Ford Performance NSCS Notes and Quotes
Quaker State 400 – Kentucky Speedway
Saturday, July 11, 2015
Ford Finishing Results:
2nd – Joey Logano
6th – Brad Keselowski
11th – Ricky Stenhouse Jr.
12th – Aric Almirola
13th – Trevor Bayne
16th – Greg Biffle
22nd – Sam Hornish Jr.
29th – David Gilliland
37th – Cole Whitt
BRAD KESELOWSKI – No. 2 Miller Lite Ford Fusion – IT SEEMED THE DIFFERENCE FOR YOU TONIGHT WAS ON PIT ROAD. “Yeah. It’s easy to play the Saturday evening quarterback, but it just didn’t come together for us. There are certainly some things I could have done better and we didn’t have the best day on pit road. It’s something to build off of, but I thought Kyle and I both had pretty good cars and we just didn’t put it all together when it counted. We’ll keep working on it.” HOW FRUSTRATING TO SEE THIS ONE SLIP AWAY? “I won California and I definitely didn’t deserve to win that one, so it goes both ways.” DO YOU FEEL LIKE YOU HAD THE BEST CAR OUT THERE? “Yeah, we probably did.” WAS IT KIND OF SCARY FOR YOU WHEN YOUR TIRE CARRIER FELL IN FRONT OF THE CAR AS YOU WERE TAKING OFF? “Yeah. He was about to be road kill for a second. I’m glad he wasn’t.”
JOEY LOGANO – No. 22 Shell/Pennzoil Ford Fusion – “We tried. We cleared the 11 on the restart, which got us clean air and I thought we were in good shape. And then as tires started wearing the 18 was really good on the long run and he figured out the top before me. That’s the advantage you have as the second-place guy is you can go up there and play around more. I was just trying to keep the gap, so I didn’t want to take the penalty of losing three or four laps trying to figure out the top and he would have been closer, but he figured it out before me and got around me. We raced the heck out of each other, but I figured it out too late.” THOUGHTS ON THE NEW RULES PACKAGE? “I think it’s a little bit too early to judge it considering we don’t have the soft tire yet, but I think it put on a good race. I’ll have to re-watch to know for sure, but I felt like there was a lot of passing out there. I felt like I could enter behind cars and not get as out of control, so I think that’s good. You’re always going to fight air. We’re going 200 miles an hour, but it seemed like the effect was less which is what we’re shooting for.”
TREVOR BAYNE – No. 6 AdvoCare Ford Fusion – “We had a better car than 13th, believe it or not, and we just got beat with some pit strategy there a couple of times. A couple got by us with tires and the 41 had four tires, the 48, 24 – we ran that whole last bit on two tires for a long time, so I was glad we could hang on to what we did. It’s just fun to be able to race and make changes on our car and go for it. We ran in the top 10 most of the night. We’re making gains and we’ve got to keep rolling with it. The 17 finished 11th, so that’s good for our organization. We’re getting better and we have to accept that progress and keep going.” A GOOD FEW WEEKS IN A ROW FOR YOU. “Yeah, it’s going the right way. It wasn’t just a fluke to finish in the top 10 just once. We’re proving that we can be there every week and that’s what we have to do.”
RICKY STENHOUSE JR. – No. 17 Fifth Third Bank Ford Fusion – “We were all over the place. We started out really good. I thought our Fifth Third Ford was gonna be pretty solid. We took two tires and made an adjustment and it fired off OK, but it didn’t hold on very good at all. We lost all of our track position, lost a lap, and we were fighting all night trying to get that back. We got in the back with some cars that when one brushed the wall there. We were four-wide going into one and just really got jumbled up there and got in the back of the 26. I kind of slid and got in the fence and then we had to make some different adjustments to get the car better after that because of the aero package. What I did to the right-rear quarter took all the air off the side, so we had to make some more adjustments. Nick and the guys in the pits did a great job. We gained some spots and went forward. We took two tires there at the end and I wasn’t sure how it was going to work because we did it earlier in the race and I didn’t like it at all, but we were able to march forward. We were getting really close to that top 10. We were running down the 41, but I made a mistake in the last 10 laps that cost me. I didn’t gain as much one lap and I think we could have had it, but it was a solid night for us. It’s something to build off of and I think I really like this package, but we’ve still got to fine-tune our car. We still don’t have that all-out speed that we’re looking for. I think on the longer runs we were OK. We just have to find some more speed.” THERE SEEMED TO BE MORE PASSING WITH THIS PACKAGE. HOW WAS IT FROM YOUR SEAT? “It was definitely more fun. I hadn’t had that much fun in a while sliding around. I feel like that was what I was born to do. That’s what I grew up doing is sliding around, turning right, turning left, playing with the throttle. I thought we could add a little bit more gear and that would be more beneficial, but I really liked it.” ROUSH FENWAY HAD A GOOD NIGHT. “We all had a lot better night. Trevor ran good most of the race, it looked like to me, better than most of us and we were able to get our car tuned up a little bit more there at the end and get it going. But we’ll have to look and we made some adjustments that the 6 was doing and it made our car a lot better.”
ARIC ALMIROLA – No. 43 Smithfield Ford Fusion — “That was a bit of a frustrating day. We were really good on restarts but couldn’t hold it. By the end of the run, we caught back up with everyone. Trent and the team made some good adjustments. After the last few weeks, I’m glad we scored a Top-15 in our No. 43 Smithfield Ford. We’ve finished in the Top-15 10 times this season. We’ll just keep trying to score Top-15s and Top-10s and see where we shake out when we get to Richmond.”
