Ford Performance NSCS Notes and Quotes
Coca-Cola 600 Qualifying – Charlotte Motor Speedway
Thursday, May 21, 2015
Ford Qualifying Results:
2nd – Joey Logano
4th – Greg Biffle
6th – Brad Keselowski
16th – Ryan Blaney
21st – Aric Almirola
25th – Michael McDowell
26th – Sam Hornish Jr.
27th – Trevor Bayne
29th – Ricky Stenhouse Jr.
37th – Cole Whitt
39th – David Gilliland
40th – Brett Moffitt
ARIC ALMIROLA – No. 43 U.S. Air Force Ford Fusion – “I’m not sure what happened. The car did something a little bit goofy there that we weren’t expecting. It just drove weird, so we’ll have to go back and tear it apart and see if they can figure out what happened, but it was still a decent lap for the problems we had going on.”
BRAD KESELOWSKI – No. 2 Miller Lite Ford Fusion – “I thought our first session was pretty good and our second one was pretty good, and in our third one we just got a little bit off. We’ll keep working on it.” SO HAS IT HIT YOU THAT YOU’RE A FATHER AND YOUR LIFE IS CHANGING? “Not really. I’m sure it will over time, but right now I’m just focused on the task at hand of being the best race car driver I can be and the best person I can be, and that hasn’t changed.”
GREG BIFFLE – No. 16 Ortho Ford Fusion – “I’m thrilled with qualifying, but we still have to get our car to run in the race and we’re still having a little difficulty with that. We experienced that in the All-Star Race, qualifying second and then fell back through those 25-lap segments. This is a little bit different build of a car, but it still had qualifying speed like we did at the All-Star Race, so that’s a lot of confidence. Now the most important thing in practice is if we can get a 20-lap run and keep the speed and drive-ability in the car. Those are the two keys and if we can do that, we have a chance at being around at the end, staying on the lead lap and let attrition play its role and then be there at the end. Just trying to have confidence. We haven’t seen it in race trim yet, whether it’s us taking the tape off the front of it or what it might be – the change between our qualifying and race trim. We’re struggling a bit right now, so we’re just gonna work hard in practice and see what we can do.” BUT YOU’RE NOT JUST SQUEEKING BY TO ADVANCE IN THESE QUALIFYING ROUNDS. YOU HAVE SPEED. “And I overdrove three and four there. You don’t know until you do it and I said, ‘I’m gonna drive it for the top of the board because that’s what I want.’ I want to be the top of the board or 12th. That’s the worst I was gonna be, and I ran it down in three and four pretty hard and it lost the nose and pushed up the race track. I think I could have been on the front row if that wouldn’t have happened. I had to come out of the gas and I’m fourth. That doesn’t happen very often, so I had a lot of speed. We’ll look at the lap-tracker and see where I was compared to the 20, but we’re happy with that. Personally, I’d rather qualify 20th and be able to lead the whole race than qualify fourth and struggle for 600 miles. We’ll work hard in practice and see if we can find some speed.”
RYAN BLANEY – No. 21 Motorcraft/Quick Lane Ford Fusion – “We were just tight. They made good gains on it from practice to qualify, but it just wasn’t enough. We’ve got a good spot to go to work on Saturday for race runs. We’ve got a decent starting spot. We can make it up.”
JOEY LOGANO – No. 22 Shell/Pennzoil Ford Fusion – PRESS CONFERENCE – “It was a good effort for our team. You look at where we ended in practice I wasn’t too worried about where our practice speeds were, but it wasn’t very glamorous that’s for sure. The first round I was like, ‘Maybe I was a little overconfident going into this one.’ We were 22nd after the first round and Todd Gordon made some good adjustments. I made some adjustments on my line and was able to get some speed out of our car and I think we were seventh on the next one and then second the last, so I’m proud of my team. Last year, our weak point in qualifying was maintaining that speed throughout three sessions, and this year it seems like we don’t have much speed the first session, but we’re getting better throughout them. I’d much rather be good in the last session. It’s a lot of fun to have a car that qualifies well each week so far here, so it’s been a lot of fun. We’ve got a couple weeks to figure out how to beat the 20 car. He’s very, very fast obviously. That was an amazing lap they ran there at the end. You here second place it’s like, ‘Yeah. It’s great. Cool,’ and then you hear how far off you are and you’re like, ‘Not even close.’ So we’ve got a little bit of work to do.”
