Ford Racing NSCS Notes & Quotes:
Food City 500 –Bristol Motor Speedway
Sunday, March 16, 2014
Ford Finishing Order:
1st – Carl Edwards
2nd – Ricky Stenhouse Jr.
3rd – Aric Almirola
5th – Marcos Ambrose
12th – Greg Biffle
14th – Brad Keselowski
20th – Joey Logano
22nd – David Gilliland
31st – David Ragan
JOEY LOGANO – No. 22 – Shell/Pennzoil Ford Fusion
RED FLAG INTERVIEW ON LOSS OF POWER-STEERING:
“I’d say 500 laps is gonna be a lot longer than I thought it was gonna be around here, but Todd Gordon and the guys are putting a plan together. There’s so much load here and the car is pressing so hard down on the race track that it makes it so hard to steer. It feels like it’s working against you. I was already huffing and puffing pretty hard trying to get the thing to turn. You can’t be quick with it. That’s the biggest problem is you can’t go fast. If you get loose or anything like that, you can’t steer the car to the right and then back to the left quick enough that you get yourself in a bind and then you crash. It’s kind of just limp it until you get the caution.
“We got lucky because we got that lucky dog. We’re back on the lead lap. It may cost us a lap trying to fix this thing, but we’ve got to do what we’ve got to do and try to recover with lucky dogs and wavearounds. We’ve got a fast car. We were up there leading laps. It was intermittent for a while once we restarted behind Jimmie and Matt, but then it just went away. We’ll just have to fix it. The good thing is we’re 130 laps into this thing and there’s a long ways to go. The bad news is if we can’t fix it, we’re only 130 laps into it, so, either way, we’ve got our work cut out for us today.”
EDWARDS WINS THIRD NASCAR SPRINT CUP SERIES RACE AT BRISTOL
EDWARDS WINS THIRD NASCAR SPRINT CUP SERIES RACE AT BRISTOL
Carl Edwards captured the 22nd NASCAR Sprint Cup Series win of his career with today’s victory.
Today’s win is Ford’s 620th all-time series victory and the 134th for Roush Fenway Racing.
Edwards’ third Bristol win ties him with Fred Lorenzen and Kurt Busch, who each won three times at this track for Ford.
This marks Ford’s 34th NASCAR Sprint Cup Series win at Bristol, which is the second-highest total for the manufacturer at one track. Michigan International Speedway has been the most successful for Ford with 35 wins.
The last time Ford won consecutive NASCAR Sprint Cup Series races was 2012 when
Marcos Ambrose and Greg Biffle won at Watkins Glen and Michigan, respectively.
The last time Ford swept the top three spots in a NASCAR Sprint Cup Series race was last season when David Ragan, David Gilliland and Carl Edwards finished 1-2-3 at Talladega on May 5, 2013.
CARL EDWARDS – No. 99 Kellogg’s Frosted Flakes Ford Fusion – VICTORY LANE INTERVIEW –
“I wasn’t sure about the backflip. First, I’ve got to thank the fans for sticking around. How about Ford? They’ve done so much in this sport. They make the greatest cars on the road and for them to finish tonight 1-2-3-5, that’s a big turnaround from the other night. I’ve got to thank Kellogg’s, they stick with me – Fastenal. Jimmy Fennig made some calls. Subway, Aflac, UPS, Sprint, the Eco Power oil, Wiley X, Cessna, New Holland.”
HAD HE NOT MADE THAT CALL WOULD YOU HAVE WON?
“I don’t know. Aric and those guys were really fast. I don’t know if I could have got by them. That’s a gutsy call with all the tire trouble. Goodyear makes great tires. We didn’t have trouble at the end, but it was just a bad matchup with the track. I’ve got to say get well to my Uncle Dan. He’s battling something real tough, but he’s an Edwards and he’s tough and we’re thinking of him. It’s just an awesome night. We’re in the Chase and we’re gonna go win this championship. I just can’t believe we turned this thing around. We were terrible on Saturday, so I’m just glad we turned it around. Jimmy is the man.”
MARCOS AMBROSE – No. 9 Stanley Ford Fusion
“It’s just a great night for Richard Petty Motorsports. My teammate Aric Almirola was a couple spots
in front of us, so we’re really proud of our team tonight and a great night for Ford tonight as well with Carl doing backflips on the frontstretch here. I’ve got thank the fans for sticking with us through all this rain this afternoon. I’m really proud of this Stanley team and can’t wait to watch this one on replay and look forward to California coming up.”
