Ford Performance MENCS Notes and Quotes
NASCAR Playoffs Advance
Tuesday, September 11, 2017
The Wood Brothers will be making their NASCAR Playoff debut this weekend when Ryan Blaney and the No. 21 Motorcraft/Quick Lane Ford Fusion hits the track at Chicagoland Speedway. Co-owners Eddie and Len Wood, along with crew chief Jeremy Bullins, participated in a conference call today to talk about the final 10 weeks of the season and their hopes of winning a championship.
EDDIE WOOD, Co-Owner – No. 21 Motorcraft/Quick Lane Ford Fusion – “I’d just like everyone to know that everyone at Wood Brothers Racing and all of our partners, Motorcraft/Quick Lane, Ford Performance and Ford Motor Company, that we’re thinking about everyone that’s affected by Hurricane Irma and, of course, Hurricane Harvey. All of that is still going on in Texas and a lot of people that we’re associated with and friends that we know are in both places, so we just want them to know we’re thinking about them and wishing them the best. And then today is 9/11, the anniversary of that, and I can remember where I was like everyone else. I can remember exactly where I was and what I was doing when we heard about that, so I don’t want to forget that. We still think about it.”
THIS IS YOUR FIRST TIME IN THE PLAYOFFS. WHAT ARE YOUR THOUGHTS? “This is a first for Len and I and our team. We did win an owner’s championship, our dad and uncles did in 1963, it’s been a long, long time, but this is very special to us because this is the first time we’ve actually been involved in the new format. It’s kind of a do-or-die format. You’ve got three races to do well in to advance to the next round and that puts a lot of pressure on everyone, but I think we’re ready for it. Jeremy can talk to that in a few minutes. He’s done a lot of work in preparing for it. In the past few weeks there have been a lot of things he’s been going over and getting ready for, but just the sheer excitement of being a part of that is something new to us and I’m really excited about it.”
LEN WOOD, Co-Owner – No. 21 Motorcraft/Quick Lane Ford Fusion – “This will be our first time and we’ve been looking forward to this since our Pocono win back in June and getting to the Playoffs. The first round are tracks that we run well, which the mile-and-a-half stuff are our best tracks right now. We’ve had speed everywhere we’ve been, so to get through this first round we’re looking at it like it’s three races until the end and then we need to transfer. We’ll assess it from there and then we have three races until the next one, so we’re looking forward to it.”
JEREMY BULLINS, Crew Chief – No. 21 Motorcraft/Quick Lane Ford Fusion – YOU GOT TO TEST CHICAGOLAND A FEW WEEKS AGO. HOW BENEFICIAL IS THAT? “It’s always nice to get a test. We don’t get a lot of track testing anymore with the organizational testing program, but fortunately Chicago and Martinsville and Homestead we’re all gonna get to test because they’re all Playoff races for us. Having the opportunity to test at the first track was good in a lot of ways. It gave us the opportunity to work on our setup for there, but it also gave us the opportunity to try some things to make our cars better that you don’t get the opportunity to do on a race weekend, so hopefully all of that will parlay into some performance to kick this thing off.”
EDDIE WOOD CONTINUED – WHAT MAKES RYAN BLANEY SO GOOD? “Ryan is a special talent. He’s only 23 years old, but he’s got the maturity in the race car of a veteran that has raced for a number of years. I think that’s one of his special qualities is he seems to be able to adapt to different things. He gets up to speed really quickly everywhere we go. Even last year when we started the full schedule there were a lot of places he had never seen, and before the time we got ready to qualify he was already up to speed. That takes a special kind of guy. I think you’re gonna see a lot out of Blaney in the future for a long, long time.”
LEN WOOD CONTINUED – “He’s a special talent. I think last year he was kind of trying to gain respect from all the other drivers and once he pulled that rookie stripe off at Daytona, I think he said, ‘We’re gonna turn up the intensity a little bit and aggressiveness.’ We scored a lot of stage points this year, I think like 168, which is running hard all day long. We’ve got to put the races together without making mistakes and that will be the key to getting him up front.”
