Ford Performance MENCS Notes and Quotes
Stewart-Haas Racing Press Conference
Wednesday, January 18, 2017
On Feb. 24, 2016, it was announced that Stewart-Haas Racing would switch to Ford for the 2017 Monster Energy NASCAR Cup Series season. A formal press conference was held at the Ford Performance Technical Center on Wednesday to publicly show the SHR Ford Fusions and talk about how the transition has gone with Daytona Speedweeks less than a month away. This is a full transcript of the event.
PARTICIPANTS:
Raj Nair, Executive Vice President for Global Product Development and Chief Technical Officer, Ford Motor Co.
Dave Pericak, Global Director, Ford Performance
Tony Stewart, Co-Owner, Stewart-Haas Racing
Clint Bowyer, Driver, No. 14 Mobil 1 Ford Fusion
RAJ NAIR – IT’S BEEN 11 MONTHS SINCE THE ORIGINAL ANNOUNCEMENT AND NOW THE SHR CARS ARE BUILT AND DAYTONA IS ONLY 30 DAYS AWAY. WHAT ARE YOUR THOUGHTS ON SEEING THIS BECOME REALITY? “It’s great to see the cars here. I think seeing them makes us all itchy to get out on the track now. If you look at the last couple of years, we’ve done a lot to improve our performance on the track, to be honest. Whether it’s a lot more bring to bear Ford engineering, building this Tech Center, creating Ford Performance, the addition of Team Penske and now it doesn’t come around often that you can bring a championship-caliber team like Stewart-Haas into your organization, so we’re looking forward to getting to Daytona and getting on the track and start racing, so we can start shooting for that championship that’s long overdue.”
DAVE PERICAK – WHAT HAS IMPRESSED YOU MOST ABOUT SHR AND HOW THIS FORD RELATIONSHIP IS DEVELOPING? “I would say the level of collaboration has been fantastic, and the speed at which these guys implement and get things done is impressive. These guys are racers and there’s no messing around. When there is something that we all know is the right thing to do, the speed at which Stewart-Haas gets things done is pretty amazing. That was one of the things early on when we met with Tony and Gene and the team. We realized that we worked very much the same way, so I think that’s really gonna pay off on the race track.”
TONY STEWART – WHERE DO YOU FEEL THE TEAM IS AT NOW IN THIS TRANSITION WITH DAYTONA A MONTH AWAY? “I think every off-season we start the year and don’t feel like we’re ready, and don’t feel like we’re caught up the way we want to be, but this winter has been a big challenge, obviously, but we were prepared for it. Ever since I joined Gene Haas’ organization I don’t think there has been an off-season where I didn’t throw a curveball into the off-season, so the team has done a great job. The great thing is their spirits are high and they’re really excited about this switch to Ford. They’re working long, hard hours, but you go there and everything is organized. You can tell there is a lot of work to be done and there’s a lot going on, but, at the same time, it’s very organized in what they’re doing and the way they’re going about it. I’m really proud of our guys. I’m proud of how dedicated they’ve been through this process. Like I said, we’ve put them through this task numerous times and I keep telling them I’m gonna keep throwing curveballs at them until they can’t hit one, so I feel like our organization is one of few that could actually do this. Throw in an XFINITY program and our own chassis department in there just to make it interesting for those guys, so they’ve done a great job and when it comes time to go to Daytona we’re gonna be ready for sure.”
CLINT BOWYER – WHAT ARE YOUR THOUGHTS ABOUT THE COMING SEASON AND TO BE JUMPING INTO THE 14 FUSION IN A FEW WEEKS? “Every year you hear all the drivers and everybody is talking about excitement, but after where I’ve been and signing onto this opportunity a year ago and just chomping at the bit watching everything that’s going on at Stewart-Haas and I just couldn’t wait to walk in the door and call that home. And then the Ford aspect of it. Raj and Dave came to the shop and bought everybody lunch the other day and it was really great. Raj got up and cut up with the guys and it was just racers, a bunch of racers hanging out and talking and it really broke the ice with everybody. You could tell that it just set everything at ease. You watch those racers go to work and get to building these race cars. I’ve been there pretty much every week since and it’s one race car after another coming out with new bodies on them, and there’s always something new right around the corner. It is exciting times. The anticipation of the Daytona 500 with everything new is certainly high on everybody’s plate right now, but, for me, I can’t wait. I can’t wait to get to Daytona. We’ve got new horsepower under the hood. The cars look sexy. We’re ready.”
