Health issues forced Kasey Kahne to retire from full-time NASCAR midway through the 2018 season, but he remains confident that he will be able to make it through the full Craftsman Truck Series schedule in 2027 without problems.
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He does not anticipate having the same issues with dehydration and heat exhaustion while driving the No. 77 Chevrolet Silverado for Spire Motorsports.
"I think it fits me pretty well," Kahne said about the Truck Series on Wednesday. "Just because of the shorter races, a lot of night races.
"The long Cup races throughout a full season, I just couldn't handle that anymore, and that's why I had to get out of the sport when I did. But I can make this happen and do it and do it well."
The differences in race distances will be the major change that benefits Kahne. Twenty of the oval Cup Series races range between 400-500 miles. The Coca-Cola 600 is 600 miles.
The Truck Series races, for comparison, are much shorter. This weekend's Truck race will be 250.5 miles. The Cup Series race will be 400.5 miles.
"In the Cup car, halfway point is when it started really kicking in," Kahne added. "And as the season went, there's no breaks.
"You just... by July, August, it just keeps adding up. It was a couple years there, and then the final one at Darlington (in 2018), I mean, it was just too much built up, could not recover, and that's where my body was."
The sport has significantly changed since Kahne last raced. He noted that more options exist to remain cool in the cars now.
This doesn't totally fix the issues that he experienced during his full-time career; he said that he was really feeling it at the end of his return to the O'Reilly Auto Parts Series last season at Rockingham Speedway.
Yet, he has also competed in nearly three dozen sprint car races in a single season without having these health concerns. Kahne said that he felt really good in a shorter race.
Kahne believes that his body will hold up well to the Truck Series schedule, especially with the breaks between some of the race weekends. This isn't a series that runs week in and week out.
He also knows that he will drive equipment capable of winning races. That doesn't mean that he expects to come in and dominate the series.
The trucks are completely different than those that he used to win five races in six starts. They have more grip and less power.
Kahne certainly expects to face a learning curve as he returns to NASCAR. He doesn't know the current truck, nor does he have any experience competing against the lineup of drivers. He doesn't yet know their tendencies.
He will have to learn everything on the fly while kicking off his full-time season. He expects to see his average finish of 1.2 drastically change.
"I've never driven one with this engine package, as far as I know," he said. "So I talked to Chase Elliott a little bit after he ran Wilkesboro, and yeah, he had good things to say about it.
"So I kind of, I went along with that, and yeah, feel good about trying to see what they're like and the differences."