JOEY LOGANO PRESS CONFERENCE – “I thought the racing was good. I thought we were closer than what we were because you’re definitely sliding around a lot, especially on restarts. This track is a bumpy track and we have a hard tire for what we want to have here, but I thought it was an improvement. I felt like we can enter behind each other and the effect of being behind a car wasn’t as big, so I think that’s good. You’re never gonna get rid of it completely because we’re going too fast, but I think directionally it was correct. I’ll have to re-watch the race to know for sure, but I felt like we made a good step with the Shell/Pennzoil Ford over the last couple days here. That was the best run that we’ve in general this year for a while. I felt like it was kind of a different group of cars racing up front than what we’ve gotten used to seeing throughout most of this year and the end of last year. I don’t know what to say about that and what the reason is, but I thought it was a good race. I thought there were four or five cars that were running the same speed and it was all about how you got through traffic or how you worked your tires on a long run. I felt like when we got the lead there on that last start – to pull away from Kyle a little bit – and then he started making some ground on the top. When you’re second place you’ve got the advantage of trying to move around and taking that chance of losing a little bit of time to try to find something. When you’re the leader you don’t want to lose much of your gap playing around and trying to find speed. Kyle got the top rolling and I just got there too late and he had some good speed and got by me after a hard-fought battle. Congrats to those guys. They led a lot of the race, so good for them. Second always hurts.”
JOEY LOGANO CONTINUED — HOW ANXIOUS WERE YOU BEFORE THE START OF THE RACE WITH THIS PACKAGE? “I was anxious since Wednesday and then you sit there in the rain and then Thursday you’re going even crazier and you just can’t wait to get on the race track. Maybe it’s because I can’t sit still in general, but I thought for the limited amount of practice that we had I thought guys did a good job getting their cars driving decent. I went into turn one the first lap of the race and I slid up the track and slid all over the place. I was like, ‘Oh, OK. This is not what we’re used to here.” I need to obviously change what I did on restarts to try to make the most out of it, so you’ve got to go back a few years of what you used to do to make speed with your car and pass cars and work traffic and stuff like that. I was anxious to see how it would work out. I thought the product, like Carl and Denny said, I thought the product on the race track was good. I thought it was better, but, like I said, we’ve got to re-watch it and look at the stats and all that, but I do think from our point of view at least it seemed to be better. From everyone else, we’ll just have to wait and see.”
SHOULD THE ADJUSTABLE TRACK BAR THE DRIVERS HAVE BE TAKEN AWAY NOW? “I agree (with Carl’s assessment). You make passes by figuring out the weakness of the person in front of you and how take advantage of that. If you can fix that weakness, how do you pass somebody? I think directionally, eventually, we can get that out, but it’s in there. It’s the same for everyone, but it does take a lot out of the crew chief’s hand during the race and, like I said, most passes are made from cars that are ill-handling and if you can crutch it to the next stop I think it doesn’t help the racing, but it’s there. I think we’re all handling it fine. There are also times you can fix your car to try to pass cars and make passes, so it can go both ways.”
IS THIS A SIGN OF A SHIFT AS FAR AS THE BALANCE OF POWER? “I agree with Denny on that. It does seem like directionally we’ve gotten more speed over those guys, but this is a very unique race track. It’s a race track that Team Penske has been good at in the past — bumpy, bumpy surfaces. You look in the past and it’s been Kyle or Brad for the most part have won here, so those are the two organizations that I feel like are strong here. I don’t want to say, ‘Oh, we’ve fixed everything. We’re obviously better,’ but it’s hard to say for sure until we get to a place like Kansas or one of those smoother race tracks that you’ve seen the Stewart-Haas cars and the other Chevys be dominant.”
WOULD YOU LIKE TO CALL NASCAR AND SEE IF THEY COULD RUN THIS PACKAGE AT LOUDON NEXT WEEK? “I think it would be hard to do that. You’ve got to have a little bit of time. These guys have been working hard on their cars and getting ready. It sounds pretty easy, I’m sure, and it’s something that if it happened we’d all figure it out and go with it and it would be fine. We wouldn’t complain about it, but I would assume they’d have to give us at least a week to kind of get ready, but, hey, if not, we’re good.”
JOEY LOGANO CONTINUED — ANY THOUGHT TO HAVING A DIFFERENT PACKAGE AT INDY? “I think having track-specific packages is a good thing. Indy is one of the crown jewel events of NASCAR. The Brickyard 400 and the Daytona 500. Those are the two biggest races of the year. We can’t afford to have a bad show and I feel like we’ve had some not very good racing there in the past. The race track is just hard to race on for our race cars. There’s not a place that we can get clean air to try to catch up to cars in front of us. It’s a single-groove race track, so the theory is you look at Indy Car, that’s one of their best races because they can draft on the straightaways. I think directionally that’s what we’re gonna try to do at a race track like that, where the speeds are high and we’re on the gas a lot, and it’s super, super hard to even get to a car. Hopefully, we can make the runs and be able to see cars draft up and be able to pull out. We’re talking a nine-inch spoiler. That’s huge. That thing is gonna be pushing a boulder through the air and we’re gonna be on the gas a lot, we’re gonna be wide-open a lot. Obviously, horsepower is gonna show a lot when we go to a race track like that, and obviously a lot of people will be trying to trim their cars out with that much drag on the car, so we’ll have to wait and see. It’s a lot of unknowns, but, directionally, we’ve got to try something different there because that’s one of our most important races of the year.”
