Ford Racing NSCS Notes & Quotes:
Ford EcoBoost 400 Qualifying – Homestead-Miami Speedway
Saturday, November 15, 2014
Jamie Allison, director, Ford Racing, participated in a press conference this afternoon with counterparts from Chevrolet and Toyota. Below is a transcript of Allison’s remarks.
JAMIE ALLISON, Director, Ford Racing – HOW NICE WOULD IT BE TO HAVE JOEY LOGANO WIN THE CHAMPIONSHIP? “Here we are at Ford Championship Weekend and it would be an exclamation point to celebrate a Ford champion, but the road to Ford Championship Weekend is well traveled and hard-earned between all the competitors. Us at Ford Motor Company, we are capping off a phenomenal season with 14 wins, the most since 2005, accomplished by involvement with all of our teams, and here we are at the capper with the most exciting form of Chase to be potentially celebrated here at Ford Championship Weekend, so, indeed, it would be an exclamation point.”
HOW MUCH OF A BOOST WOULD IT GIVE YOU TO WIN THE TITLE TOMORROW? “Like I said, it would be an exclamation point, but let me give you some metrics on what’s going on this year with the success we’ve had on the track. First of all, social media is increasingly the metrics by which everybody measures engagement. We started the year with 800,000 fans and followers on Facebook and now we’re at 2.6 million followers on Facebook. We do a lot of activations on the track. We generate a lot of leads for our dealers. We’ve generated 570,000 leads this year, up 60 percent from a year ago. We track sales – matched and leads generated from on-track activation – and our sales are up 90 percent versus a year ago. These are gigantic swings in engagement, gigantic swings in fan affinity, and it translates all the way down from awareness down to consideration to shopping intention to buy. So success on the track translates to fan consideration and purchase intention. At the end of the day we are here because our fans are fans of Ford and what we race on the track increasing with relevance with what’s being shown in the showroom as well as what’s in peoples’ driveway, there’s that direct correlation. Whoever said Win on Sunday, Sell on Monday it’s absolutely true because we’re seeing it in the evidence and the data that we have.”
IS THERE ANYTHING ON YOUR CHRISTMAS LIST FOR NEXT YEAR’S CAR? “When we think of relevance at Ford we think of three levels of relevance. Obviously, product relevance, which is brand identity. The Gen-6 and the cars you see on the road are more consistent with the brand cues of the cars that you see on the track. Next is technology relevance. Obviously, there is increasingly a higher level of technology found in road cars than there is now in race cars in general. The progression of fuel injection is one step. There’s always additional consideration for added technology in this sport to bring more technology relevance that allows a company to support racing. We are a car company and this is car racing and the perfect intersection of those two – when the engineers inside a large company like Ford Motor Company can come and support all the development that’s taking place with our race teams – and when there is a technology gap, that puts a gap in the ability to support and that’s why breaching the gap on technology relevance is important. The last part is fan relevance. The Chase format, the energy that you hear about the Chase – NASCAR now increasingly more so has more fan relevance. You see it’s a sellout crowd here, it was a sellout crowd at Phoenix. There is an energy around the sport and when there is energy in the sport it lifts all boats. Obviously, as manufacturer’s we’re the beneficiary of it, but more importantly as a car manufacturer and as more people get excited about car racing it lifts the consideration of our products.”
JAMIE ALLISON CONTINUED — HAVE YOU BEEN ABLE TO PROVIDE ANY ADDITIONAL SUPPORT FOR THE 22 TEAM THIS WEEKEND? “Every week, every day, every hour there is constant interface between our technical development team and our race teams. It runs the gamut of testing, development and increasingly more analytics. There are tendencies in the sport during the race that can ge gleaned from mining data that could give a crew chief an opportunity to make a decision based on data rather than strictly on gut feel. The field of analytics is wide open, so when you’re coming down to the final race from a hardware standpoint it’s largely in the hands of the teams, but in terms of enabling decision-making in race situation, that’s one scenario. Also our recent addition of our technical center being based literally across the street from our teams and NASCAR, with all of the tools that exist there are at full disposal to our teams and our teams have made full use of it. So we’re looking forward to a race at a place that we’re all very familiar with, and with the familiarity of the Ford oval around the track, I think you can’t discount that in my view – the sense of a bit of a home field advantage as we look at it. When I walk into Ford Championship Weekend I feel that I’m at home, so I’m sure the Ford teams feel that sense, so hopefully it plays out, but at the end of the day they have to go out and race and make the best of it.”