IT WAS AGGRESSIVE FROM THE START.
“You had to. These cars go a lot faster around this track than the old style cars and we had to really dig in our feet. The groove went to the very fence and we had to really watch ourselves there and keep adjusting the car all night. We got a bad set of tires where they delaminated and started to cord really bad, so we lost a lap and then got it back. I passed Kyle Busch to get the lucky dog and worked our way back up to the front.”
RICKY STENHOUSE JR. – No. 17 Nationwide Insurance Ford Fusion
DID YOU THINK WHEN THAT LAST CAUTION CAME OUT IT WAS YOUR CHANCE TO WIN?
“I did until it started raining. I’m still not sure what the caution was for, but Mike Kelley got this Nationwide Insurance Ford Fusion rolling pretty good. We felt good about it all weekend because this was a track we were good in Nationwide, so it’s good to have him back and good to be running back up front. It’s good for our partners – Zest, Fifth Third, Nos – it’s just a lot of fun coming back up here and running in the top five. We got a 1-2 finish for Jack Roush. The Eco Power oil was getting a little hot under cautions there, but everything held together and we were able to come home with our first top five of the year. Hopefully, we can keep that going.”
ARIC ALMIROLA – No. 43 Smithfield Ford Fusion
“It was a good run for us. The Smithfield Ford Fusion was good all weekend. We worked on it. Trent Owens and all these guys, we changed every part and piece on this race car throughout the weekend. I’m really proud of those guys. They did a great job and got a top-5 finish out of it. It was a good day for us. The first few weeks haven’t been great to us, so it was a good way to come back.”
HOW DOES IT FEEL TO HAVE A CAREER-BEST FINISH?
“It feels good. You want to win. I saw it right there at my fingertips on that one restart when I raced side-by-side with Carl, but he had a lot better car than we did tonight.”
BRAD KESELOWSKI – No. 2 Miller Lite Ford Fusion
“It was exactly where I wanted to be, just not smart enough to take advantage of it. I saw the 4 was in trouble and we had new tires and the leaders didn’t. We were just making our way through traffic
and he broke something in front of me. Everybody – me and the cars in front of me – we all knocked the wall down running in behind him. It’s unfortunate and just one of those racing deals, I guess. I should have anticipated he was gonna blow up, I guess, but that’s just part of it.”
THE RACE SEEMED AGGRESSIVE FROM THE START.
“Yeah, I thought it was a typical Bristol race.”
ARIC ALMIROLA AND RICKY STENHOUSE JR. PRESS CONFERENCE
RICKY STENHOUSE JR. – No. 17 Nationwide Insurance Ford Fusion
“It helps our confidence for sure. It’s been nice working with Mike and the guys again. We’re having a lot of fun. We’re just slowly working and getting better and better. I thought we were a lot better than our finish last week at Las Vegas, except I sped on pit road. So I think we’ve got some good cars and everybody back at the shop is working hard on building those, but for the race we didn’t qualify as good as we wanted. We thought we had a pretty good race car throughout all the practices this weekend. I was looking for the race track to rubber in – right before the rain I thought that run right before the rain we were coming on pretty strong when it was laying some more rubber, but after that rain delay it seemed to get kind of cold and it didn’t seem to be laying as much rubber for us. We were fighting the
balance. We were a little bit loose and a little bit tight and could never really zone in on it, but Mike made some good calls. We stayed out there and kept our track position and ended up second, so it was cool to have a 1-2 finish for Roush Fenway this weekend.”
ARIC ALMIROLA – No. 43 Smithfield Ford Fusion
“It was a good night for us. The first half of the race was just a struggle to get to the front. We had a
really good car, but we qualified back in the field so we had to pass a lot of cars. Like Ricky said, before the rain I thought our car was really good. It seemed like a lot of people were struggling for drive-off and my car was really good on drive-off, and when it cooled down it seemed like not as many people were struggling – they could hold on longer in the run. That was kind of our strong suit. It seemed like our car got better and better as the run went on. It’s frustrating because I had one shot to race Carl for the lead and these races are so hard to win, obviously. It was a great day for us and I’m not disappointed at all with third, but when you see it and you can taste it and it’s that close, you wonder what could have gone different. If our car would have taken off a little bit better, things might have gone different, but, all in all, it was a great day. Our pit stops were really good. I’m really proud of everybody on our team. We changed every part and piece on our race car this morning because we weren’t very good in practice, so
I’m really proud of Trent Owens and all of our guys. They gave me a really good car.”