EDDIE WOOD CONTINUED – DO YOU FEEL IF YOU GET PAST THE FIRST ROUND THAT THINGS LOOK BETTER FOR YOU DOWN THE LINE, OR WILL THEY ALL BE DIFFICULT FOR A GUY WHO HASN’T BEEN THERE MANY TIMES? “Every race is as important as the next one. There is none that are really more important to me. They’re all important, especially the first three in the first round. If you’re fortunate to run well and finish up front in those races or even win one in advance, then you start worrying about the next three. You’ve got to take them one at a time. Everywhere that’s left Ryan has run well there, and I feel good about all of them. But the mile-and-a-halves are certainly better for us right now, but he’s run well everywhere we’ve been. We don’t have a road course in the Playoffs, but he had never seen Sonoma until last year, so he catches on quick and I wouldn’t put him at a disadvantage just because he doesn’t have a lot of starts.”
JEREMY BULLINS CONTINUED – “I feel like the first round with Chicago, Loudon and Dover – Chicago is a place I feel like we can go and easily be a top-five car, if not contend to win the race. Our intermediate program is strong and Loudon and Dover are two places where I feel we can run top-10 all day long. We’ve been able to do that and just need to put races together at those two places, but the first round you can kind of point your way through. The second round with Charlotte, Talladega and Kansas, I feel like we can win any of those. I feel like those are all very good race tracks for us. The next round is Martinsville, Texas and Phoenix. Martinsville, we had top-five speed in the first race and had some issues there. Texas, I felt like we were a contender for the win, and Phoenix is a place we’ve gotten a lot stronger at, so I certainly feel like it’s out there for us to do our jobs and try to get all the way to Homestead. I’d say a lot of people look at us as a long shot, but I think some of the tracks really suit us well.”
ARE YOU CONCERNED THAT AT SOME OF THESE TRACKS EARLIER IN THE SEASON YOU DIDN’T GET THE RESULT YOU WERE LOOKING FOR? “No, not really. You look at Dover for example, I think we were running in the top 10 and broke an axle. The same thing at Charlotte, we were running in the top five and had an axle failure there. Talladega is hit-or-miss. You’re either gonna run well or get caught up in a wreck, so we know our speedway program is really good. We’ve all got good speedway cars, so I’m not worried about being competitive at that one. Kansas, I think we wound up top five, but that’s a place we were in contention all day. Texas, the stage strategy got us a little bit and cost us some track position at one point, but we still had a really fast car. Like I said, Loudon and Phoenix are places where we’re gaining on them. I wouldn’t say we’ve been competitive enough to win one yet, but we’ve got some top 10s at Phoenix and things to build on. I’m not concerned at all. I feel like it’s just a matter of putting races together and not having some of the things that go wrong that have gone wrong in the past and if we do that, we’ll be in good shape.”
IS THERE ANYTHING THAT STANDS OUT MORE AS A CONCERN? WERE YOU WORKING AHEAD ON CARS? “Winning a race in June allows you to be aggressive with some of that stuff. Fortunately, with our Team Penske alliance and having access to the technology and the things that they’re working on, we’ve been able to be part of the solution as far as trying to make things better and work forward and look forward. We’re actively working on things that we found recently to make our Chicago cars better, so we’re just trying to push as hard as we can. We know everybody else will and we’ve got to be the best we can be.”
EDDIE WOOD CONTINUED – SINCE SOME TEAMS CAN CARRY LARGE AMOUNTS OF PLAYOFF POINTS WILL OTHER TEAMS TAKE MORE RISKS TO TRY AND GAIN ON THOSE WITH A BIG LEAD TO START? “You guys have been around racing a long time as well as we have and you can’t really predict what’s gonna happen. Those guys could have some problems early and all of a sudden those extra points they’ve got could disappear pretty quick if the right guy doesn’t have a good day. I think it’s set up to race aggressively. Everyone does. Those guys will as well as we will. It’s just like we said a while ago, Ryan as the driver has got to try to not put himself in bad spots and we just have to do everything we can do on pit road and then it sort of falls on Jeremy. He’s got the load of calling the race and that’s not an easy task. I wouldn’t want to do that. I used to do it, but there are too many variables and too much to keep up with, so my hat’s off to Jeremy for the job he does. But I think everybody has to run hard. The whole thing is designed for everybody to run hard all day long, and I think that’s what you’re gonna see.”
