tear us apart. Nonetheless, at some point I literally started calling Kenseth “Chat with Matt” even though I am seemingly the only person who remembers this or even noticed. Kenseth is the most recent first-time Cup Series champion I haven’t covered yet. I have to word it that way since I haven’t covered his Daytona 500 sparring partner Tony Stewart yet either and obviously Stewart’s most recent title was more recent than Kenseth’s.