Ford Racing NSCS Notes & Quotes:
Go Bowling.com 400 Qualifying – Pocono Raceway
Friday, August 1, 2014
Ford Qualifying Results:
2nd – Joey Logano
3rd – Brad Keselowski
23rd – Ricky Stenhouse Jr.
25th – Greg Biffle
26th – Carl Edwards
27th – Marcos Ambrose
28th – Aric Almirola
30th – David Gilliland
39th – David Ragan
BRAD KESELOWSKI – No. 2 Alliance Truck Parts Ford Fusion – “Third is a respectable effort. You certainly always want the pole, but we can be proud of where we’re at. I had to make a second run there in the second session, which probably took us away from having a legitimate shot to run with Kyle. He put up a heck of a lap and so did my teammate, Joey Logano, but it was a strong effort. Like I said, we can win from third and we’re happy with that so we’ll move on.”
WHY ARE YOU RUNNING IOWA AS WELL THIS WEEKEND? “I enjoy Iowa. The track has been good for me. Somebody had to run it and it was either Joey or I and we just kind of sat down at the start of the year and figured out who was gonna run where and this was just one that I thought fit me.”
YOU HAD A FAST CAR IN JUNE AND CIRCUMSTANCES KEPT YOU FROM WINNING. IS THIS A SENSE OF REDEMPTION? “That would be better answered after the race is over. That’s what matters the most, but I don’t know if there’s really redemption. I think when I look at racing we won here in 2011 and it was a great win for me personally, but we weren’t the fastest car. I think we were probably the fastest car here this past spring and didn’t win and those things come full circle. I think the longer you’re in this sport the more you kind of realize that and try not to let the highs get you too high and the lows get you too low. Losing a word as strong as redemption would signify to me personally a high and a low and even though we have those we try not to have them as much as we can and try to recognize that that’s just part of the racing circle.”
DO YOU FEEL THIS YEAR IS REDEMPTION FOR LAST SEASON? “There’s a lot of redemption speak in here. I just think we’re a little bit stronger team. I think we’ve got a better relationship with Ford than we’ve had. I can’t say I’ve done a lot personally. It’s a team sport and I might get a lot of credit, but I don’t do that much of the work. It’s really everyone that’s been a part of it. When we run good it’s everyone and when we run bad it’s everyone, so that’s the way this sport works. Sometimes I get the face of that unfairly when we’re running well and unfairly when we’re running poorly. I’m probably less responsible for our success and failure than I get credit for either way, but we’re just a better team.”
MARCOS AMBROSE – No. 9 Stanley Ford Fusion – “The downforce tracks have been a struggle for us at RPM all year and it continues here. I threw down some good laps there, so I’m pleased with my effort and we’ll just keep working really hard. We’ve got good balance on the car, which is normally a good sign for the race, but we’re just missing a couple tenths to get us to transfer through or it would have been a different story.”
CARL EDWARDS – No. 99 Fastenal Ford Fusion – “I got really loose off of turn two at that end of the race track. I hit the fence and was trying to get back as quickly as I could and I ran off in the dirt, so I put the car through its paces. It actually handled pretty well in the grass over there. That was the best part of the lap, but we’ve got to decide now if we’re going to run this car or go to a backup car. It really snapped down there. If I hadn’t hit the fence it would have been a good save, but I just ran out of room.” HOW DIFFERENT IS THE TRACK THIS TIME? “I don’t know that the track is much different. Our car seemed a lot better. I thought we were gonna be pretty good there, but it wasn’t meant to be. That was not pretty. I didn’t plan on bringing it back like this, but hopefully we can get a Ford on the front row. It looks like a couple of Fords are running really well, so we’ll work on this and get it back together. We’ve got a long race and hopefully we can make something out of this.”
JOEY LOGANO – No. 22 Shell/Pennzoil Ford Fusion – “My Shell/Pennzoil Ford is really fast and I felt like that as soon as we unloaded today that we were loose, but the car still had a lot of speed in it. I’m still huffing and puffing from running over here. I ran from pit road. It’s a long ways. We definitely made some good adjustments. When your car is loose and it still had speed, and I knew we could tighten it up and get some of that speed back. In qualifying trim we were decent and when we went into qualifying itself I felt like the first lap was really good. There were some things I could have done to make it a little bit better, so a couple of adjustments we could have done just to tighten it up a little bit probably would have helped. So we made those little adjustments and tried to keep up with the cycles on tires and as we burned fuel off the car. Anytime you win the first two sessions you feel pretty good about what you’re gonna have in the third and ran the third session really hard. I felt like we nailed the setup, nailed the balance. I felt like I actually nailed the lap on all three corners and I was pretty confident – really, really confident that that was gonna be the pole and we got beat, so that’s frustrating. I saw a stat on TV a minute ago, which wasn’t exciting, but it’s our sixth front row start this year, which is good, but there’s only one pole out of that so second sucks. It’s still something to be proud of. We’ve made the final session in each qualifying session besides the superspeedways, so any track that handling comes into we’ve made the final session. We’re very proud of that with all of Team Penske. Brad obviously qualified well even making an extra run he still qualified up there in third place. We have two fast race cars. I felt like the 41 was one of the fastest cars also, and I thought he was gonna be the guy we were gonna be racing for the pole, but Kyle definitely laid down a good one because I thought my lap was damn near perfect and then I got beat, so it’s a little frustrating, but, overall, it’s a good starting spot, good pit box. Clean air is very important here, so if we can have a good start we can try to dictate strategy from there.”
