Ford Notes and Quotes
Monster Energy NASCAR Cup Series (MENCS)
Bojangles’ Southern 500 Qualifying (Darlington Raceway, Darlington, SC)
Saturday, September 1, 2018
Ford Qualifying Results:
8th – Joey Logano
9th – Kurt Busch
12th – Aric Almirola
13th – Brad Keselowski
14th – Paul Menard
15th – Matt Kenseth
17th – Clint Bowyer
21st – Ryan Blaney
22nd – Kevin Harvick
23rd – David Ragan
25th – Ricky Stenhouse Jr.
26th – Michael McDowell
30th – Matt DiBenedetto
KURT BUSCH, No. 41 Haas Automation Ford Fusion – “We worked really hard to qualify ninth. I just messed up the first time out in round two. I chose the middle lane in three and four and I should have stayed on the bottom. That put us in P13, so we went back out and picked up time, so it verified the line that I chose, it’s just that we had an extra outing on our tires for round three. There’s no way to go for the pole. There’s no way to try to stretch it, especially with an impound and having an extra lap on the tires, so that’s kind of the cash register of stuff we went through to qualify ninth, so we’ll go from there.”
JOEY LOGANO, No. 22 Pennzoil Ford Fusion – “That’s not a horrible place to start. We want to be better than that, obviously, but I think we didn’t make any qualifying runs yesterday. We were focused on race trim and we still have some work to do in race trim, I think, but we’ve got what we’ve got at this point with the impound. We fell off just a little bit too much in the last round. If we could have maintained our speed, we would have been close to the pole, but that’s just Darlington – tires fall off.”
ARIC ALMIROLA, No. 10 Smithfield Helping Hungry Homes Ford Fusion – “I thought our car is pretty good. We had good speed in practice in race trim. I didn’t really know what to expect in qualifying trim. I hit the wall actually in my mock run in practice, so I kind of went into that with some reservations and a little bit of unknown, but it was a solid day for us. We made the final round again, so doing those kind of things is what we need to do here building some momentum going into the Playoffs.”