WHAT HAVE CARL EDWARDS AND MARCOS AMBROSE MEANT TO WORLDWISE MARKETING EFFORTS AND WHAT WILL THEIR LOSS MEAN TO YOU? “At Ford we’re a family company and it pervades and permeates everything that we do. Our drivers are more than drivers, they’re literally part of the Ford family. Whenever you have a member of the family pursuing other opportunities it leaves a void personally with the team members as well as professionally in terms of fan outreach. With Marcos he’s stepping out of one Ford and into another Ford in another part of the world. He’s kind of returning home and we wish him all the best. We’re very close with Roger on him fielding the Falcon down in Australia. Carl Edwards is someone that we hold in the highest regard. He is the winningest Ford Fusion driver. He has been a part of many of our outreach to our fans and nothing will ever take that away. We all have to make our own decisions and we have to look ahead, but we wish Carl all the best. In the meantime, we have a new set of friends and teams and drivers to which we’re going to continue to reach out to our fans and at the end of the day our fans love to win. When we win with our drivers that works its way all the way through the marketing funnel from consideration to shopping to intention. This is sports and in sports you have to win. You can’t activate a losing program, so winning is paramount and it starts on the track and it concludes itself with on-track activation, fan outreach and social media, and literally just being in touch with our fans.”
DID YOU EXPECT THE INTENSITY WITH THIS NEW FORMAT? “NASCAR nailed it. NASCAR got it right. We see the proof in the pudding. If you analyze what has taken place, why do we see all this energy? I come back to this is sport. What happens in sport? You have to win. Winning is paramount and we saw the emphasis on winning drive drivers, drive teams, drive manufacturers, drive everything to basically win and we saw that take place. The pursuit of winning is what brings out the greatest emotions in all of us who are competitors. Our drivers are competitors and the crews around them are competitors, so it really from my perspective literally brought it back to its ultimate roots which this is a car race and someone has to win and he or she with the best opportunity to win must go for it and win. I think that’s at the end of the day why we feel that the national media and all the energy that we see around it because now it’s pure and raw, it’s about winning. In terms of having all the manufacturers in the final spot to win it is kind of seminole to kind of have it end that way. At the end of the day one will prevail as NASCAR’s tagline says. Jim, I think we’ll have a little fun – I think it’s our turn (laughing).”
JAMIE ALLISON CONTINUED — DO YOU THINK ONE OF THE FINAL FOUR SHOULD HAVE TO WIN A RACE TO BE THE CHAMPION? “You play with the rules and in every format ever conceived by NASCAR inevitably rewards consistency so kudos to all the teams that play by the rules and achieve the rules’ outcome, whether it’s through consistency or through winning. If new rules come up around which we lose one of those considerations, then we can have that conversation. In the meantime, the rules today rewards consistency and hat’s off to the team who can take advantage of it.”
WHAT DO YOU DERIVE FROM THE HUMAN ELEMENT THAT IS INVOLVED WITH THIS CHAMPIONSHIP? “As manufacturers we’re in it for identical reasons, we’re bonded by a common cause to leverage and participate in this sport. We are car companies. This is car racing. This is a platform for us to showcase our products and to tell the world about our products and our brands. That’s our common bond. You talk about athletes and their emotions, athletes are there to compete and win. Kudos to NASCAR because this is a place where you can indeed compete at the highest level and yet allows for the raw emotion to come out. It’s personalities that people want to follow, so the scale of NASCAR, the reach of NASCAR and the participation of NASCAR to us delivers on our objectives and it’s all because of this confluence of all these factors and the fact that the drivers can still compete and their personalities can come through and the manufacturers can collaborate, and yet at the end we want to compete and make sure our brands succeed.”
WHAT MAKES JOEY LOGANO A SPECIAL DRIVER? “When you start the conversation about Joey Logano this is a sport of teams. You have to put it in context. It’s Joey. It’s Todd. It’s Penske. It’s Ford. When you put that ensemble together, this season has been an absolute standout season with five wins for Joey, six wins for Brad, 11 wins with Team Penske – starting on the front row as many times as they’ve done all season long, and now with Joey here at the final race laser-focused. Joey Logano, when he came into this sport, was billed as a phenom and indeed he is a phenom. He’s got the talent and with the team around him I think he’s very poised to succeed. He’s driven and the call is inside and we expect he will succeed.”
