Ford Performance NSCS Notes & Quotes:
2015 Daytona 500 Media Day
Thursday, February 12, 2015
ARIC ALMIROLA – No. 43 Smithfield Ford Fusion – “Winning at Daytona is special for anybody, but winning at Daytona, for me, is really special because I grew up here. I grew up sitting in those grandstands and dreaming about what it would be like to have a chance to race here, so to actually get a chance to race a Cup car here and win is unbelievable and very special. We come to Daytona this year with a lot of excitement. We’re the last ones to win here in the Cup Series, so we’re excited about the Daytona 500 and it would be really awesome to get a Daytona 500 win to add to that Coke Zero 400 win.”
WHAT’S YOUR FIRST MEMORY OF BEING IN THE STANDS? “I probably started coming here when I was seven, eight, nine years old – right in there. We would come. We would take vacation and go to Disney World, especially for the July race, we’d go to Disney World and we’d stop and spend a couple days there and then we’d drive over to the race track here and watch the races and then drive back home to Tampa. We always made a week of it and we always had a lot of fun doing it as a family.”
HOW HAS IT BEEN TO WORK WITH SAM? “We honestly haven’t worked together very much. We’ve just been in the shop and doing some media stuff together and so far that’s been fun. We’ve had a great time together. I think Sam will be great to work with. He’s a great guy. He’s a family man just like myself, and we’ve got a lot of the same values and we’re both on the rebound parts of our career and I think Sam is going to do a great job.”
HOW IMPORTANT IS IT THAT HE’S HAD SOME HIGHS AND LOWS? “I think we’re both in the same boat on that, really, and I think that helps us form that much better of a relationship. It’s always tough when you have a veteran guy or a guy like myself that’s been around for a long time and I was beat down in 2008 and worked my way back up to the Cup Series and I appreciate it that much more. Sam does as well. It’s always tough when you get a guy like myself or a veteran guy and then you get a young kid that’s just coming in with a ball of fire and everybody is telling him how great he is and has a big ego to mesh those two personalities together. Me and Sam are a lot more similar in a lot of ways.”
DO YOU FEEL THAT SENSE OF HISTORY HERE? “I do. Anytime you come to Daytona with that number 43 on the side of your race car and Petty blue colors on the car it makes it really special. Obviously for us having Smithfield adorn the Petty blue colors is really special. They’ve been a great partner for us and we look forward to trying to get them a Daytona 500 win.”
DOES IT FEEL ANY DIFFERENT COMING BACK TO DAYTONA AFTER WINNING IN JULY? “Honestly, not really. We’re excited. We brought the same race car back, so that’s cool. We won the July race here with the car we’re bringing here for the Daytona 500. We’ve made some improvements to it, so we think, and we’ll just have to see. It’s still media day at Daytona and it feels the same as it has every other year.”
DO YOU FEEL YOUR CAREER HAS CHANGED BECAUSE OF THAT WIN? “Yeah, I think it certainly has changed my career. I was telling someone earlier, it hasn’t changed my life. I’m still the same guy. I still come home and change dirty diapers and my wife tells me what to do, just like before I won and that didn’t really change after I won, but my career has change. I feel like I’ve got a lot more respect and we’ve put ourselves in a position to be a team that’s recognized and people expect us to run up front. We competed well in the Chase and performed at a pretty good level, so when people think about Richard Petty Motorsports and this 43 team right now they think of us as contenders.”
WHAT DO YOU LIKE TO DO AROUND TAMPA WHEN YOU’RE NOT RACING? “Eat. That’s the one thing I miss about Tampa more than anything else is the Cuban food. It’s very hard to get Piccadillo in Mooresville, North Carolina. So I miss that, but, to be honest with you, North Carolina is home for me now. I miss my family. All of my family is still back in Tampa, so I miss them, but besides my family, I miss the food.”
HOW IMPORTANT IS HAVING FUN AT THIS LEVEL OF RACING? “Fun is the measure of everything. If you don’t get up and go to work and have fun, you’re either doing it because you need the paycheck or you’re doing it to just put yourself in the ground earlier. Fun is the reason we should do anything and I get to do that. I get to wake up every morning. I enjoy my job. I enjoy meeting people. I enjoy meeting with our sponsors and doing appearances. The most fun part of my job is driving a race car. Sure, there are days when it becomes work. There are days that I don’t want to go do something or I’m required to go do something that I don’t necessarily want to do – hence, media day – but it’s part of the job. As a whole, I love what I do and driving the race car is the most fun part.”