JEREMY BULLINS CONTINUED – “I think the reality of it is if you look at the standings, I mean obviously the 78 and the 42 and some of those guys have had phenomenal seasons and racked up a lot of points, so they’re in a very good position to carry those points. The rest of it once you get pretty far down the list it’s fairly even. We’re talking one or two points either way through a lot of those spots, so, to me, I look at it and say, ‘Alright, there’s about 12 of us that are racing each other heads-up with not really spotting each other anything or having an advantage or disadvantage.’ So I don’t really look at it a whole lot different than years past. I think you can easily point your way through the first round if you don’t have any bad days or don’t get caught up in any accidents or have any failures, and then after that it’s time to go racing. I think the good thing for us, like I said, is if we can get through the first round, I think the schedule starts to get in our favor a little bit of some places we’ve run really well at, so I don’t know that it really changes anything from my perspective.”
LEN WOOD CONTINUED – RYAN IS WELL AWARE THAT YOUR NEXT WIN WILL BE #100. WHAT DOES IT MEAN TO KNOW SOMEONE LIKE RYAN IS SO IN-TUNE WITH YOUR HISTORY? “Ryan came to our museum early on in 2014 or 2015 and we talked about having a spot on the wall for his picture. I think he made that his mission to be one of the winners that had driven the 21 car. He values the history. There aren’t many people right now who do that like he does. He wears the old hats and old t-shirts, things like that, and, of course, we’d like to get number 100 next week at Chicago. Nothing would be better than that, so he does a nice job with the history.”
CAN YOU DISCUSS HOW YOUR LEVEL OF COMPETITION HAS RAISED SINCE THE TECHNICAL ALLIANCE WITH TEAM PENSKE? “It’s been a really good thing for us to be aligned with Team Penske. It’s almost like we were one of Roger’s cars. We use quite a few people from Penske. We obviously use their Research and Development, the engineering. It’s made it much easier for Eddie and I because you don’t really have to worry about whether the car runs or not because it’s there every week. We’ve had speed every track we’ve been to and as Jeremy talked about, we’ve got to put it all together. Doug Yates and his engines have been some of the best in the garage, second-to-none as far as I’m concerned, so hopefully we can put them in the championship weekend.”
EDDIE WOOD CONTINUED – HOW HAS THE IMPROVED PERFORMANCE HELPED IN TERMS OF BEING ABLE TO HOLD SPONSORSHIP? “This is of course a performance-based business as it always has been, and we’re fortunate to have our partners in Ford Motor Company and all the people there have been behind us forever. We’ve raced Ford products since our dad started the race team in 1950. We’ve raced nothing but Ford Motor Company products and we’re all like family. I just want to send a special thanks to the Motorcraft and Quick Lane people like Brett Wheatley, and Ford Performance and Ford Motor Company in general. All of our friends up in Dearborn like Edsel Ford and Jim Farley, Joe Hinrichs, Raj Nair, Dave Pericak – all of those guys kind of look after us and make sure we’ve got the right products and backing and information to go along with all of our Team Penske alliance. It’s all a really good mesh. Fortunately, all of the race cars we’ve had this year have been really, really fast and that makes things easier. I’ve always said that running up front and being in contention to win races just makes life easier if you’re a racer.”
JEREMY BULLINS CONTINUED – IF PLAYING AROUND WITH THE REAR END OF THE CAR IS SUCH A MINIMAL ADVANTAGE, THEN WHY DO TEAMS DO IT AT ALL? “I think there are different things that will get you in trouble. Some of the things that have gotten people in trouble, in my opinion, are minimal, but those are only the things that I’m aware of. I can’t tell you what other teams got in trouble for and things like that, but it’s just an area that everybody over the past few years has spent a lot of time working on trying to find speed. I think a lot of it is very difficult to control and some things that you don’t necessarily do intentionally can get you in trouble, which is unfortunate. I think there are times where teams will cross the line and do things intentionally to get in trouble and a penalty is warranted, but I think some common sense has to come into play sometimes and try to make sure that there was intent there. I think we race cars that everything can be fine at the beginning of the race, but if you hit the fence once it can move a lot of things around. These parts move every lap under the loads that these cars see, so I think it’s something that we all work really hard to stay inbounds on and not get ourselves in trouble on, and, unfortunately, we’ve seen issues where cars got in trouble. From our perspective, we’re just gonna work hard and try to avoid that for these last 10.”