TONY STEWART CONTINUED – WHAT MADE YOU WANT TO PUT CLINT IN THIS SEAT? “I don’t know. I wonder if I made the right decision sometimes (laughing). Being around us it’s not hard to realize why. We both have a great sense of humor and our backgrounds are really similar. We’re both dirt track racers, but racing against him I saw things that I saw in myself. I see that drive and determination and he’s one of those guys that does not like to lose and that fits what we want at Stewart-Haas Racing. He’s got a great relationship in the past with Kevin Harvick and he was already working well with Danica and Kurt, so I just think he fits the mold of what Stewart-Haas Racing is about and I think he’ll be a good fit for Ford as well.”
QUESTION AND ANSWER SESSION
RAJ NAIR CONTINUED — HOW MUCH OF A PRIORITY IS THE MANUFACTURER’S CHAMPIONSHIP TO YOU? “I think since we set up Ford Performance I laid out some goals for that organization. Certainly, getting the production vehicles out – the GT350, the Raptor, the Focus RS and, obviously, the Ford GT – and on the racing side a big challenge I asked the team was we want to go win Le Man in 2016 and celebrate that 50th anniversary of the Ford GT the right way and they’ve done that. But we’ve not achieved that goal of a manufacturer’s championship. We’ve not achieve that goal of the driver’s championship. I would say both are important. For us as a manufacturer, obviously, the fight with Chevy and Toyota is really important, but the driver’s championship is equally as important. So we want to win both and we are doing everything we know how to do that, whether it’s, like I said, bringing a lot more engineering resources to bear that a big company like Ford can do. Whether it’s our windtunnel programs, our dyno programs, our computer simulators, our actual simulator here (at the Tech Center), but also bringing the right personnel on board and the team that Dave has built, and obviously bringing the right partners on board. We have a great partner in Roush, a great partnership with Roush Yates Engines. We brought Penske on board and that’s been very successful for us, and now getting Stewart-Haas – the caliber of the organization and the caliber of those drivers – I think we’ve got a lot better chance to achieve that end goal.”
TONY STEWART CONTINUED – CAN YOU TELL US THE IMPACT OF THIS SWITCH? DID YOU ADD BODIES? WOULD YOU NORMALLY RE-BODY ALL OF YOUR CARS LIKE YOU HAD TO FOR THIS SWITCH? “I don’t know that necessarily we would have re-bodies all the cars, but the aero package is a little different this year, so all of them would have been changed anyway. This is a change that really, employee-wise, we did have a big addition employee-wise, but it was more because of the chassis department than it was anything else. We were geared up for this. We were ready for it. We had plenty of time to prepare for this off-season, so at Homestead when the end of the season came about, we were ready to go full-steam ahead and make the change.”
DAVE PERICAK CONTINUED – BASED ON NUMBERS CHEVROLET HAD AN ADVANTAGE IN TERMS OF CARS IN THE FIELD EACH WEEK AND TOYOTA IN TERMS OF PERFORMANCE THEY’VE HAD AN ADVANTAGE. DO YOU FEEL WITH THE ADDITION OF SHR THAT YOU’RE ON AN EVEN PLAYING FIELD NOW AND YOU HAVE ENOUGH TEAMS AND COMPETITIVE DRIVERS TO COMPETE? “From a pure numbers perspective, of course, we’ve leveled it quite a bit with the addition of Stewart-Haas. As far as performance goes, we’ve been stepping up our performance and making improvements over the last couple of years, and this year is no exception. We’re coming into this new season with some new levels of performance already planned. At the end of the day, I feel like we’re in the best position we’ve been in in probably a decade with the number of cars we have, with the quality of drivers that we have, and with the engineering staff that’s supporting the teams to perform as well as we expect to perform.”
HOW BIG OF A TASK WAS THIS FOR FORD TO BRING IN STEWART-HAAS COMPARED TO WHAT YOU HAD BEEN DOING? “It’s a big deal from the perspective of we are not just a sponsor of the team, we’re a part of the team and we provide quite a bit of engineering support, so we too had to staff-up in order to handle four more race cars and support each of the teams as required, but we had plenty of time to prepare as Tony said. We announced this in February of 2016, so we’ve been staffing up and getting prepared to do that, so there’s nothing that we’re not prepared to handle or that was crazy, it was just four more cars, four more race teams, and we had to staff-up because we do support our race teams from an engineering perspective. We don’t just sponsor them.”
RAJ NAIR CONTINUED – YOU MENTIONED THE 24 OF LE MANS WIN LAST YEAR. TONY HAS MENTIONED HE WOULD LIKE TO RUN LE MANS. WHAT ARE THE CHANCES WE COULD SEE TONY STEWART IN A FORD IN FRANCE IN THE FUTURE? “I would never rule that out. I’m not sure what’s gonna be happening in retirement for Tony, but I think he’s gonna stay sharp. Right now, we’re pretty happy with our driver lineup, but I would never rule anything like that out (laughter) – not that we wouldn’t be happy if you were in it. But he’s also got those eyes that burn. You can really feel it, so if he stays in shape and makes sure he can handle 24-hour races.” TONY INTERJECTS – “I have incentive now.”