HOW DOES THE CHEMISTRY COME TOGETHER AT A PLACE LIKE RPM? “I think that’s the beauty of Richard Petty Motorsports. I’ve really become part of the family there. They’ve surrounded me with a lot of good people. I’ve got a great crew chief in Trent Owens a great group of guys on our race team that has not changed. We’ve got all the same guys on our race team this year because we get along so well and we perform so well together there’s no reason to change anything. Richard Petty Motorsports has a lot of high quality people and we show that. We punch above our weight week-in and week-out and I’m proud of that.”
HAS MAKING THE CHASE CHANGED THE WAY YOU’RE PERCEIVED? “I don’t know. I guess that would be a question to ask somebody else that perceives me a certain way. I feel like I’m the same guy. My attitude didn’t change. My hat size didn’t change. My ego didn’t change. I still feel like the same guy that is just excited to get in a race car and go race and try to win races. I feel like being a part of that elite group was special and being able to hang out in Chicago for Chase week with all those guys and them getting to see my face, and going to the banquet and competing with all those guys in the Chase I think it makes us more relevant, but I don’t know if it’s changed the perception of myself or not.”
DID IT MAKE YOU THINK, ‘HEY, I BELONG HERE?’ “Yes, certainly. But honestly I felt like that before we made the Chase and even if we hadn’t made the Chase I felt like our race team belonged in the Chase. We have a great race team with a great group of guys and that was something that was attainable for us and that was a goal for us. Our goal was to win and put the 43 car back in victory lane and make the Chase and we were able to do both of those things. Again going into 2015 that’s our goal. We want to win a race and get the 43 car in victory lane again, and we want to make the Chase and now we’ve got a really good understanding of what the Chase is like and what the level of excellence is that’s expected in the Chase. All of my guys on the team are hungry to get back and experience that.”
WHAT DID YOU LEARN IN THE CHASE? “Honestly, that there’s a little part way down deep that you have to dig and everybody finds that little bit more that’s in the Chase. You go all season and it kind of gets routine. You show up at the race track and go through your routine and you go out on the race track and you race. The season is a long season and it becomes very monotonous and when the Chase starts it’s like a brand new season and all the guys on the team, the drivers included, they get re-energized and refreshed and they try to find a little bit way down deep to dig up and go get, and everybody shows up with that same attitude. That’s the attitude we have to show up with and we have to figure out how to stay that fresh and that energized for 38 weeks.”
DO YOU EVER LAY AWAKE AND THINK ABOUT BEING ONE OF ONLY 43 DRIVERS WHO GET TO DO THIS EVERY WEEK? “Yeah, it’s a very elite group. I think we have some of the best drivers in the world, so to classify myself in that group is really special and I’m proud of that. I’m certainly proud of the sacrifices my family made to get me to where I’m at today, so because of that I don’t take one day for granted. I’m very appreciative for the opportunity I have ahead of me and I wake up every day trying to make the most of it.”
HOW IS IT DRIVING FOR RICHARD PETTY? “That’s something I’ll cherish even more as I get older. I think 20-30 years from now, whether I’m still doing this or not, whether I’m still driving the 43 car or not, whether Richard is still with us or not, I’ll look back and say, ‘Wow, that was really cool.’ And I’m going to have the opportunity to have pictures of me and my family, my son and my daughter with the King, standing next to the 43 car in the garage area, in the hauler, those are things we’ll be able to look back on as a family and say we were really lucky and those were great times in our life.”
WHAT ARE YOU LOOKING FORWARD TO THIS YEAR? “We want to do a lot of the same things we did last year, but there are a certain number of things we want to do better. We want to run more consistent. We had signs of speed throughout the year last year, but we didn’t do it consistently week-in and week-out. We want to do that this year. The other thing is we want to get back to victory lane, we want to make the Chase, but when we get to the Chase we want to be perfect. We broke out at Chicago and had a great race and ran in the top five and was running sixth with 30 laps to go and had an engine failure. Had that not happened, we guarantee ourselves making the next round based on our other two finishes, but that didn’t work out for us. We have to be excellent and perfect in every facet to be able to go from round to round in the Chase and that’s what we look forward to this year – to get back in the Chase and try to achieve that level of excellence.”
DOES TECHNOLOGY FROM RACE CARS FIND ITS WAY TO PRODUCTION CARS? “I think it certainly does and I think Ford Performance specifically is trying to do a better job of that than they ever have. They’ve just taken all of their separate entities, which was Ford Racing and Ford Performance and Ford Vehicle Dynamics and they’ve merged them all under one roof. All technology aspects of Ford now are in one building and they all communicate and talk to each other. So the people working on the Shelby or the GT or the Mustang can infiltrate what they’re doing on the racing division side and they can complement each other. So it will be interesting to see how some of the racing stuff correlates to the everyday driver and vice versa.”
