Ford Performance NSCS Notes and Quotes
Ford EcoBoost 300 – Homestead Miami Speedway
Saturday, November 19, 2016
Ford Finishing Order:
4th – Ryan Blaney
10th – Aric Almirola
11th – Darrell Wallace Jr.
16th – Ryan Reed
RYAN BLANEY – No. 22 Discount Tire Ford Mustang – YOU WERE THERE AT THE END, SO ANYTHING COULD HAVE HAPPENED. “We just got lucky at the last restart. I don’t know what the 14 was doing. He ruined a lot of guys’ Chase hopes right there. I don’t know why he did that, but luckily we just weren’t in his lane and we got a decent restart.”
YOU STARTED WELL, BUT LOST TRACK POSITION AND NEVER GOT IT BACK. “I didn’t really think we were that great all night. Maybe 30 laps into a run we were OK, but by that time we would lose 20 seconds, so you can’t really have that happen. We were just really tight. I’m not sure what happened overnight. We were really loose yesterday and I know we did some things to help that, but I didn’t think it was gonna be that much. It’s something we’ve got to go back and look at and try to get better.”
DARRELL WALLACE JR. – No. 6 Leidos Ford Mustang – “The year was one of the hardest years for me on and off the race track. A lot of personal things went down and the performance on track wasn’t there that we needed, so it’s just unfortunate. We deserved better finishes than what we had and we should have been in the final four, but that’s part of it. I can’t thank my Leidos team enough. We had a lot of fun this year and we’re trying to end on a positive note. We came away with a clean race. We had some ups and downs. It wasn’t our best night on pit road and yet again on another restart it takes it out of us. That’s part of it, but I’m blessed to be in this spot I’m in. We’re working on finalizing things for next year and hopefully we’ll be back behind the wheel of a Ford Mustang. We’ll see what happens.”
RYAN REED – No. 16 Lilly/American Diabetes Association Ford Mustang – “I was a little too over-aggressive. I hit the fence twice. A lot of guys hit it a lot more than twice, but just the way I hit it I cut a right-rear both times. Both times I spun out coming off of two, so it kept us on the lead lap, but we had such a fast race car. We could drive up inside the top 10 every long run. I needed a lot of short run speed, but overall it was a heck of a season. We came home sixth, a career best. It was definitely a career-best season. We’ve made so much progress with a lot of top 10s this year, so it’s something to be proud of and I feel like we’ve got something to build off of going into 2017.”