IS IT SIGNIFICANT THAT THERE ISN’T A CHEVY IN THE TOP 7 TO START ON SUNDAY? “I don’t know how much to look into just qualifying. Those guys have been fast in the race where their speed really shines. They qualify good, don’t get me wrong, but their speed seems to shine a little bit more. You talk about those cars and obviously you’re talking about the 4, 41, 48, those are the cars that stand out more than everybody else. I’m sure they’ll be fast when it comes to race time. Qualifying is just a different animal. It takes a completely different setup. Qualifying can kind of mask over some of your issues that you have in race trim a lot of times, so I wouldn’t look too much into it.”
HOW DO YOU THINK NASCAR’S EMERGENCY TEAM ADDS UP? “I think they do a good job. I think it’s always an area for improvement. It’s safety. We look at race cars and how can we make the race car safer. Well, I think equally we need to look at how can we make our track safety workers better. I’m not saying they’re not doing a great job, they do a great job, but how can we make it better and that’s what we do as a race team – how to make the race car faster – I think safety is first. It’s above that even and it should take above what we’re doing there. I think the way Indy Car has it with the same team that goes to every race track, I think that’s a great idea. I think that’s a very good idea. We have a group of nurses that comes along with us and that really knows us personally and knows our background and what we’ve had for issues before, and that really helps out the situation a lot. But I do think we can always make it better, but we definitely have a great group right now that helps take care of us in bad situations, but I don’t think it’s something that we just say ‘good enough.’ We’ve got to always work harder to make that better.”
JOEY LOGANO CONTINUED — HOW MUCH TIME DID YOU SPEND TODAY ON QUALIFYING RUNS VERSUS RACE RUNS AND HOW BUSY WILL YOU BE TOMORROW TALKING ABOUT EVERYTHING? “Well, I made eight laps total today, including qualifying. So we didn’t spend any time in race trim mainly because 600 miles, the longest race of the year, we’ve got to keep those miles off the motor. We’ve got two practices coming up on Saturdaythat we’re gonna want to make some long runs. This is a long run race. We want to make sure our car is good for that, and we have an idea of where we want our balance to be and where our car is because we had the All-Star Race last week. So we have a good baseline and 95 percent of the cars, I think, came with the same attitude to just focus 100 percent on qualifying today and that’s what we did. We got a good result out of it, which always feels nice. The worst is when you spend all of practice in qualifying trim and then you qualify 20th. That’s the worst, so at least we got a good result out of what we did today and the effort that we put into it, but I think just the mileage limit comes into play there.”
HOW CONCERNED ARE YOU ABOUT WHAT HAPPENED TO JAMIE DICK AND HIS CAR LAST WEEK? “Very concerning. I looked at it and it hit his helmet and I saw the roll bar behind it with a cut in it and bent really bad, and that’s one of the worst things I think you can see. As a driver you look at that and you’re like, ‘Whoa.’ I believe the penalty needs to be large to the team that leaves something loose and lets a weight like that come out. That’s very, very dangerous. That’s more dangerous than hitting any wall and that’s something we can’t look over, for sure. I know NASCAR has looked in the past of how to keep debris from going through the windshield and shooting things at them, and we’ve seen videos of it and they’ve shown us and you see how the Lexan windshields and most of the time with the tests they’ve done before it seems like it deflects it most of the time. Like I said, I’m not a professional at making cars safer, but of the videos we’ve seen we know they’ve worked on it. Obviously, it’s an area we need to make better because I don’t know if we were ready for 35-pound pieces of tungsten coming through the windshield. I think we’re ready for soda cans and little, small pieces of debris, not like that. That’s something that makes me nervous as a driver. That’s at Iowa going 150. What if we hit one here going 200? It wouldn’t be pretty.”
HOW DO THE DYNAMICS CHANGE THIS WEEKEND COMPARED TO THE ALL-STAR RACE? “That’s why qualifying was very important tonight. You want to make sure you start up front. Yes, it’s 600 miles. Yes, we want to start up front. This race is long enough to recover, don’t get me wrong, but it’s a tough place to make it happen. It’s one of the toughest places there is to pass. Having a good pit stall is gonna help that a lot. We saw that happen with the 11 car last week. Having that first pit stall got him out front and then he was able to make that, what I look at as a great move to take the air from the 4 and won the race that way. It was a great move on his part, but that’s something we’re gonna fight for 600 miles. We’re gonna fight that air. It’s a challenge we have here. It’s a track that has a lot of grip. We go very fast. We have a lot of horsepower, so it’s going to be challenging out there to make these passes. We’re gonna see strategy. People are gonna have to take the chance at some point to get themselves up there. Whether you get the reward or not, I think it’s just got to be well calculated and make sure you understand what you’re doing when you make these moves. Restarts are gonna be key. That’s when you make the most passes, so making sure your car is good on the short run is gonna be important, but, like I said earlier it’s a long run race, so it’s hard to have both. As a driver I want both. I want my car to do everything and it’s something we’re gonna work on in a couple of days.”
