Ford Performance NSCS Notes and Quotes
Pennsylvania 400 Qualifying – Pocono Raceway
Friday, July 29, 2016
Ford Qualifying Results:
7th – Brad Keselowski
10th – Joey Logano
14th – Ricky Stenhouse Jr.
18th – Ryan Blaney
22nd – Chris Buescher
25th – Greg Biffle
27th – Aric Almirola
31st – Trevor Bayne
32nd – Landon Cassill
35th – Brian Scott
37th – Jeb Burton
GREG BIFFLE – No. 16 EcoBoost Ford Fusion – WHAT HAPPENED ON YOUR LAST QUALIFYING RUN? “Brian Pattie told me to come in. He didn’t think there was anybody that beat us, but I laid down to conservative of a lap. We had a great car. I was banking on the third round. It’s been a while since we’ve had a car this fast and now we don’t even make the second round, so it looks pretty foolish on our part. I didn’t run a fast enough first lap, and it cooled off a huge amount so some of those guys were able to beat us on their third run. It was just a miscue on our part, but we’ve got a great car so we’ll be coming from 25th when the green drops.” CAN YOU PASS THAT MANY CARS TO GET TO THE FRONT? “Oh yeah. This car will definitely drive to the front. I’m confident of that. It drives really good. This is what we need to race these guys with, so it will definitely get to the top 10, but we’ll have to wait to see after that.”
RICKY STENHOUSE JR. – No. 17 Roush Performance Ford Fusion – “We only needed just a little bit. The guys did a great job on this Roush Performance Ford Fusion. We struggled a lot in practice unloading with a setup that we ran decent with last time we were here. We had to make a lot of wholesale changes and didn’t do a qualifying run in practice. The very first run in the first round we ran a 52.30 and went back out again. They made a lot of adjustments and we went a second and three-tenths faster to make it to the next round. We made some more adjustments there and got a little bit loose in one and a little bit loose in three or I think we would have made it to the third round. I definitely didn’t hit a perfect lap, but definitely happy with the performance that we had compared to practice. Hopefully, we can tune it up tomorrow for Sunday.” WHAT IS IT LIKE AS A DRIVER KNOWING YOU’RE IN ONE MINUTE AND OUT THE NEXT IN QUALIFYING? “I saw the lap times before I went out and I knew we ran a 50.75 there and I thought I was gonna be close. I thought we needed to be a low-70 or high-69 to make it, but we just missed it. It was so close, but we’re happy with that based off where we were in practice.”
CHRIS BUESCHER – No. 34 Love’s Travel Stops Ford Fusion – “That was pretty good for us. We kept picking up as we went. The guys did a good job of just getting it better and I’ve got to be better firing off with more speed at these places. We didn’t get a whole lot of practice before these qualifying runs and I didn’t get back in my rhythm. But my guys did a nice job. We picked up speed all the way throughout and held on to a pretty good pace, so we’ll see how race runs go tomorrow.”
