Ford Performance NASCAR: Daytona Media Day (Landon Cassill)

Landon Cassill, driver of the No. 38 Florida Lottery Ford Fusion, will be making his debut for Front Row Motorsports in Sunday’s Daytona 500.

LANDON CASSILL – No. 38 Florida Lottery Ford Fusion – IS THIS RACE A CRAPSHOOT? “It’s not a crapshoot at all.  You definitely have to know what you’re doing.  You have to be able to get yourself to the front somehow and stay there somehow, and I actually did a Sirius interview earlier with Dale Jr. and we were kind of talking about it and he talked about the importance of running up front the whole time and not laying back and then just expecting to be there at the end.  I think to kind of add on to his thoughts, which I kind of did in the interview as well, was the more you’re up front, the sharper you get at protecting those lines and protecting your position and knowing the edge of when it’s too late to throw a block at someone or when it’s too late or even too early when the right time of that is.  The days of just hanging out and hanging out and then all of a sudden whipping up there at the end and crossing the line first is kind of gone for now at superspeedway racing.  Now, you’ve got to be there and you’ve got to sharpen that skill of running up front, so you can get up there and stay up there.”

WHAT ARE THE CHANCES THE LEADER GETS PASSED ON THE LAST LAP IF HE’S IN FRONT OF BOTH LINES?  “It just depends on who he is.  I think even with everything we just said, my strategy might be a little bit different than someone like Dale Jr. because, or you take Chase Elliott, who qualified on the pole by three-tenths of a second.  His car ran faster by itself than three cars that are 20th to 30th-place in speed will run in a draft.  I mean, he’s a second-and-a-half faster than a majority of the field.  Those guys being out front, if Chase Elliott is out front on the last lap or Dale Jr. is out front on the last lap, it’s gonna be hard to pass them.  My strategy might be a little bit different.  I may not want to be exactly in the lead on the last lap because I’m kind of setting myself up to be freight-trained anyway.  I might want to be second or third, and I feel like the times that I have taken the lead in the past year or two at Daytona and Talladega in the middle of the race there’s been kind of a recurring theme in terms of the position that I was in and how I took the lead, so, for me, my thought is, ‘How can I get myself in that position in the remaining laps of the race,’ so that coming down the backstretch going in turn three on the last lap I can make the same move I’ve made in the past that got me to the lead.”

CAN YOU WIN?  “Yeah, absolutely.  I think so.  As long as I can put myself in that position on the last lap, I think I can do it.  That part of it is the crapshoot.  How do I get through 499 miles and be in that position?  And even if I am in that position is the guy behind me gonna go with me or not?”

HOW MANY SCENARIOS LIKE THAT DO YOU HAVE TO RUN THROUGH YOU MIND?  “I don’t want to overthink it, I guess.  I think that in some ways it’s pretty simple.  I’m not gonna go from 10th to the lead off of two.  I need to be in the top four, really, those first two rows to be able to split the middle or be able to make the move.  The scenarios kind of narrow down to, ‘OK, am I in the inside lane?’  And if I’m on the inside lane, what do I do?  And am I in the outside lane, and if I’m on the outside lane what do I do?  That’s kind of what’s going to dictate the scenarios that you play out in your mind.  At that point, in some ways, it’s just a mirror of each other.”

WHAT KIND OF RACE WOULD YOU LIKE TO SEE ON SUNDAY?  “I don’t mind the different groups of cars.  I don’t mind the breaking out into single-file and trying to arrange yourself the best way to make up ground or to log the laps.  It’s honestly pretty stressful to have a pack of 40 cars there for 500 miles and three-wide.  I’m not gonna look forward to that if I’ve got to do it, but even if we do that, at the end of the day, I’m still gonna put myself in a position that I’m comfortable and I’m safe for a good portion of that race, and I feel like I know where I need to be in the pack if the race is gonna go that way.”

DO YOU HAVE ANY OTHER EXPERIMENTS PLANNED FOR THIS YEAR LIKE THE WEIGHT LOSS THING?  “Last year I ran home from Charlotte.  That was pretty cool, and then lost a bunch of weight at Indy.  That wasn’t even an experiment I just kind of live tweeted it before and after the race, but I don’t know.  I don’t have anything set yet, but I’m all ears.  I’m all for suggestions and Snap Fitness will probably be thrilled to hear about anything we do.”

HOW MANY RACES WILL SNAP FITNESS BE ON YOUR CAR?  “We haven’t nailed it down yet, but probably similar to what they did last year.  Probably four to six.”

