FORD PERFORMANCE NASCAR NOTES AND QUOTES
Date: Friday June 2, 2017
Event: AAA 400 Drive for Autism – Qualifying Notes and Quotes
Series: Monster Energy NASCAR Cup Series
Location: Dover Speedway (1-mile oval)
FORD QUALIFYING RESULTS
6th Kurt Busch
8th Brad Keselowski
12th Ricky Stenhouse Jr.
15th Ryan Blaney
17th Trevor Bayne
18th Kevin Harvick
22nd Clint Bowyer
25th Matt DiBenedetto
26th Joey Logano
27th Landon Cassill
30th Regan Smith
31st Danica Patrick
33rd David Ragan
KURT BUSCH (No 41 Haas Automation/Monster Energy Ford Fusion) — Qualified 6th “We’re making good improvements. We were sixth in Kansas and going for the pole position at Charlotte and ended up P12. I was going for it today with a good, clean lap. We want a little more. We’re making improvements. Any time that I pressure the car to get that extra tenth out of it, we lose a tenth. We need to figure out how to get that tenth on Fridays. Overall, I’m happy with the effort. The car unloaded with a lot of speed.”
THIS TRACK IS LIKE RACING ON A RAZOR’S EDGE ISN’T IT? “Yeah. You can get in trouble here really fast. It’s nicknamed the ‘Monster Mile’ for that reason. We unloaded fast. I just didn’t deliver the job I needed to today. We’ll take P6 and get ready for Sunday’s race.”
BRAD KESELOWSKI (No. 2 Wurth Ford Fusion) — Qualified 8th “We were strong, consistent. We ran a lot of consistent times but needed more to have a pole (winning) car.”
HOW WAS YOUR CAR IN RACE TRIM? “It’s decent. We need to find more speed in it tomorrow. We’ll start up front for Sunday and that gives us a chance to get a win.”
RICKY STENHOUSE (No. 17 Little Hug Ford Fusion) — Qualified 12th “We’ve got good speed in our car. I’m happy with that. I have to get it to drive a little bit better in race trim. As long as we keep the speed, that’s the plan. My qualifying laps were okay. I over-drove (Turns) 3 and 4. I was trying to make up from not getting off Turn 2 like I needed. All in all, I wanted to get Ford another pole. Ford was on quite a streak for the poles. I feel like I have a car that can race on Sunday. We have speed in the car and we can definitely win from 12th. We just have to get it ready tomorrow to race on Sunday. I want to be able to get the car to run on the top and on the bottom.”
KEVIN HARVICK (No. 4 Jimmy John’s Ford Fusion) — Qualified 18th “We were just really loose in the corner and tight off the corner. For whatever reason we had that struggle from the first lap that we ran today. I felt like our race trim stuff was pretty good. We just never hit on it in qualifying trim and that’s rare. (They) do a great job on Fridays.”
JOEY LOGANO (No. 22 Shell Ford Fusion) Qualified 26th “I just got loose on the first run in (Turns) 3 and 4 and chased it up the racetrack. We just over-adjusted a little bit. I got tight in the two-thirds on the second run and lost too much speed there. We’re lacking speed right now and we don’t understand completely why. There’s a lot of different theories, I guess. We’ve lacked speed the last few weeks. We have some work to do. We’ll figure it out. It’s a strong team. We’ve fought back before. We’ll have to fight back this weekend, but we’ll fight back in the bigger picture and get speed back in our car.”
