Ford Performance NSCS Notes & Quotes:
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NSCS NOTES & QUOTES
Saturday, March 14, 2015
Sam Hornish Jr. has enjoyed great success over the years at Phoenix International Raceway in several forms of racing. The Richard Petty Motorsports driver returns to the Valley of the Sun looking to build on that success, and talked about it and other topics with media members Saturday morning.
SAM HORNISH JR., No. 9 Medallion/Camping World Ford Fusion – PHOENIX HAS BEEN A STRONG TRACK FOR YOU, TALK A LITTLE BIT ABOUT YOUR HISTORY HERE AT THIS TRACK AND RACING HERE THIS WEEKEND. “I really think my history at this track starts long before I got the opportunity to drive here. My family has relatives that live in the Phoenix area and we would come out here on family vacations and we would come to races. I remember sitting up toward the entry to turn one and getting the opportunity to watch Indy cars or stock cars running around here. I have fond memories of that and being able to go and to hang out with my family and enjoy a day at the race track. Fortunately enough I got the opportunity to come here and race and to win my first Indy car race here. I believe the last Indy car race that ran around here as well. I got my first start in the Cup series here and also my first XFINITY win and my first Cup top-10. This has been a place that I always enjoy coming back to. It is the type of track I enjoy because both ends are so different. It is kind of a compromise. You have to work really hard to get your car really good on one end and then kind of carry it around the other one. I have always loved coming back here.”
AFTER THREE RACES, DO YOU FEEL LIKE YOU GUYS ARE TRENDING IN THE RIGHT DIRECTION? WHAT IS IT LIKE TO BE BACK IN THE CUP SERIES FULL TIME? “That is the tough part about not having any testing. You don’t really know where you stack up versus everybody else. In the past with Daytona testing and some places here and there you would go to the track and usually there are a few other cars there that day. Whether it was Nashville or going to Daytona you can click the stopwatch and say that this guy is a tenth faster than us or we are a little better than him. That was one of the most anxious parts about getting going at the beginning of the season. Where are we at? We want to know where we are at. At least if we start and it doesn’t go as well as we want it to we will know what we need to work on to make the cars better. We are obviously with the finishes we’ve had so far not where we want to be at. We feel we have some work to do for sure. Really, if we want to look at where we have been trending compared to the people that have the closest race cars to us, I don’t feel like we are doing a bad job. I feel like we are actually doing pretty good but it is not as good as what we want to be doing at this point in time. We feel the more that Aric and I can work together to make Richard Petty Motorsports better, the better it will be for the rest of us over here. I feel like we have had decent speed. We haven’t had a lot of luck at this point in time. Atlanta we had a good car. Between a tear off on the grille and somebody’s tire going through the grille and the issues we had, to run as well as we did I feel pretty good about that. We need a little work to be a top-10 car. Last weekend we missed it on the setup. We had too many things we were fighting and with the adjustable track bar that works really good if you are fighting one problem. If you are tight or loose you can make an adjustment but when you are really loose in the corner and then tight on throttle, the more you adjust that track bar you will help one thing and hurt the other one. I feel like we kind of missed it there. Qualifying wasn’t great for us yesterday but we feel like our race run stuff will be better and that is one of the great things about Phoenix. Even though it is a short race in terms of miles it is a place you get a fair amount of pit stops to adjust on the car and the race seems a lot longer than what it really is. I am just happy to get going.
OVER THE YEARS YOU HAVE RACED AT A LOT OF TRACKS WITH TIRE BARRIERS AS PROTECTION. RIGHT NOW, WHILE SAFER BARRIERS ARE BEING EVALUATED, TIRE BARRIERS ARE THE TEMPORARY SOLUTION. DO YOU FEEL SAFER WITH TIRE BARRIERS? ARE THEY A GOOD SOLUTION? “I try not to think about it too much. As soon as you think about something it tends to be you are the one that gets to test it out. At the end of the day you really look at tire barriers are good. They do soften that blow but what we have seen with tire barriers in the past is generally if they are too close to the race track and someone hits them it bounces you back toward the track. The thing is we have the opportunity to look at now is there is so much SAFER barrier at the track edge and they aren’t looking to put tires on the inside of pit road or whatever. It is more way off the track. The good thing about SAFER barrier is it generally doesn’t deflect the car back onto the racing surface to get his by another car. Those hits are usually way more dangerous than the initial one you took hitting the wall. I feel like everybody is really sensitive to the subject right now and I don’t know what the availability of SAFER barrier is but I know it takes time to get it installed. I like the fact that everybody is working really hard to get that taken care of so we don’t have these issues. If you put race cars on the track long enough they will hit every inch of wall at some point in time. There is no place that is safe from getting hit. The hit like Denny (Hamlin) took at California or Kyle (Busch) took at Daytona are the worst ones because it takes so long to get to the wall that you start thinking of all the things you should do. Whether it is pulling your feet back or hitting the throttle and you never get the car to turn and the straight on impact is hard because instead of a glancing blow you are at a 90 degree angle into a wall. I think we need to make sure that those have some kind of barrier around them to begin with because they will get hit more than likely.”
HOW MUCH TIME HAVE YOU OR YOUR CREW SPENT WITH FORD PERFORMANCE TO TRY TO MAKE THE STRIDES THAT YOU NEED TO MAKE? “I will try to be a little bit sensitive about this because when you look at where we have been at as far as the Ford camp this year, the Penske cars have been pretty good and the rest of us have lacked a little bit from where we want to be at. We know that there is work to be done and the biggest thing is being able to try to figure out how we do everything in the right way. How do we figure out what the Penske guys are doing that is making them better than us? That is there job, to go out there and beat us and ours is the same way as well as the rest of the competition. Obviously we would like to have Ford be one through 10 or whatever the number is but we have some work to do to catch up to the Penske guys and that is what we are trying to figure out. While Ford would like us all to be right up there, they can’t go. ‘Hey, you guys have to share everything you are doing.’ Because it doesn’t work that way. That is one of the things I really like about NASCAR racing and what drew me to it when I decided I wanted to do this full time, was the ability to make changes to the car. When I came from Indy car series with the spec car, say I had a teammate that I had to share my information with and he has an idea of what I am doing, basically they can all do the same thing because they are working with the same parts. The information travels around a lot faster than it does here. We might know what springs the 60 has in it but it doesn’t mean it will work in our car because the chassis is built different. We have worked really hard with Ford to try to figure out what we can do to be better and a lot of times it is putting cars in the wind tunnel or they figure out how much ballast you are carrying with the cars, just to give us direction. They don’t have to divulge all the secrets. If you show us where the end of the tunnel is we might get there a little faster than if we are working our way through a maze but it is a hard thing to do. If we were ahead, we wouldn’t want to have to share too much of our stuff either. I think that is part of the interesting aspect, even though the cars look very similar on the race track there is a lot going on underneath them that is very different.”
BEST OF LUCK IN TOMORROWS RACE. “Thanks. I am definitely looking forward to it with having Camping World on the car and it is a great partnership with them and Medallion Bank. We are excited about what that partnership lends us on the sponsorship side but also just with being able to work with what Camping World does with NASCAR and being on cars and sponsoring one of the series’ and doing the things they are doing. Their presence has been great and we are proud to carry their name on the car and hopefully we will get a strong finish for them this weekend.”