WHAT ARE YOUR FIRST IMPRESSIONS OF THE DIGITAL DASH?  “I think it’s great.  I think it opens up the door for a lot of cool things, getting lap times and the way we can customize the pages to whatever I need, whatever I need it to say, whatever I want it to look like.  Right now, we’re still getting, for the most part, the same information we were getting, so I think as time goes on it will be interesting to see how NASCAR opens up the tools on what kind of information we’re able to get, but I’d say the number one thing I’m looking forward to is using the lap time to my advantage in terms of green flag pit stops and things like that.  Previously, you have someone giving you lap times on a long green flag run to make sure you’re consistent, but I’ve never really had anybody giving me lap times on a green flag pit stop to know that I’m getting onto pit road hard enough and I’m getting off pit road hard enough.  I’m kind of anxious to use that to my advantage and keep myself honest because, really, to summarize that that’s one of the biggest things to struggle with is keeping yourself honest getting on and off pit road.  I don’t like getting caught speeding.  It’s not worth it, so sometimes you can find yourself giving up too much time getting onto pit road just trying not to get caught speeding.”

SOME SAY IT’S A BIT MORE SENSITIVE THAN THE ANALOG SYSTEM?  “It definitely seems to be a little bit different.  I haven’t really gotten enough experience with it really figure out how I’m gonna use it.  I have noticed that instead of looking at the needle on the RPM gauge, I’m looking at the actual numeric numbers of the RPMs, so when I was going through the gears off pit road I was looking for 8800 to shift at as opposed to looking at the needle.  So we’ll kind of see if I get used to that or how it works.”

IS IT HARDER TO COMPREHEND LOOKING AT A NUMBER AS OPPOSED TO THE NEEDLE?  “I think it’s really only easier because, not because it’s easier, but because that’s what we’ve been doing forever.  So at the end of the day, it’s a necessary advancement in technology in my opinion, and I’m glad we’ve got them in our cars.  We’re just gonna have to get used to them and figure out the most efficient way to use it to our advantage.”

WHO ARE THE FAVORITES IN THE 500?  “I think Joey Logano looks really good right now.  I think he’s just on a really good streak.  I think Keselowski looks really good, too.  Those will probably be the favorites.  For me, I’m anxious to get my car in the draft.  This will be my first time driving a Ford, my first time feeling Roush Yates horsepower, which I can already tell getting off pit road that it’s a different feeling than I’ve had before – in a good way.  So I’m really anxious to run it in the draft and see how it runs on the bottom, in the middle and on the top.  That’s really good be what tells me what positions I’m gonna be able to put myself in on Sunday.”

SO DOES THAT MAKE THURSDAY MORE OF AN EXPERIMENT THAN NORMAL?  “I don’t know about experiment, but I definitely plan on racing on Thursday.  You can talk about being locked in or protecting your car, things like that, but I always look at Thursday as an opportunity to show people that I’m here to race and show the other drivers that when it comes time to race with me on Sunday that I’m someone they can be around.”

BUT A BIGGER LEARNING CURVE?  “Absolutely.  There’s definitely gonna be a learning curve.  You’ve got to learn everything you can.  It’s my job to take care of the car and race, not just ride around and take care of the car.”

WHAT DO YOU FEEL IS THE NEXT BIG INNOVATION ON PIT ROAD?  “I don’t know.  I think it would be nice if the Jackman maybe had a lighter jack or an easier way to get around the car quicker or a way to just have more consistency, but really I don’t know if you’re gonna see an innovation on the jack side of things right away because the jack isn’t what holds up the pit stop a lot.  The air guns, I think the reason you saw pit stops get so much faster and us make such a big deal about the air guns is that’s what holds up a pit stop.  That’s the last thing is that last lugnut that gets tight, so maybe if there’s somebody that’s able, even though they’re kind of in a box on the fueling side of things, but if they can fuel the cars faster, that will definitely help things out because typically those really fast guys will change four tires before you can put two cans of fuel in the car.  If they can make the pit stops take two cans of fuel, take that fuel faster, that would be a pretty important innovation.”

IS THERE ANY TRANSLATION BETWEEN SUCCESS ON PIT ROAD AND THE BOND A DRIVER HAS WITH HIS CREW?  “I don’t think it’s just about success.  I think at the end of the day a good leader is a good leader, and a driver that treats his pit crew right leads them is probably more important on how they do on the bad days than the good days.  If a driver is only good with his pit crew when they’re having success, then I think he’s probably not the best leader.  So I would say it’s about the good days and the bad days and how you can lead your guys out of a slump.  If they’re having a hard time or if you’re having a hard time getting in and out of the box, and it’s messing up their rhythm, that’s what really creates the bond.”

IS IT GETTING TO A POINT WHERE IT’S MANDATORY THAT A CREW MEMBER BE A FORMER ATHLETE?  “I don’t know about mandatory, but I think it’s just so competitive that you have to have a certain skill set, you have to have a certain ability and it is a pretty demanding feat of athleticism to do what those guys do.  I think it’s probably just evolved to the point where we need some pretty serious athletes.”