WHAT WOULD YOU LIKE TO SEE IN A PRODUCTION CAR? “I think the one thing we have in race cars that I love to see in production cars is you can move your steering wheel closer to your body. I’m tall so I have long legs, so I have to get far away from the pedals, so I move the seat way back but the steering wheel stays real close to the dash. I always feel like I’m reaching for the steering wheel. The steering wheel doesn’t come close enough to me.”
WHAT PRODUCTION CAR FEATURE WOULD YOU LIKE TO SEE IN A RACE CAR? “Production car feature I’d like to see in a race car would have to be better A/C. We don’t have very good A/C in our race cars.”
WHO DID YOU IMAGINE YOU WERE WHEN YOU WERE SEVEN YEARS OLD WATCHING RACES AT DAYTONA IN THE GRANDSTANDS? “I never really thought of it in those terms. I never wished I was somebody on that race track. I never envisioned myself as somebody else on that race track. I always wanted to be me out there. I always wanted to have my own experience out there.”
WAS IT A DREAM OR DID YOU SAY, ‘I’M GOING TO DO THAT ONE DAY?’ “It was both. It was certainly a dream, but it was something I was willing to get up every day and work hard for. I can’t tell you how many Friday nights I missed school parties or school dances or you name it. I can’t tell you how many weekends I didn’t go to the football games or hang out with my friends or go to sleepovers or any of that stuff because all I cared about was racing and I was willing to do whatever it took to try every effort to make it to this level. And if I didn’t make it, it wasn’t for lack of effort or lack of want to.”
DO YOU FEEL THOSE SACRIFICES IS WHAT GOT YOU HERE? “Absolutely, without a doubt. I think had I grown up and skipped races here or there because I wanted to go to a friends’ party or skipped working on my race cars because I wanted to go hang out with friends or a girlfriend or whatever, that would have certainly impacted my career because I don’t think I would have performed at the level I did as a kid growing up and ultimately I wouldn’t have got the experiences I got to continue to move up through the ranks.
VALENTINE’S DAY PLANS? “This year we race on Valentine’s Day. I race in the Sprint Unlimited so I told my wife on the drive down here, I didn’t buy her anything and didn’t bring anything with me in an effort to put more pressure on myself to try and get her a trophy on Saturday night for Valentine’s. If that doesn’t happen, I’ll have to be quick on my feet and figure something out. Most years when we’ve been down here we’ve just gone and ate a small dinner at Cracker Barrel or something like that. She’s easy to please. I got lucky with her.”
DID SHE BUY THAT TROPHY STORY? “Yeah, she was good with it. She just told me to make sure I don’t come home empty handed Saturday night. After the race is over I’ll have to see what the situation is and go from there.”
DO YOU REMEMBER THE FIRST DAYTONA 500 YOU SAW AS A FAN? “Honestly, the Daytona 500s for me and Firecracker 400s kind of run together. I came here a lot with my family, so I honestly don’t have vivid memories of one specific race sitting in the grandstands, but I just remember being here a lot and the excitement and how long a two-hour drive from Tampa to Daytona felt when I knew we were coming to Daytona.”
HAVE YOU EVER RUN INTO THE PACE CAR ON PURPOSE OR FOR A JOKE? “It just depends. Now we build our race cars are so lightweight and so cosmetically sensitive that it’s a little bit more iffy on whether or not you want to do that. I’m a little more cautious. I don’t want to tear up the grille or anything like that, so I’m not one of those guys. I try to think about what I’m doing before I do that.”
WHAT ARE YOUR THOUGHTS ON FIGHTING? “I’m all for it. Honestly, I really am. I think it’s great for the sport. I think it creates a lot of news. It’s buzz worthy. It gets fans rowdy and riled up and excited about their favorite driver in the fight or whatever. I think it’s good. I think it shows how much passion we have for our careers and our sport and I’m all for it. I wish we didn’t get fined. I think people would fight more often. Obviously, there’s a line to draw. We’re certainly role models for kids and you don’t want to teach them that’s a normal behavior, but at the end of the day we all get paid to go out and perform at a certain level and if we feel somebody has caused us to not get the result that we were able to achieve because they did something to affect us, you want to be able to go express your displeasure and I think that’s something that should be shown.”
