February 22 2011 Last updated at 06:35 PM ET
Whoever wins the 2011 NASCAR Sprint Cup series championship, his name won't be Daytona 500 champ Trevor Bayne.
The 20-year-old rookie, who became the youngest winner of the Daytona 500 Sunday, said he's sticking with his original plan for the season -- a full-time Nationwide series run for the championship and a part-time Sprint Cup campaign.
"I think I am going to stay with Nationwide," Bayne said Tuesday on the weekly NASCAR teleconference. "Nothing has really changed for me other than that I am the Daytona 500 champion, which is really incredible.
"I think we are still going to have an awesome year for Roush Fenway running for that Nationwide championship. Obviously we still have a blank car and I would love to get some partners on it, but as of now we are still running for it full time over there. I am still not full-time Cup and I am going to run for the championship in Nationwide. I don't regret any of our decisions there."
Bayne will also run at least 17 more races in Sprint Cup for the Wood Brothers.
As they have for the past several years and for most of their long and storied history in NASCAR, the Wood Brothers are running only a partial schedule.
"The Wood Brothers only have 18 races, 17 filled with Motorcraft and Quick Lane, which is really good support, but the 18th race is one we will run at Martinsville with the funds we got from Daytona," Bayne said.
The announcement comes as NASCAR finds itself with an unusual but undoubtedly short-lived problem with its new points system, namely that none of the leaders of NASCAR's three major series -- Sprint Cup, Nationwide and the Camping World truck series -- won their races at Daytona.
Conversely, all three Daytona winners won't be running for championships in the series they triumphed in on the storied 2.5-mile speedway.
This irony is caused by NASCAR's decision to require drivers to pick a single series in which to run for the championship, while still allowing drivers to compete for race wins in any of the three series.
Although Bayne won the 500, his declared intent to run for the Nationwide championship gives second-place finisher Carl Edwards the lead in Sprint Cup points. Cup star Tony Stewart's victory in the Nationwide race and Cup driver Clint Bowyer's second-place finish mean that Landon Cassill, who was third, is the points leader in the Nationwide series.
Daytona truck race winner Michael Waltrip is a part-timer now in all series and won't be going for the truck title. Second-place finisher Elliott Sadler is now in the Nationwide series full time. So the truck series lead falls to third-place finisher Clay Rogers.
Bayne, meanwhile, has had a crash course in the art of the interview and answering the same question 10 different ways. But he's a 20-year-old living a dream and thus is bearing up splendidly well.
We learned from the champ during a round of questioning at the champion's breakfast Monday at the speedway that after the race Sunday evening, "I did go to the basketball court for a game of horse and I lost. We were just shooting around and then we rode our skateboards for a minute and tried not to break any legs ..."
Back for further interrogation Tuesday, Bayne had little new to add other than his decision about which series to run. But among the hundreds of phone calls he received, one stood out.
"When the White House called and said that the president wanted to speak to me in the next couple of days that was really cool. I was blown away by that," Bayne said. "I still haven't talked to him yet. I have had so many calls and texts from folks including Jimmie Johnson, Carl Edwards and Jeff Gordon, all showing their support, but the White House was the one that stunned me the most."
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