Ford Performance NSCS Notes and Quotes
AAA 400 Advance – Dover International Speedway
Friday, October 2, 2015
Joey Logano, driver of the No. 22 Shell/Pennzoil Ford Fusion, sits fourth in the NASCAR Sprint Cup Series standings going into Sunday’s AAA 400. He stopped by the Dover International Speedway infield media center Friday morning, where he was surprised with a video showing his likeness being carved into a corn maze at Schnepf Farms in Queen Creek, Ariz. After talking about that, he addressed the current state of the Chase and his hopes for Sunday’s race.
JOEY LOGANO – No. 22 Shell/Pennzoil Ford Fusion – THAT’S AN EXISTING CORN MAZE IN THE PHOENIX AREA. THEY’VE DONE THIS IN THE LIKENESS OF MUHAMMAD ALI, OPRAH WINFREY, JAY LENO AND LARRY KING. WHAT ARE YOUR THOUGHTS? “I have something in common with Oprah Winfrey. Wow. That’s really cool. I didn’t know we were doing that, so that’s pretty neat. I’ve never seen anything like that. I didn’t know you can do that with corn mazes. That’s really cool.”
YOU’RE IN A GOOD SPOT IN THE CHASE. HOW FAR DOWN THE ROAD ARE YOU PLANNING AND DOES THIS WEATHER HAVE ANY AFFECT ON YOUR PLANS FOR THIS WEEKEND? “To answer the first part, we look as far forward as possible. Obviously, we’re looking to the next round and, really, all the way to Homestead and what we have to do to build our cars to the spec we want, start talking about setups and what we want to do there, so we’re constantly looking toward the end of the season and what we have to do. And then there’s also a plan on what we’ve got to do this weekend. This weather, we’ve seen it coming. It looks like the weather is actually getting better throughout the weekend than we thought it was gonna be, so it looks like there’s a chance we could actually get on the race track, maybe not today but some day. If it rains out today, I believe we start fourth. I believe that’s how it would work, so that’s not the end of the world. That’s close to where we want to be. We just need to work our plan when we get some practice and what we want to do to make our car faster, and then throughout the race we feel pretty comfortable in our points position, but we’ve seen it happen to a few guys this round and other rounds in year’s past that it can change in the blink of an eye with something happening, so we’ve still got to be smart. We want to go out there and win the race. That’s always our goal no matter what, but at the same time we don’t want to put ourselves in jeopardy of crashing or having a piece break on our car or something like that.”
YOU’VE SAID THE CAR LAST WEEK WASN’T AS FAST AS YOU HOPED. DO YOU PUT THAT CAR ASIDE NOW BECAUSE IT MAY NOT HAVE THE SPEED YOU WANT, OR DO YOU KEEP WORKING ON IT TO TRY AND MAKE IT BETTER AT THIS STAGE OF THE CHASE? “To be honest with you, at Team Penske we don’t really look at the differences from car to car. They’re all the same. If it doesn’t run good at one race track, it’s usually because of the setup and we didn’t hit it just right. It’s all the parts that you can change. It’s not the way the body was or the way the chassis was. All of our cars are the same to a certain spec, so a lot of times – Todd will even agree with me on this – he doesn’t even know a lot of times where the car raced before because it doesn’t matter in our case. If we didn’t run well, and it wasn’t the fastest car, it’s not because of the build of the car it’s because we missed the setup or missed on the outlook of what we were trying to do that whole weekend. It’s not necessarily the car. There are a lot of times we’ve switched the 2 and the 22 cars and it’s just kind of the way it lays out going into the race track. I think that’s different for different teams, but for Penske at least our cars are all built the same, so we can actually compare.”
THE RESTART ZONE HAS BEEN EXPANDED AND YOU SEEM HAPPY ABOUT THAT. WHY IS THIS SUCH A BIG DEAL? ISN’T THERE MORE ROOM FOR GAMESMANSHIP AND WOULDN’T THIS HAVE BEEN A FACTOR IN PREVENTING THE PENALTY ON BRAD LAST WEEK? “I think it’s really good that we’ve made the zone larger. I would even go more if it was up to me, to be honest with you. What it’s doing is the box was so small before that instead of a restart box you might as well just called it a restart line because everyone knows kind of a general area where you’re gonna go. When everyone kind of knows that and there’s a small area where you have to go, people start timing that and people start laying back trying to get runs. You see that stacking effect a lot of times as a person goes later in the box like we saw last week. When you enlarge the box, it’s a little bit harder to time it because there’s a bigger area you can go. Hopefully, and when you think about it, cars won’t lay back as much because there’s just different areas they can go in the box. This doesn’t seem like anything that’s crazy, out-of-the-box, to me as far as the rules change. I remember growing up racing short tracks and stuff and you could hit the gas in turn three and go whenever you want. I feel like this kind of opens the box, which is good. There’s gonna be plenty of gamesmanship still, and I think NASCAR has also set the precedent with what they did last week and enforcing the rule. That’s something they need to continue doing. It’s not just having it happen one time and then scare us, and then don’t do anything about it for the next three weeks. They finally put their foot down last week on what we can and can’t do, and that rule needs to be consistent and make sure that when they see something they make the same call and be consistent with that.”
WHAT CAN’T YOU DO ON THE RESTART? “You can’t jump the start. From the way I’ve learned and talked to them and read through the rules, they want you nose-to-tail, side-by-side, bumper-to-bumper, coming up to the line. They don’t want you laying back. There’s a certain amount of laying back that I feel like is OK, and there’s a certain amount that’s not. Obviously, the leader, from what I’ve been told has to go inside that box and not before it. We haven’t seen that rule enforced yet, but that is a spoken rule at this point. And then obviously you look at what happened last week and you learn from watching that as a competitor. You’ve got to be a student of the sport sometimes and watch what other people do and what you can and can’t get away with. We saw what you can’t get away with last week, so we’ve got to be smart about what happens there.”