TONY STEWART CONTINUED – WHAT HAS BEEN THE ADVANTAGE OF BUILDING YOUR OWN STUFF NOW? “I don’t know if there have been any advantages, but it’s just been different. We had a great partnership with Hendrick and obviously we ran their chassis and engines, so it made a lot of sense to have that alliance with them. Where now we’re doing our own chassis. We’re with Roush Yates Engines and it’s a totally different package. I feel like it’s an appropriate time for us to get out on our own and cut the cord, so to speak. I feel like we’re ready for that as an organization and, like I said, we’ve been preparing for this for a long time, so I feel like we’re ready.”
DAVE PERICAK CONTINUED – YOU’VE SEEN SOME OF YOUR ORGANIZATIONS DECREASE IN SIZE WITH ROUSH AND RPM. WHAT IS YOUR ROLE OR RESPONSIBILITY IN HELPING TEAMS LIKE THAT CLIMB HIGHER? “It is our responsibility to help them and the downsizing that you’ve seen is, I would say, a way for us to re-focus those teams and get back to the fundamentals and get them back on the right path again. You don’t want to have so much going on that you can’t focus in the areas that you need to focus and fix what’s broken. Our job as Ford Performance and Ford Motor Company is to get in there and help them get back to where we know that they can be. You look at Roush Fenway and they’re a proven championship-level team, so we’ve had some bumpy roads, but I think we are now on a path to improve their performance and we’re 100 percent involved in making that happen, and we’re 100 percent dedicated to all of the teams that are with Ford Motor Company.”
TONY STEWART CONTINUED – IS THERE A DIFFERENCE IN PHILOSOPHY BETWEEN WHAT YOU HAD EXPERIENCED AND WHAT YOU’RE FINDING NOW WITH FORD, OR IS IT THE SAME AMONG MANUFACTURERS? “I think the approach is the same. How they go about that approach is quite a bit different. That’s part of the reason why we made the switch. We feel like the resources that we have now are greater than what we had before and something that we haven’t seen, so that was a very big tool that we hadn’t had in the past, and one of the main reasons we made the switch. We feel like we have resources that were never available to us in the past, so, like they said, they are really focused on winning races and championships and we’ve seen that. When we first started meeting with Ford it was very apparent that there were a lot of things they had to offer that we hadn’t seen before and were huge assets for us. That’s why we made a serious look at it and ultimately made the decision to switch over.”
WHAT KIND OF TOOLS? WINDTUNNEL TIME? “We can’t tell you that stuff (laughter). There are a lot of great resources and a lot of them are in this building. There is a great simulator over here, but there’s a lot of resources within the organization that are tools that when we saw that and saw the availability of it, it was really something that made all of us at the shop very excited. It’s things that we’re looking forward to having access to.”
FURNITURE ROW MADE A PRETTY SUCCESSFUL TRANSITION LAST YEAR FROM MANUFACTURER TO MANUFACTURER. CAN YOU TAKE ANYTHING FROM THAT? “I don’t think I looked at that as anything with what we decided to do. We met for a long time before we made the decision and we knew that there were a lot of things that weren’t initially on the table that we asked for and they responded to right away, and it showed us their level of dedication to winning races and championships again. It became very clear very quickly that this was the right decision for us and the right direction for our future.”
DAVE PERICAK CONTINUED – YOU ANNOUNCED A DRIVER DEVELOPMENT PROGRAM LAST WEEK. IS IT THE HOPE THAT STEWART-HAAS WILL BE PART OF THAT DOWN THE ROAD? “When you look at our longevity in this sport and our dedication to it, we need to make sure that we’re bringing the young talent in and growing them, so we put that program together. Chase Briscoe is the first one to enter the program and what’s different about our program, I think, than others is that we’re not only gonna develop the drivers in NASCAR, but we’re also gonna leverage that driver for our production car development. So when you look at the Ford Performance products, Chase Briscoe will be a part of the production team going out and evaluating cars for us, giving us good feedback, and then while he’s doing that he’s also learning how to work with engineers and how to give good feedback on cars and what makes a car go and all that, so there’s a really good education that’s gonna happen. As far as Stewart-Haas, when we bring the drivers into the Ford Development Program, they’re truly signing with Ford Motor Company. As they do that, then that gives us the opportunity as they progress through the levels, whether it be XFINITY or ultimately Cup, to give them the best ride and the best opportunity and figure out where it fits best within the Ford camp. Ultimately, they will go to a Cup level if they’re good enough and they will then sign with one of the teams and they will remove their signing with Ford Motor Company. We’re looking forward to going out and looking for these young drivers. Tony has a big involvement in grassroots racing and he’ll be a great recruiter for us, so I think when you look at how all of this comes together it really makes sense in how we’re gonna develop our talent and bring them up through the organization.”
