Ford Performance NSCS Notes and Quotes
Hollywood Casino 400 – Kansas Speedway
Sunday, October 18, 2015
ROGER PENSKE-TODD GORDON PRESS CONFERENCE
ROGER PENSKE, Owner – No. 22 Shell/Pennzoil Ford Fusion – “We’re very fortunate to have Joey on our team. He came on here a few years ago and has really been up ever since. There’s no question he and Brad, I’ve said it before, have made quite a bond together and the two crew chiefs with Paul and Todd, they’ve worked together on the Nationwide/XFINITY and of course have come together here. The speed we have, we’ve got great cars and really when you think back of the guys back at the shop that are building these cars every day and certainly the way the pit crews have operated. You see we’ve made a big step on pit crews thanks to Todd and Paul, and I think Joey has stepped up his game tremendously. He’s got confidence. He’s a great driver. I think we’ve seen that because he’s won on the road course, he’s won on the big tracks and there’s no question we’re very fortunate to have him as one of our drivers and I think he’s gonna be in this sport a long time and win a lot of races.”
WHAT IS YOUR TAKE ON THE KENSETH INCIDENT? “I was up on the outside. I saw a couple times Joey got squeezed off of two and I think over in three, and as they went down into one Joey had a fender up inside. He was on the outside of the 20 and he got in the wall. I don’t know if you saw that or not, and then he turned down, Joey did, to take the lower lane and there was another car up there – I think a slower car – and then Kenseth came down. Unfortunately, they got together. I don’t like to see that anymore than anybody else does. It’s one of those racing accidents. It’s real tough when it’s in this kind of a situation, but there was no question that Kenseth was doing everything he could to keep Joey from going by.”
TODD GORDON, Crew Chief – No. 22 Shell/Pennzoil Ford Fusion – WHAT DID YOU SEE? “I saw two guys racing their butts off. Joey had a couple runs at Matt and Matt blocked both of them and unfortunately got us in the wall into turn one, and there’s more contact that prevails beyond the contact to the wall. It’s just hard racing. Two guys that want to win and both have, and Joey’s talked about it, they’re both very competitive race car drivers and they do a lot of similar things and neither one of them was gonna give there. Obviously, it came out the way it did.”
HOW MUCH PRESSURE HAVE YOU PUT ON THE REST OF THE CHASE FIELD BY WINNING TODAY? “We talked about that in our team meeting ahead of time, and we’ve talked about it all week because the opportunity after you win Charlotte is that winners go on, and if you can go ahead and lock everybody else out, it puts everybody else that’s a Chase contender on edge going to Talladega. It’s a great advantage. We’ll take what we can and I haven’t had a Chase race at Talladega needing to perform there with a win here last year, and this team has done great job of making sure that everyone else has to.”
ROGER PENSKE CONTINUED — HAS THIS PLAYOFF TWEAK ALTERED THE RULES OF GIVE-AND-TAKE IN THESE SITUATIONS? “I think the Chase format was designed to create tension, to create competition and certainly pressure on the teams and the drivers. From the standpoint of the way they drive on the race track you just have to watch the restarts and see that it’s elbows out the window there every time. I think this situation here at the end, as I said earlier, it’s unfortunate. You don’t like to see that, but if you go back and you look at it frame by frame, I don’t think you can just say Joey ran into him on purpose. I think there was movement on the 20 car coming down on him and certainly when he got in the wall, we didn’t run into the wall in turn one just because we wanted to, so, to me, it’s unfortunate for Matt and Joe Gibbs, but I think the format is terrific. We’re stepping up. Our guys are bringing better cars. We’ve worked on these cars for months to have them available for this time of the year, and I think that we’re starting to show that speed here as we get into the Chase.”
TODD GORDON CONTINUED – DID YOU ALTER THE APPROACH TOWARDS THE TAIL END OF THE RACE? “We build our race cars to do that. You have to look at the end of the race and checkered flag and race your race backwards. We understand how we need to make our cars to be successful on a last stint and how our cars need to be for the whole race. Honestly, we didn’t have the speed the 48 or the 20 had in the middle of the race. We had a tire come apart actually and fell back a little ways, but definitely had a strategy for how we wanted to end the race and when the caution comes and were able to play that strategy and definitely find speed in our race car.”
ROGER PENSKE CONTINUED – HOW MUCH DO YOU FEEL MATT WAS RACING FOR WINNING ONE RACE AND HOW MUCH KNOWING IF YOU BEAT MATT HIS CHANCES OF MOVING ON ARE SLIMMER? “I don’t think at any time we were calculating where Kenseth was gonna be, either out front or behind. The checkered flag hadn’t fallen and we were still racing. You could see the last pit stop we had an excellent stop, came out there right up front, and, to me, Joey had more in the car. I think you see that when it’s time to go. You saw it yesterday – back in 14th when it was time to go in the XFINITY race and he finished third. To me, as I said before, that’s the game we’re in. Last year, Brad had to go to Talladega and win that race to go to the next round, so that’s gonna be the case next week for a number of drivers.”
TODD GORDON CONTINUED – DID YOU HAVE THE SAME SETUP AS LAST YEAR? “The thing is if you ever try to take a setup you had from the spring to the fall, you’re gonna slow down because you look at it, I think we were looking at it and pole speed was up a tremendous amount. Everybody makes their race cars better, but I think the thing that you look at is we understand what we have to feel in our race car. Joey does a phenomenal job of it, of what we need to feel in our race car in practice to be successful come race time because you don’t ever really get to race the line. The track widens up come race time and there’s some things that happen with the track and once you know what that offset is and what you’re looking for in practice to be successful, you look for those same things. We felt really good about our car yesterday. We had speed, but we had the balance that we needed to have to come forward racing, and it played out again.”
ROGER PENSKE CONTINUED – HOW DO YOU PREPARE JOEY FOR THE AGGRESSIVE RACING THAT LIES AHEAD? “He’s got to race the guys around him. We don’t race the car. We prepare the car and bring it to the track. Each one of these drivers know what the circumstances are and with that they’re gonna make the moves that are necessary to try to get ahead, and you could see it on restarts today. To me, that’s gonna be the pattern as we go the next four or five races.”
DO YOU HAVE ANY CONCERNS FOR THE 2 TEAM RIGHT NOW? “I think we have good transparency between the two teams, there’s no question about it. I think as you saw Brad got better there at the end and made a big move, and I think that was because we’re sharing data up and down the pit road during the race. I think Paul and Todd will get together with Travis (Geisler) and Mike (Nelson) this week and they’ll look at what are the things that worked and what didn’t. They’ll use that in their playbook as we go forward.”
TODD GORDON CONTINUED – DID YOU SEE ANY ISSUES WITH MATT AND THE RESTARTS? “There is data out there to take a look at it. I’m sure that TV and NASCAR have that. I can’t speak for it. They do look like they were pretty slow to the restart zone, but I can’t speak for that. I have no information that tells me anything differently. I know when we rolled up to the restart zone we rolled up at pace car speed and had a good restart, and Joey was successful with it.”
