Ford Performance NXS Notes and Quotes
Lilly Diabetes 250 – Indianapolis Motor Speedway
Saturday, July 25, 2015
Ford Finishing Results:
2nd – Ryan Blaney
5th – Elliott Sadler
14th – Aric Almirola
16th – Chris Buescher
19th – Dakoda Armstrong
20th – Ryan Reed
23rd – Darrell Wallace Jr.
RYAN BLANEY – No. 22 Discount Tire Ford Mustang – “It’s my fault, obviously. You saw it. I screwed up. This team doesn’t deserve that. I dropped the ball for them today and I take full responsibility. It’s all my fault.” WALK US THROUGH THE LAST LAP. “It was my fault, obviously. I got tight and I got too deep and didn’t get off the long corner. It was my fault. This Discount Tire team doesn’t deserve that and I threw it away. It’s a pretty bad feeling to throw one away here at the Brickyard.” HOW MUCH PRESSURE ON THE END WAS THERE HAVING ONE OF THE BEST DRIVERS BEHIND YOU LIKE THAT? “There was no pressure for 24 laps and the last one I just made a mistake.”
ELLIOTT SADLER – No. 1 OneMain Financial Ford Mustang – “My guys have put in so much work over the last month and a half. They’ve built some new cars and when we bring those new cars to the track we get top fives. You’ve got to run in the top five to give yourself an opportunity to win. The guys are doing a good job right now. It’s great to rebound from New Hampshire like this.” HOW WAS YOUR RACE TODAY? “We were a fifth to seventh-place car all day and we did a great job on pit strategy. We had a plan and stuck to it and I’m proud of a top-five.”
CHRIS BUESCHER, No. 60 Zest Ford Mustang (Finished 16th) — “It was a long day for us. I felt we were getting a little better in the middle of the race and for whatever reason that last run was a lot tighter. It might have just been a bad set of tires but we couldn’t do anything with it. We had a lot better car that that at a lot of points during the race. Restarts are the most important thing here because once we get going you can’t do anything. It is all about clean air still. That is really frustrating.”
RYAN BLANEY PRESS CONFERENCE – IS THIS YOUR TOUGHEST LOSS IN NASCAR? “Yeah, pretty easy. Not many can say they had a chance to win at the Brickyard and gave it away, but I did just that. I think I’m the only one in that category, so I’m leading that category but that’s definitely gonna sting for a long time.”
DO YOU EXPECT THE RACING TO BE SIMILAR TOMORROW? “To an extent, I think. I ran behind some guys in practice and you get really, really loose behind them. You kind of got like that today. You kind of fight two things – kind of loose in, tight center, loose off in these things and the Cup cars just kind of seem loose all the way around, but you seem to get a little bit more bigger runs in the Cup cars down the straightaways, so that might help out. We didn’t get as big of runs down the straightway with these XFINITY cars as I thought we were going to with the bigger spoiler on it. That was a bit of a surprise, but I think the Cup racing you’ll see tomorrow is guys really being able to draft up better behind somebody down the straightaway.”
WHAT WAS THE GREATEST THING YOU LEARNED GOING FROM 11TH TO THE FRONT. “A good driver doesn’t give it away on the last lap after winning the race, so I think that does make me a bad driver. But it was all the team. We passed a couple cars, but they got us good track position doing a different strategy than other people. We had the same as the 54 and the 18 who was pretty good. They had the right strategy, which gave us a shot at it and we had it, and it just didn’t work out for us. They did a great job today, not me.”
DALE JR. TWEETED THAT YOU’LL ACCOMPLISH GOALS IN YOUR CAREER AND THIS WILL BE A DISTANT MEMORY. DOES THAT MEAN ANYTHING? “A little bit. It doesn’t really take any of the shame away from doing that, but that’s gonna be a laughing stock in the racing industry for a long time, but getting words of encouragement from Dale definitely means a lot to me.”
RYAN BLANEY CONTINUED — WHAT WAS YOUR BIGGEST TAKEAWAY FOR THE RACE TOMORROW AND HOW DO YOU PUT THIS BEHIND YOU? “You learn a little bit of stuff today to help you for tomorrow, where you can get big runs on people and where you’ve got to do it. You can take away a little bit of it, but they drive pretty differently here – the Cup cars and XFINITY cars – but you’ve got to put it behind you how hard it’s gonna be. We’ve got another big race tomorrow. We don’t start very good, but hopefully we’ll make our way up there. We didn’t start very good today, but you’ve got to put it out of your mind as fast as you can and we’ll try to do that.”
