Ford Performance NSCS Notes and Quotes
Go Bowling 400 – Kansas Speedway
Friday, May 6, 2016
Brad Keselowski, driver of the No. 2 Alliance Truck Parts Ford Fusion, is coming off his second win of the NASCAR Sprint Cup Series season last week at Talladega Superspeedway. Keselowski spend a few minutes with the media prior to qualifying to discuss that victory and other issues at Kansas Speedway.
BRAD KESELOWSKI – No. 2 Alliance Truck Parts Ford Fusion – HOW IS THE CAR PERFORMING SO FAR? “We haven’t had the runs we would like to have here at Kansas as of late, and trying some different things to be better. My teammate, Joey Logano, has been really good here and we’re looking at them and saying, ‘Hey, they’ve got a lot of speed here,’ and we’ll try some things. That’s one of the advantages of having a teammate is that sometime you help them out and sometimes they help you out. All in all, you both try to be the best, so I’m looking forward to what we have in the race because it seems like every year you come here and practice and qualifying is not a very good indication of the race just because the track surface and some of the changeover between practice, qualifying and race conditions. We haven’t had a lot of speed so far, but I’m very optimistic about the race.”
YOU’RE EITHER GETTING A LOT OF CREDIT OR LATER THE BLAME FOR THE ALL-STAR RACE FORMAT JUST ANNOUNCED. WHAT WAS YOUR THINKING GOING INTO THAT? “Someone reached out to me and asked me from the Charlotte Motor Speedway what we could do to make the race the best possible, and I put a little bit of thought into it. I know another group of drivers did as well and we all kind of pitched in some ideas. I don’t know, I don’t think that I was all the ideas, but maybe the one that seems to catch everyone’s attention. I just wanted to see the race something that I would want to watch if I was a fan, and something that I would want to be proud of if I was the driver that won it. Quite honestly, I didn’t feel like the formats of the past few years were that way. So when sitting down and kind of going over it all, I kind of had this over-arching theme that I think our sport is best when at the end of the day we have what I call common winds, where everybody is happy. Those are easy to say, hard to do, but I think they’re out there. A lot of times we get caught up with trying to maybe make one group happy and we forget that this sport is more than one group. So for this particular format, example, the idea was how do we make the drivers feel like they earned it and the fans feel like they saw a great race. It’s really what it came down to and putting the format together was, I think, somewhat of a collective initiative to do just that. I feel really good about it. I think what you’re gonna see in the All-Star Race is gonna be the modern day format of excellence for that type of race because a lot of things have changed. It’s not 1990 anymore. It’s not 1992 anymore. I think we’ve seen aerodynamics come in the sport and really make it so much more difficult to pass than ever before, and the format is meant to combat that challenge. There is probably an argument to be made that it’s a little bit gimmicky, and that’s fair, but it’s the All-Star Race and I feel like the All-Star Race gets a free pass on gimmicks to some extent, and it should be a short, fun, amazing race. I’m feeling pretty optimistic that it’s gonna be the best race of the year.”
WHAT WILL MAKE A DRIVER HAVE TO EARN IT? “You’re gonna win the race one of two way, most likely and one of those two ways is you’re either gonna drive through the field in 13 laps, which in my belief is earning it. Whenever you have to pass 12 or 13 cars over the course of 13 laps that’s a lot of passing, and I think that’s gonna require perfection from a driver making all the right moves and understanding every little idiosyncrasy of the race track and his competitors, and vice versa. If a guy that’s 11th or 12th, or whatever that number ends up being, gets the lead and runs away with it, he’s gonna have to drive his butt off because he’s gonna have such a natural disadvantage with the scenarios that play out that I think it’s gonna be extremely difficult for him. Either way, no matter who wins, you’re gonna have to fight hard, whereas I think when we looked at the last few years’ scenario it was pretty simply – win the restart into turn one and you win the race. I didn’t feel like that was an earn it scenario.”
WOULD ATTACHING A CHASE BERTH TO THE ALL-STAR RACE BE TOO GIMMICKY OR BECAUSE THE ALL-STAR RACE IS GIMMICKY IS THAT NOT FAIR? “I don’t think it’s out of line. I can’t think of really very many scenarios when someone has, I guess Jamie McMurray was one of them. He won the All-Star Race. I hadn’t really thought about it, but it seems fair to me. It seems like if you can win an All-Star Race it seems pretty fair.”
