Ford Performance NASCAR Notes and Quotes
Bojangles Southern 500 (Darlington Raceway)
Sunday, September 4, 2016
FORD FINISHING RESULTS
5th JOEY LOGANO
9th BRAD KESELOWSKI
13th RYAN BLANEY
17th CHRIS BUESCHER
18th RICKY STENHOUSE JR.
30th LANDON CASSILL
32nd ARIC ALMIROLA
36th GREG BIFFLE
38th JEFFREY EARNHARDT
39th BRIAN SCOTT
40th TREVOR BAYNE
JOEY LOGANO, No. 22 Shell Pennzoil Ford Fusion (Finished 5th)
DOES ANYTHING SHORT OF A WIN AT THIS POINT MATTER? “Yeah, it just doesn’t matter if it isn’t a win. At this point I guess momentum means something so I guess something matters. I disagree that I didn’t have anything for them. I did on the long run. We were the fastest car on the long run every time. We hit a lot of short runs at the end and that would kill us. I lost two or three spots every restart for the first five or six laps and then it would kick in and off I would go. I was fighting to get them back. We kind of hurt ourselves there with restarts tonight. We needed to go green from about 100 to go. We would have been good then.”
A LOT OF GUYS WERE RUNNING LOW IN THREE AND FOUR. IS THERE MORE GRIP ON THAT UNUSED ASPHALT? “It isn’t unused, not anymore at least. We have been running down there the last three or four years. It is nothing new but it is fun. I had a blast tonight. It is so much fun. You can move around cars in different places. You can pass. What a great race track. It is all because of tire wear. This place wears the tires out. You make a lot of pit stops and there are a lot of natural cautions. It is a great race track.”
WHAT WAS YOUR BIGGEST CHALLENGE TONIGHT? “Restarts. Usually we are really good on restarts but today, the first six laps or so of a green flag run I would go nowhere. We would kind of fall backwards and after eight laps it would come in and 15-20 laps into a run we were the fastest car on the racetrack but we were buried in the back. We were good on the long run. Not good on short runs. Overall we were awful in practice and were able to make a lot of changes to this thing. My teammates were fast and we leaned on them and got our car better, to the point we could have won I think if we ran 100 laps straight at the end.”
BRAD KESELOWSKI, No. 2 Miller Lite Ford Fusion (Finished 9th)
“It was an up and down night for us out there tonight with the Miller Lite Fusion. We fought real hard but didn’t get the finish out of it that we wanted. We had to fight through a lot of adversity out there tonight. Darlington will do that to you. I am proud of my team for that. They never stop fighting.”
CHRIS BUESCHER, No. 34 Love’s Travel Stops Ford Fusion (Finished 17th)
YOU MAINTAIN YOUR POSITION INSIDE THE TOP-30 IN POINTS HEADING INTO RICHMOND. FROM THAT ASPECT IT WAS A GOOD NIGHT FOR YOU. “Yeah, from that side of things it was a good points night for our Love’s Ford. At the end of the night it wasn’t a bad race for us. If we could have qualified and had a better spot maybe it would have been different. We worked hard on this thing all day and the team made good adjustments to get it rolling forward. It isn’t bad for our first Cup series race here in Darlington.” IS NEXT WEEK GOING TO BE THE MOST PRESSURE PACKED RACES OF YOUR CAREER? “It definitely will be. I feel like we have a good cushion right now coming out of here. That is not necessarily comforting because we still have a lot of work to do.”
RYAN BLANEY, No. 21 Motorcraft/Quick Lane Ford Fusion (Finished 13th)
“That’s a long race to begin with and we made it longer by having bad racing luck with that caution early in the race, which put us down two laps. Then I got into the wall in (turns) three and four that caused a flat tire, then got together with the 47 (A.J. Allmendinger) and we were down two laps. At about the halfway part of the race there wasn’t much to feel positive about but the team kept working and battling and we ended up with a decent finish.”
RICKY STENHOUSE JR., No. 17 Fastenal Ford Fusion (Finished 18th)
“We got a lucky break there. I got to run up front a little bit but all in all we didn’t get our balance right all night. It was back and forth all night. It was a tough night for us with the Fastenal Ford. We couldn’t do anything to make it fast and ran the same speed all night. Some of those cars got us at the end. They made their cars better and we weren’t able to do that tonight.”
TREVOR BAYNE, No. 6 AdvoCare Ford Fusion | Mechanical Failure on Lap 95 (Finished 40th)
“I really hate that that happened. Matt (Puccia) made some great adjustments that got our AdvoCare Ford to handle great but we were in a tough position because we were down a cylinder. I’m proud of all of my guys’ effort this weekend. We’ll give it everything we can next weekend and go for the win to get into the Chase.”
BRIAN SCOTT, No. 44 Twisted Tea Ford Fusion — WHAT HAPPENED WITH YOU AND THE 14? “I was trying to let those guys go that had newer, fresher tires. I was trying to let Tony (Stewart) go there and I think he got inside of me and got loose there. I was pointing him to the inside to let him go. Apparently he got mad at me. I want to thank Twisted Tea, Ford, Albertsons, Shore Lodge and everyone that came on board. I have a lot of respect for Tony. He has always raced me really clean. I am not sure what he thought was going on there. I am not sure if he thought I was trying to hold him up there, I wasn’t. I was trying to let him go. I even pointed him to the inside. Maybe he thought I was giving him the finger or something. I will talk with him. We will figure it out. It is a tough race. The Southern 500 is a tough race. Everybody is slipping and sliding a lot. It is getting to the point where people’s tempers are getting short.”
