Ford Performance NSCS Notes & Quotes:
Toyota Owners 400/ToyotaCare 250
NSCS FRIDAY MEDIA AVAILABILITY
Friday, March 13, 2015
Elliott Sadler, driver of the No. 1 OneMain Financial Ford Mustang, returns to his home track this weekend looking for his first win in 2015. Sadler spoke about coming home, the season to date and more with members of the media Friday afternoon at Richmond International Raceway.
ELLIOTT SADLER, No. 1 OneMain Financial Ford Mustang – RICHMOND IS YOUR HOME TRACK. WE KNOW YOU LOVE COMING HERE. WHAT MAKES RACING AT RICHMOND SO SPECIAL TO YOU? “Well, I definitely love coming to Richmond. It is a place that I came to as a kid for many years back when it was the third race of the year. Sometimes it snowed and sometimes it was cold but I spent a lot of time in the grandstands here. To come back all these years later and be able to race at a place you visited as a kid makes it very special. I am like 45 minutes from the race track to the front door of my house. It is a very special place. My brothers raced here and a couple of my uncles raced here back in the day when it was a half mile track. It is a neat race track, a fun race track, a very unique three-quarter mile v-shaped and we don’t have anything else like it and it is special being so close to home.”
YOU ARE SPORTING A GREEN PAINT SCHEME THIS WEEKEND AND YOU HELD A COOL EVENT LAST NIGHT. “My sponsor, OneMain, does so many neat things and this is another one. They definitely made a huge initiative the past couple of years to go green and they got linked up with the National Forest Foundation and are committed to plant over a million trees the next four years. They planted 200,000 this year in Montana at the northern tip of Yellowstone. I can’t thank OneMain enough for doing that. NASCAR set such a great example with their going green initiative and the things we do as a sport is pretty special. It is neat to have a sponsor fallowing in the same footsteps and doing what they can for the environment. We did it last year, planting a tree down by the James River and we had one this year where the fans could enter a contest and get more involved with them and we brought some food and did kind of like an outdoor barbecue and planted a dogwood tree, which is the Virginia state tree. We did that at a lady’s house in Chesterfield. That was cool to get the fans involved like that. I wish I could take credit for the idea but OneMain put it all together and with me growing up as an outdoor kid with fishing and hunting and living in the outdoors and the environment it is really special that I have a sponsor that will run a green car here so close to home.”
I HEARD YOUR GUYS BROUGHT THE SHOW CAR AND THAT WAS PRETTY POPULAR IN THE NEIGHBORHOOD. “Yeah, I don’t know if they got in trouble with that and having a race car in the front yard with the engine fired up. I think maybe one of the neighbors got a little excited. That was a surprise. She knew we were coming to plant a tree and I was bringing some food but they had no idea the car was going to show up in her front yard. You guys know as well as I do that this sports is built on fans. We try to go the extra mile to bridge that gap between myself and our race fans and we feel like we did that yesterday and with a great cause behind it.”
HOW DO YOU THINK THE FIRST YEAR HAS GONE WITH ROUSH AND HOW IMPORTANT WOULD IT BE FOR YOU TO GET A WIN WITH ROUSH HERE AT YOUR HOME TRACK? “We are always wanting to get a win and you want to get that first win to make things happen. I am very comfortable with my team. We have a lot of good guys on my race team and we feel we are getting better each week – all of our teams are. We are steadily climbing up the points ladder which is good but we need to do some better things going forward. We have to be better from practice to race and things like that but we are getting our cars faster each week and that is what we have to do with no testing this year. We are learning on the fly a lot and this Ford Mustang is new to me and my crew chief and we are learning it together. We are making gains. I am very excited about where we are going to be and the stuff we have coming down the pipeline and especially the end of Man and beginning of June. We have some cool stuff coming. We will have ourselves in contention here pretty quick.”
WHAT IS THE STRANGEST OR CRAZIEST THING YOU HAVE SEEN IN THE TALLADEGA INFIELD? “I don’t think that is for this time or place to be honest with you. It is a great question and I have seen some cool stuff in the Talladega infield but I think that is where it needs to stay, in the Talladega infield. I have seen some neat stuff. People are definitely creative. You want race fans to have fun and Talladega has the niche of everything going on on the inside of the track but if you want to have fun and do something different, go down Talladega boulevard and check things out. It used to be way more fun before camera phones came. That has kind of calmed everything down a lot the last 10 years.”
THEY ARE FORECASTING RAIN TOMORROW NIGHT. HOW DO YOU ADJUST TO THAT? “It isn’t going to bother me a bit. I will be at home tomorrow night. That is up to you guys to talk about. We will race tonight and the weather looks good for tonight. Tomorrow, I guess rain is in the forecast but they miss it sometimes up here in Richmond. Hopefully if it comes it will come late or early and be okay at race time. A lot of times in the last five years I have seen people tweet that there is an 80-percent chance of rain and there is no way we are going to race but it seems somehow we always end up racing. I am optimistic that tomorrow, some of my friends are throwing me a surprise birthday party that I am not supposed to know about and we are going to have the party and watch the race.”
HOW DID YOU FIND OUT? “I wanted to go out to eat and I kept pushing my buddies to go out to eat and they kept making up excuses and finally I told them I was going with or without them and they told me I couldn’t because they were throwing a surprise birthday party for me. I found out that if you think people are throwing a surprise for you, start acting like you won’t be in town and then you will find out.”
LAST MONTH YOU SAID YOU THOUGHT YOUR PROGRAM WAS A LITTLE FURTHER BEHIND THAN YOU ANTICIPATED. ARE YOU MAKING PROGRESS? ALSO YOU GO TO TALLADEGA NEXT WEEK AS THE DEFENDING RACE WINNER. “Yeah, we are way better today than we were a month ago on a lot of the stuff that we are doing to our race cars. We are going to be way better in a month than we are now. One thing I found out at Roush Fenway is they made a huge investment to make all our cars better and they are trying things for the Cup races and some of those things are trickling down to us. A lot of time, money and effort has been put into the program the last month. You can’t flip a switch. I wish you could. I wish you could flip a switch like a light switch and put it all on the racetrack but it doesn’t work that way. There are a lot of parts and pieces that have to go together to get it all to work on the racetrack. We are definitely further along than a month ago and next month we will be even better yet. We are going in the right direction.”
WHAT DID YOUR TEAM FIND THIS MORNING IN THE ONLY PRACTICE THAT YOU THINK WILL BE BENEFICIAL? YOU ALWAYS CAME HERE WITH YOUR PARENTS. ARE YOUR PARENTS HERE THIS WEEKEND? “Yes, my mom and dad are here which makes it special. It is a close race track so at their age they can still come and enjoy this race track. Goodyear brought a new tire this weekend for us so the biggest thing we learned this morning was what this new tire wants. One thing I like about Richmond is the tires really fall off here and your car changes on a long run. Guys will be really fast on restarts but sometimes slow down a lot on long runs and vice versa. We were trying to find the happy medium this morning. My car is good on the long run but if we have a late caution we will be in trouble. We saw that last year with the Cup race with Logano flying on restarts and then fall off but he hit it just right. We are in that same deal and we want to get my car faster at the beginning of the run.”
“Before I leave I want to thank you guys. I follow a lot of you guys on Twitter and some of the things you wrote and posted and said about Steve Byrnes and his family this week really hit home and I really appreciate all you guys that talked about Steve and his legacy and what he meant to this sport. It means a lot to a lot of us that have been friends with him a long time. I just wanted to pass that along.”
