Ford Racing NSCS Notes & Quotes:
AAA 400 – Dover International Speedway
Sunday, September 28, 2014
Ford Finishing Order:
2nd – Brad Keselowski
4th – Joey Logano
11th – Carl Edwards
19th – Ricky Stenhouse Jr.
21st – Greg Biffle
26th – Marcos Ambrose
28th – Aric Almirola
31st – David Ragan
33rd – David Gilliland
GREG BIFFLE – No. 16 3M/Post-it Ford Fusion – “This is the way it’s gone all season. We’re just searching for speed and struggled all day today. We’ve worked hard trying to fix our problems, but it just hasn’t come together yet. It’s frustrating because part of you wants to just pull it and put it in the garage and the other half is racing as hard as you can to get in the Chase. It’s pretty frustrating. I’ve won races my whole career, but to be struggling like this all year is disappointing at best.”
ARIC ALMIROLA – No. 43 Nathan’s Famous Ford Fusion – “It just didn’t work out for us. I hate it. We picked a bad day to run the way we did and we can’t blame anybody but ourselves. My car didn’t have any grip. You can’t go fast without grip.” IS THERE ANY KIND OF MORAL VICTORY IN TERMS OF GETTING THIS FAR? “Not at the moment. I’m sure we’ll be able to look past this another day, but right now it’s pretty disappointing.”
CARL EDWARDS – No. 99 Fastenal Ford Fusion – “It was just a solid day. The car was actually pretty decent and everybody did a really good job. The pit crew did great and Jimmy did a great job with the car and that’s what we needed. We had a top-10 car and finished 11th, but I think if I would have done a little better job on the restarts we would have been better.”
ANY ANXIOUS MOMENTS? “Yeah, there were a lot of anxious moments. We were running 21st at one point and that’s tough.”
HOW DO YOU VIEW THE NEXT THREE RACES? “This is built for us. We’re having a hard time here. We keep making small gains and getting the opportunity to be put back in the same position as the guys in front of us is a huge opportunity for us. We’ve got to capitalize on it and go run well at Kansas and Charlotte. We know we can win Talladega, so I look forward to that race. That’s the first time I’ve ever looked forward to Talladega in the Chase, but I’m looking forward to it.”
THIS KEEPS YOUR HOPES ALIVE OF WINNING A TITLE FOR JACK. WHAT DOES THAT MEAN TO YOU? “There are a bunch of things are important to me right now. I want to do very well for Jack and finish strong. This is Jimmy Fennig’s last year on the box, but, honestly, more important than that to me is I understand how fleeting and how rare these opportunities are to win championships. They come once a year if you’re very lucky, so I just want to make the most of it.”
JOEY LOGANO – No. 22 Shell/Pennzoil Ford Fusion – “I feel good about that. It was a little bit of a tougher week for us. We didn’t have a very fast car off the truck, but Todd Gordon and all these Shell/Pennzoil guys did a great job giving me a car that was pretty racy. We started 16th and drove up to 10th quick and then had a terrible restart and lost everything we had gained and then some. From there we just put four tires on it, reset and try to drive our way back up there. It was a hard-fought day, which is pretty normal for here at Dover. We got something good out of it and now we’ll start the next round and try to move on to the next one.”
YOU LOOK AT THE BOARD AND SEE TWO PENSKE AND TWO HENDRICK DRIVERS IN THE TOP FOUR. DO YOU LOOK AT WHAT THEY’RE DOING OR IS IT A CASE OF JUST CONCENTRATING ON YOUR TEAM’S EFFORT EACH WEEK? “We’ve got to focus on what we do to go fast and not what other people are doing or who our competition is. There are 11 other guys right now who are our main competition, so we’ve got to look at them all just like we did going into this round. We look at every one as a contender, no pun intended, and we’ll be able to focus on what we’ve been doing with our race cars and go from there.”
DID YOU LEARN ANYTHING FROM BEING BACK THERE TODAY THAT COULD HELP THE NEXT ROUND? “We had three top-fives in the first three races here in the Chase, so that’s important. We’ve got to do that again and again to be able to win this championship. We’ve got momentum. The part I’m most proud of is that we’re executing. Even if we don’t have the best race car we execute to make sure we have a nice solid finish out of it one way or the other, so we have to keep doing that throughout the rest of the Chase.”
THOUGHTS ON THIS ELIMINATION FORMAT? “As consistent as we’ve been and as good as we’ve been running I hate to see it reset. You’re like, ‘Alright, this is three good finishes, a win in there, this feels good,’ but now we’re all tied again so it’s like that’s all out the window. It’s nice we’re able to go to the next round, but after that it’s over and you’ve got to start over and go again.”
BRAD KESELOWSKI – No. 2 Wurth Ford Fusion – PRESS CONFERENCE – “We’ve had a really good start. I guess we can’t really complain that much having won a race, a second and a seventh, but it’s hard to look at that. All I could think about is how I wanted to win all three races and now it’s time to move forward. Three more races, a new start and what we were able to do in these last three, other than getting us to this next round, really means nothing. We’ve got to keep our head on straight and push forward these next three like we have these last three.”
HOW DO YOU FEEL ABOUT THESE NEXT THREE RACES WITH KANSAS, CHARLOTTE AND TALLADEGA? “In some ways all the brackets are survival brackets, but that particular bracket is probably more so than the others. Surviving Talladega is its own horror film title, but it’s also a reality. That place is gonna be a crazy place to finish that bracket out and certainly there are gonna be a lot of guys on the bubble and it’s probably all gonna change on the last lap and the last corner. But looking at Charlotte and Kansas you can control your destiny more so at Charlotte than any other race track, which is good. We’re putting an emphasis on that race, but then I look at Kansas and say that since that track has been repaved it seems to be very, very sensitive to aerodynamics and getting in a pack and spinning out with a really hard tire, so anything could happen there. It’s almost like a mini-Talladega in that sense, but all in all it’s gonna be a real challenge. If you can survive all three of these brackets and go to Homestead and win this thing you’ve certainly earned it.”
DOES IT HELP THAT YOU’VE WON AT THE NEXT THREE TRACKS? “Not really, no. It’s a confidence-booster, but you don’t get anything for it – not that matters – in the next bracket. I don’t think of it as anything more than a confidence boost and nothing else.”
DID YOU SENSE THE GUYS WERE EXTRA CAREFUL? RACING HARD BUT MAKING SURE NOBODY CAUSED ANY WRECKS? “I can’t speak for everyone else, but I know I wasn’t. I drove it as hard as I could and put us in some hairy spots a couple times, but that’s my job. I don’t know. I’d have to sit and watch the race on TV to answer for everyone else, but I was just doing all I could.”
