Ford Performance NSCS Notes and Quotes
Bad Boy Off Road 300 Qualifying – New Hampshire Motor Speedway
Ford Qualifying Results:
11th – Brad Keselowski
15th – Joey Logano
16th – Ryan Blaney
21st – Ricky Stenhouse Jr.
25th – Brian Scott
26th – Aric Almirola
27th – Trevor Bayne
28th – Chris Buescher
32nd – Greg Biffle
34th – Landon Cassill
40th – Jeffrey Earnhardt
CHRIS BUESCHER – No. 34 Love’s Travel Stops Ford Fusion – “What didn’t happen is we didn’t go fast enough to make a long story short. It was a solid effort for our Love’s Travel Stops team. We’re trying really hard. This fire off speed has been tough on us, especially at Loudon. You look at the last race and it was kind of the same way. Our race speed was OK, and I was happy with that. I feel like we have a car that drives really good in first practice today. We’ve got two practices tomorrow to figure it out. We’ll go into that with plenty of optimism. We’ll keep positive and go pull off something and be ready for the race on Sunday.”
WHAT ARE YOU LOOKING FORWARD TO IN PRACTICE TOMORROW? “I just like the fact that the car drove well. I know that doesn’t always translate into speed, but I’ve had an evil-driving car here and made something of it, and we’ve had good-driving cars and made something of it. It’s a lot easier day when it drives good. It’s to a point where I feel we get in the corner decent. Once the groove widens out just a little bit from more traffic, we’ll be able to get it over on the right-front and get across the center a little bit better. We have really good forward drive this weekend, which I’m really excited about for Loudon.”
WHAT ABOUT KEEPING UP WITH THE OTHER CHASE GUYS COME SUNDAY? “We’re playing our own game right now. We know that if we come out of here and do the best we can, put in our maximum effort, that’s all we can do. At the end of the day, that’s the plan. We’ll come out here and do all we can do.”
RICKY STENHOUSE JR. – No. 17 Fastenal Ford Fusion – THAT WAS MORE EVENTFUL THAN YOU PROBABLY WANTED WITH GETTING THROUGH INSPECTION AND HAVING TO RUSH OUT THERE FOR THE FIRST ROUND. “I don’t know exactly why inspection gets held up, but we made it through there. The biggest thing for us is we did pick up some positions from where we were in practice, but we didn’t pick up as much as we wanted. The car drove really well. I thought the Fastenal Ford was driving like I want it to, it’s just not as fast as I want it to be. Hopefully, we can get that speed out of it with it still driving good tomorrow because I feel it’s one of the better driving cars I’ve had here at New Hampshire. Maybe that will pay off in the race on the longer runs that we get, so that’s what we’re hoping for right now because the speed is not quite where we need it to be, especially for qualifying, but that is one of the better starts we’ve had here recently. We’ve been struggling qualifying, so it’s a little further ahead of where we’ve been the last couple of weeks.”
JOEY LOGANO – No. 22 Shell/Pennzoil Ford Fusion – WHAT WERE YOU DEALING WITH IN THAT SECOND ROUND OF QUALIFYING? “A little bit of everything. This has been a tough place for us to qualify. We’ve been faster in the past, but I’d say the last few qualifying efforts here we’ve been a little bit lost on the second and third runs being able to maintain speed with the field. We just need to figure that out a little bit, but I felt good about our Shell/Pennzoil Ford in race trim. We’re gonna just start a little further back than we want to, but we’ll be alright.”
RYAN BLANEY – No. 21 Motorcraft/Quick Lane Ford Fusion – “That’s not what we wanted. Whenever you’re not in the last round you always think you missed it a little bit. I didn’t think we were quite as good. I thought we lost a little bit of speed from practice to qualifying, which is not what you want, but I think there are some things we’ve learned and we can apply for next time here. I think the track changed a lot from practice to qualifying and we’ll have to kind of look at that. We’ve got some new stuff to try tomorrow in race trim that I’m excited about and we’ll see what that brings.”
BRAD KESELOWSKI – No. 2 Miller Lite Ford Fusion – “That was fair. We need a little bit of speed, so we’ll go work on it.” YOU WEREN’T LATE GETTING OUT OF INSPECTION, SO THAT’S A POSITIVE. “Yeah, that is good. We’ll take that as a small victory for today.”