WHAT IS IT YOU GUYS LIKE ABOUT THIS QUALIFYING FORMAT? “I don’t feel like it’s the format because the 22 car has done a good job at having a good setup the first session, and we’ve always been really fast the first session. Brad is kind of the other way around. His first session is usually not as good and he gets good by the third, which he showed again today. He keeps progressively getting better and we stay about the same, but we start pretty good. So we push each other a lot in that way. We push them to be better the first round. They push us to be better as we go into the third round. I’m getting better. We’re able to see what we do differently, which helps us because one is good in one area and one is good in the other, so we can see both of that. I think we work together very tight. I think both our crew chiefs are super-smart and they both kind of know what works for each driver. Our cars run very similar each week, but our setups are still fairly different between the two and they both run the same speed. Todd kind of knows what I like and Paul knows what Brad likes and we’re able to make sure we stay in the right area of what works for us, but still be able to swap quite a bite of notes and know what works for both of us. I think having that communication and understanding what works and what doesn’t work for a particular driver is very important for us, so I think that’s what is keeping both of our cars fast, not only in qualifying but on race day too.”
JOEY LOGANO CONTINUED — HOW WOULD YOU DESCRIBE THE EVOLUTION OF POCONO RACEWAY? “It changed a lot when they repaved it. That was definitely a completely different race track, but when I first started here it was obviously when they had the old asphalt, but we had the new asphalt in turn three, just that strip in the third lane, and everyone would run up there. Toward the end of that, just before they repaved, you could kind of run the top or the bottom and be pretty much be the same speed. That’s when it was a lot of fun. It was really cool that you could kind of run real high or way on the bottom and do some different things with your race car that you couldn’t do anywhere else at any type of race track, so that was always a lot of fun. But now they’ve repaved it. It was really smooth when they first repaved it and now the bumps are starting to come back and you’re starting to get some big swells in one, you’re getting the choppiness in turn two that we used to have, and there’s even a bump in three that’s starting to work in. Those are good things. I think those are all good things to see. The track is lightening up in color, which means it’s wearing in, which is a good thing, so hopefully we’ll start to see some more tire falloff as we go through a few more years here. But I think the racing is only gonna get better. The track is only gonna get wider as it wears in and I think it’s all good things. They did a really good job repaving this and I was one of the first cars on the race track when we came up here to do the tire test and it has definitely changed a lot since then, but I’ve talked to some of the track officials on the way that they repaved it and the stone that they used and the asphalt was the same stuff they used before, so I think in time it will go back to the old Pocono, which is awesome. But it’s still fun to have a track with a ton of grip that we can go really fast on too.”
IT SEEMED A LOT OF GUYS WERE LOOSE OFF TURN ONE. WHY? “I was free there too, but I wasn’t as loose as those guys obviously, so I’d say it’s mainly setup. But it is a corner that you’re typically loose off of and I don’t really understand why because you kind of go up a hill, so you kind of build load in the car as you go up the corner – off the corner, but you’re going uphill – so it’s not like the banking is going away and it’s making the car get loose or anything like that, but it’s weird because it does build freer as you go off the corner. It doesn’t make sense, but it does and it’s a common trend, I think, throughout the whole field. It’s just how you deal with it.”
RICKY STENHOUSE JR. – No. 17 Fifth Third Bank Ford Fusion – “We made a big gain from practice to qualifying, which was pretty uplifting to us. I think we haven’t had the speed since we unloaded here like we’ve kind of worked on the last couple weeks, but I do feel that we made it better from practice to qualifying. I think we adjusted on it too much because our Fifth Third Fusion was real loose in practice and pretty tight there in qualifying. I felt like we could have been about five or six spots better. That’s still not exactly where we need to be, but, overall, a few different adjustments there in qualifying and we could have been a little bit better. All in all we made it to the second round, which is a positive. You’ve got to crawl before you walk and making it to that second round is something you’ve got to do before you make it to the finals. We’re slowly but surely getting there and we’ll make some more adjustments here for tomorrow.”