WHERE DID YOU COME UP WITH 13 LAPS? “I would like to take full credit for that, but I think probably more credit on that belongs to the speedway of trying to come up with a number that would stand out and, for some reason, everyone keeps asking that question, ‘Why that number?’ And I think that’s great. That means they were right. It’s not like some devil-worshiping thing, I can promise you that, but when we looked at the number it would take for the driver to drive through the field in the scenarios that we played out, on average it was 8-12 laps. If you make a mistake, it could take as much as 15 laps, so I think that’s kind of where the number came from was trying to fit in between that 10-15 lap range and that was a unique number that hit it and could generate some interest.”
DO YOU THINK FLYING UNDER THE RADAR THIS SEASON HAS HELPED YOU FOCUS ON YOUR RACING PROGRAM AND NOT BE TAKEN IN OTHER DIRECTIONS? “Yeah, and personal life too. It’s kind of good not having to deal with too much drama this year so far, but it’s still pretty early.”
THOUGHTS ON THE SCHEDULE REALIGNMENT. DOES IT AFFECT YOU AS A DRIVER? “I don’t know if it really affects us. I haven’t really looked at ’17. I’m still righting really hard to get through ’16, but I look at the first thought that I would say when you bring it up is I feel bad for a lot of the crew guys. I know they really enjoyed that week off. Don’t get me wrong, I did too, but it is what it is. To some extent, there are things that can change and there are things that can’t change and that’s not one of them, so I don’t tend to spend a lot of time worrying about that.”
WERE THERE ANY OTHER ALL-STAR IDEAS THAT HAD TO BE WORKED THROUGH? “No. I thought the driver council did a good job of coming up with the draw at the end of the segment to make sure whoever runs in that mid-range doesn’t sandbag because with that draw, you won’t know where to sandbag to.”
IS IT A BIG DIFFERENCE THIS YEAR ON THE TRACK VERSUS LAST YEAR? “It’s a pretty big difference from this race to last fall, for sure. The tire is a lot softer. The cars have a lot less downforce. I qualified here wide-open last year and we’re not even close to that this year, so I think that certainly has been a gain. We’re seeing at least a half-second slower in pace.”
IS IT MUCH DIFFERENT PUTTING TALLADEGA AS THE SECOND RACE IN THAT SEGMENT THAN THE THIRD, AND KANSAS BEING THE FINAL RACE? “It’s definitely gonna change the feel of that race in the sense that before you would go into Talladega and if you have a good points cushion, you would probably ride around a little bit more. Now, you’re not gonna be able to take that for granted, so I would imagine it will actually increase the intensity of that race from a driver’s perspective to perform, where before it was more or less a ‘just don’t screw this up race’ if you were in. But then it might lower the intensity too for guys that feel like they need to win to advance to the next round because of the deficit they had in the two races before. I can see the other way. It will just be different.”
WILL IT MAKE KANSAS MORE INTRIGUING? “Yeah. I’m not sure I could answer that. Maybe a little bit. It’s hard to say.”
WHAT HAS BEEN YOUR BIGGEST STRUGGLE HERE AT KANSAS? “We just haven’t found the package that we’re looking for. We’ve had good speed in qualifying, but haven’t been able to translate it into the race, and we’ve had a lot of minor hiccups that seem to hit us here. It’s hard to say. I think if we knew exactly what we were missing, we’d find it. But this has definitely been one of our weaker tracks.”
THOUGHTS ON DOVER NEXT WEEK. “That’s gonna be a handful. The cars were already a handful there. When we were kind of running through the list of tracks for low downforce there were a few where I think everyone probably said we would be OK if we left the rules the way they were in ’15 and maybe Bristol, Martinsville and Richmond – those kind of places came up from time to time. And I would probably add Dover to that list. The cars were already pretty sideways there, but I don’t think it’s a bad thing. You’re gonna have to really drive them sideways again at Dover this year, even more, and I think that could make the racing even better. It ought to be something, absolutely.”
YOU SAID LAST YEAR THIS TRACK HAD THE BIGGEST PUCKER FACTOR GOING INTO THE CORNER. HOW MUCH DIFFERENT IS IT THIS YEAR AND HAS THAT DROPPED DOWN THE LADDER A BIT? “Yeah, I would say for sure that the commitment level that causes the pucker factor has gone down because of less downforce. Like I said earlier, we ran wide-open in qualifying here last year and it was, ‘Whoa. I just barely made it.’ It’s not gonna be that way this year. The speeds are down a little bit, but the cars are actually harder to drive, so I feel more like a driver and less like a passenger than I did last year.”