RICKY STENHOUSE CONTINUED
HAVE YOU BEEN ABLE TO RUN THE CORNER LIKE YOU DID TONIGHT?
“Our car was definitely, compared to last year, we could not roll the bottom and I thought this year with the work we did in the off-season it seemed like Aric and Carl and my car rolled the bottom a lot better than we were able to last year. We focused on that a lot in practice because if you look back at these races the cars that are up front every race here at Bristol are able to run the bottom when they need to, but I was really happy with being able to run bottom, middle, top. Enter in on the top and turn and drive across the bottom. I was really, really happy with our car and the changes that we’ve made and the
progress that we’ve made from last year.”
WHAT DID YOU HAVE IN MIND IF YOU COULD HAVE HAD ONE LAST SHOT?
“I don’t know. I was thinking I would use the bumper if the opportunity was there. If you get the win, you’re in the Chase and you can let the rest take care of itself later. That’s what I was really thinking if we went back green. I saw Aric was really strong on the restart before and I thought him and I were really pretty good on the bottom and Carl seemed to be a little too loose as soon as we went back green. I would have ran it in there pretty hard. He knows I would have. We’ve had a few races in Nationwide where they came down to the wire like that and we both drive really hard, so I was thinking
about doing whatever I could to win.”
WAS THE TRACK NOTICEABLY WET WHEN THE CAUTION CAME OUT?
“Yeah. As soon as whatever the caution was for came out it didn’t matter. We weren’t gonna get to Carl no matter what, so really it was only gonna help us have the opportunity to get that one more spot. As soon as it came out going in three it started raining pretty good.”
HAS THE START OF THIS SEASON SURPRISED YOU OR DID YOU THINK THIS IS WHERE YOU
COULD MAKE SOME INROADS?
“No, actually we’ve had a lot of positives. We didn’t run very good at Vegas last week. We struggled really bad there, but at Daytona we had a great car. We went up and led some laps and had a really
strong car there, and then had a miscue on pit road where we had to serve a penalty under green and got caught a lap down and then I was racing for the lucky dog and got caught in a wreck. At Phoenix we had a good car and ran in the top 10 all day and then those last couple of restarts we didn’t have very good restarts and I finished 14th or 15th, so we’ve had good cars, we’ve had good runs – last week was
an exception – but this is how we expect to run. We thought when we brought Trent over that he would come with some new ideas and our cars, everybody at Roush Fenway has been working really hard and everybody at Richard Petty Motorsports has been working really hard together to get our cars better and I feel like we have some really good cars right now. I think it shows. We had four of the top five cars
tonight, so everybody has been working really hard and hard work pays off. I know everybody works hard, but we were not very happy with how our season went last year and we’ve made a lot of changes
and all of those changes seem to have been positive.”
JACK ROUSH AND JIMMY FENNIG PRESS CONFERENCE
JACK ROUSH, Car Owner – “It was a great night for Roush Fenway and for all the guys in the shop. They worked hard all winter and they got the result from it tonight that they deserved. It has been a very long winter for us. We made some changes and built some new cars over the winter and revised our strategies a little bit as far as the way we do our engineering and the way that manifests itself in what the race cars are and we’re still working with our process. This thing is becoming so sophisticated and expanding so much with so many people doing new things that hadn’t been done before it’s a little hard to get all the job descriptions worked out.”
JIMMY FENNIG, Crew Chief – It was a good win. We really needed that for as hard as everybody that’s been working this winter. It paid off. Carl did an excellent job driving at the end, just watching his tires, managing his tires. Goodyear did a good job with their tires here. Once the track got rubbered in we didn’t have no trouble at all, so pretty happy with the win.
Q. Jimmy, what made you decide to stay out there when it was 75-ish to go?
JIMMY FENNIG: Well, basically we only had like 17 laps on our tires, and looking at the 50-lap run, we were running on the end of 50 laps, we were running the same lap times we started the run with. And the wear at that time wasn’t a factor anymore once the track got rubbered in. It was pretty easy that we knew the speed was there and the wear was going to be good, so we just stayed out.
Q. Jack, one-two with Carl and Ricky, and Carl in victory lane talked about how far they came from Saturday, and then Ford had four cars in the top 5. If you could just talk about what a strong showing it was all around.