CLINT BOWYER CONTINUED – WHAT HAS BEEN THE BIGGEST CHALLENGE TRANSITIONING TO THE NEW TEAM? “The biggest challenge was waiting a year to get in it – get his butt out of it and mine in. That’s been the biggest challenge, but that day has arrived in a big way. You don’t have that testing during the off-season like we used to have. I remember when Richard hired me clear back in the first part of my career, I think we tested like eight times before the season ever started, so acclimation with the guys – you had a name with a face. It wasn’t just, ‘Hey, man,’ or, ‘Who is that guy? Where’s my helmet?’ You had that time to get acclimated with your guys and, more importantly, that race car. Now, it’s a little bit different. You have to do it at the shop, maybe taking them to lunch, just doing something to try and get acclimated and learn personalities and things like that, and how you’re gonna mingle with them or pick on them to get the most out of them. But then just trying to figure out how you get to the Daytona 500 and prepare yourself in a short amount of time to go and win the biggest race of the season.”
DO YOU KNOW YOUR GUYS? “I did call Buga (crew chief Mike Bugarewicz) and I told him, I said, ‘I know them all.’ I mean, we’ve all been in the garage and maybe even out at night you’ve come across them and you just know them. You’ve known them for 12 years but maybe you don’t their name. I asked him, ‘Do they have a roster or something you can send me real quick, just to make sure I have it all right?’ And they didn’t, so I felt bad. But he’s such a dedicated person and so prepared that he literally went and took pictures of all the guys and e-mailed me names of them. I was like, ‘Man, you didn’t have to do that. I could have come down.’”
TONY INTERJECTS – “He said he didn’t need that, but he needed that, trust me. He has to have pictures to go with names.”
CLINT CONTINUES – “I’ll still screw it up, but, at the end of the day, that’s the level of dedication you have at Stewart-Haas and it just doesn’t end with Mike, it’s all across the board. If you ask for something, you’ve got to be careful asking for something because it’s just done and you’re like, ‘I was just kind of curious. I didn’t mean do it.’ Like my seat, I got in that thing and I feel rich, I ain’t gonna lie. That’s the best seat I’ve ever had in my life. I switched to a carbon seat and its perfectly tailored like a suit or something. It’s awesome.”
DAVE PERICAK CONTINUED – THIS DRIVER DEVELOPMENT PROGRAM SEEMS SIMILAR TO WHAT FORD DID WITH HOLMAN-MOODY IN THE LATE SIXTIES. DID FORD STUDY THAT AND IS THAT A REASON YOU’RE COMING BACK TO IT? “We always look back at our entire history of racing, which is very rich, and making sure that where things made sense and where we were successful that we look at whether that makes sense today. I think you have to look at the relevancy in the day that you’re in versus when it happened back then, but at the end of the day we’re very dedicated. Ford Performance, that was really Raj’s idea to create Ford Performance and take our racing efforts out of our marketing-led organization and bring it into the engineering side of our business underneath Raj, so that we can absolutely support our teams in the way that they need to be supported to perform. If you look at what it takes to win in this sport now, every fraction of a second matters, so it’s our job to make sure that we’re helping the teams find every advantage. We think that we have the best practices right now in place and we’ll continue to evaluate that, but the best practices in place to make our teams successful.”
CLINT BOWYER CONTINUED – HOW DID YOUR MENTAL PSYCHE SURVIVE LAST YEAR WHILE YOU WERE WAITING TO GET INTO THIS RIDE? “Well, you can’t forget the fact he got hurt right off the bat, so the very car that you had a chance – it was alive – who knows when he was gonna get back, so there was a lot of emotion that went into the whole season. The biggest thing is there is always pressure in this sport and for whatever reason, my wife asked me the other night, she said, ‘Are you nervous about this?’ I said, ‘To be honest with you, I’m just excited to get in something that I know it’s not gonna be me.’ These cars are capable of going out and winning races. My teammates are capable of going out and winning races. It’s been a while since I’ve had that teammate that you could lean on that when he was doing something that you knew you could put that setup in the exact way he had it and go out and have success in it. We’re sending Kevin to the Phoenix test. I probably could have really pushed and pouted and tried to get that test, but ultimately here’s a guy that’s won out there eight times. I would be a fool not to let him go out there and establish that baseline for all of us across the board, and then go out and try to beat him and everybody else with it. That’s the kind of teamwork that you have to have and that you can have when you’re at an organization like this – as big as it is and the depth that it has with the drivers.”