JACK ROUSH: Well, we’re real happy with the representation Ford was able to have tonight. There were a lot of good cars that got crashed, a lot of good cars that got caught up in things that weren’t their own fault. You’ve got to stand in line and just wait for the racing gods to smile on you or to frown on you to see what you’ve got, but tonight we did have good fortune. We had nobody that got caught up in a wreck and we didn’t break a part and we didn’t get involved in somebody else’s wreck, so that helped a lot.
Ford has deserved this kind of result for their effort. They’ve committed a lot of engineering resources to us. They give us a lot of support with cars and trucks and support vehicles and things, and we have not been able to do as much for them as we needed to in the last six months, and I was glad we could get Carl into the Chase tonight. Looking forward to getting Ricky qualified for the last 10 races and Greg, as well.
Q. Ricky was in here earlier and said there was no doubt he would have put the bumper to Carl had he been able to catch him on the last lap. As the car owner of both, how do you feel about that?
JACK ROUSH: When it comes time to really charge for the checkered flag, the guys, there’s no team owners, there’s no rules. I expect them to race one another as they expect to be raced not only with one another but with everybody in the garage. I expect Ricky is as fierce a competitor as there is out there, and if his car has got the speed and he can get to the car in front of him, particularly on a short track, you’d bump and run and take the prize if you could get it. I’d be surprised if he didn’t have that in his mind.
Q. How would you have felt, Jimmy?
JIMMY FENNIG: It would have been vice versa, too, Carl would have put the bumper to him.
No, it’s good racing. You know, short tracks, at the end there, especially with the new format we’ve got with the Chase like this, it’s about winning nowadays.
Q. Jimmy, how does this change the rest of the year for you now that you’ve got this one in your pocket? Does it make you go for more wins or make you kind of settle in comfortably or how do you approach it?
JIMMY FENNIG: Well, it’s about winning. That’s the way we build around Roush Fenway Racing. We go out to win. That’s what we’re striving for. We’re going to go to California. I think our mile-and-a-half track, we’re still working on that to get the performance better, so when we go out to California we’re going to go shooting after that win. Nothing is going to change our philosophy.
Q. Jimmy, what did you think of that last caution?
JIMMY FENNIG: Yeah, I don’t even know. I guess it had a short or I don’t know.
Q. Did you think that’s what it was?
JIMMY FENNIG: Well, I seen the lights come on and I didn’t see the flagman didn’t even know the lights come on. I knew something was wrong. It just wasn’t right what happened. From what I understand, something just shorted out, it came on or a couple came on. But at the end the rain came out and NASCAR made a great decision, yellow and checker and that was it.
Q. Both Jack and Jimmy, were you worried when that caution came out that this one was going to slip by, or did you have confidence that he had been the best car for the last section of the race and he’d be okay on the restart?
JACK ROUSH: Well, track position is really important here, and if you’re up front with a lap or two to go at Bristol and you don’t get involved in a wreck and you don’t spin your tires too hard, it should be okay. I had a picture in my mind’s eye of three or four of those Fords ended up in a hair ball and letting one of the Toyotas or Chevrolets behind come through for the wind. So I had that bit of horror, but that was just anxiety, an old man’s anxiety.
Q. Jack, can you just talk, you mentioned earlier, about some of the changes or things you guys have done to try to reformulate things, and how do you feel like that’s gone so far this season?
JACK ROUSH: Well, you know, every winter we’ve got to look at the jobs that we’ve been doing technically and think about how we can do better and of course look around at our contemporaries and see how they’re doing their programs, as well. We decided we needed to add a couple more people to do some research and engineering things. We decided to reassign and redefine the job descriptions of some of the people we had on staff. We took an evaluation, took stock of who we had, the talent and the experience and all, and decided that we had people with the right stuff that were motivated and committed, so we stayed the course with the folks that we had even though we didn’t win a championship last year. We stayed the course, we augmented or added to the staffing level, and we were able to do some things that I wouldn’t care to talk about that we weren’t able to do last year based on the added resources that we’ve applied.
Ford has given us more resources, as well. They’ve expanded their engineering involvement one more notch and given us some more. Of course the thing that it comes down to is it always has with people in stock car racing is you can have talented people but if you don’t work on the right things you won’t get the results you’re looking for from their effort. We’ve had to think not only about the people and the programs we had going on, but whether we were missing something by not focusing on some of the other things.
And of course NASCAR with their changing the ride height rules and inspection process opened it up to a lot of additional considerations for things you could do with the car that you couldn’t do last year where they had to go back to inspection ride heights after the race.
