Ford Notes and Quotes
Monster Energy NASCAR Cup Series (MENCS)
Bank of America Roval 400 Advance (Charlotte Motor Speedway, Concord, NC)
Friday, September 28, 2018
RYAN BLANEY, No. 12 Menards/Pennzoil Ford Fusion – DID YOU HAVE ANY HOT WHEELS MEMORIES? “Yeah, Kyle Petty drove the Hot Wheels car for a little while. I remember I had a diecast of that one that I played with, and I think they used to make some NASCAR stuff other than Kyle’s car. Every kid enjoys Hot Wheels. I didn’t know it was the 50th anniversary though. That’s a pretty cool fact to know, but every kid is into them. I bought some of my younger cousins Hot Wheel kits every year and my sister is having a kid in December, so I’m gonna spoil him with all the Hot Wheels that he can handle, so, yeah, that’s pretty neat. I think every person was Hot Wheels at some point in their life and they had collections. I had a briefcase full of them. They made some cool briefcases and ramps and stuff. They had some pretty cool stuff. I’m sure it’s evolved and gotten a little bit more advanced nowadays. I may have to re-up on my Hot Wheels skills at 24. That would be nice.”
IT’S ALSO THE 25TH ANNIVERSARY LAST WEEKEND OF THE NASCAR RACING PC GAME. DO YOU HAVE ANY MEMORIES OF THAT? “No, I don’t think I played that. I think the first NASCAR game I played as a kid was the original NASCAR Heat game. There were a lot of other ones throughout the years or if you guys remember that total team control, you could control every car and it was awesome when you could race with like Hendrick who had four cars and you could pretty much rig the whole race, which was nice. It was pretty fun, and now going back, I have a Nintendo 64 and they have a couple NASCAR games on that, so I like that. It’s crazy to see how far they’ve come on gaming in general, but racing games for sure. I never played the older PC version of it. I don’t really have a computer at my house, so I don’t even know if I could go back and do it nowadays if I wanted to.”
DOVER IS GONNA HAVE A KIOSK IN THEIR FAN ZONE WHERE PEOPLE CAN BET ON THE RACES OR ANY OTHER SPORTING EVENT. DO YOU LIKE THAT IDEA AND DO YOU CARE? “I don’t really care, to be honest with you. I don’t personally gamble. I used to. I don’t anymore. I think it’s cool. It’s neat that you can just walk up and if you’re a gambling type, walk up and put your money down. I didn’t know that you could gamble on other events too. I thought it had to be the race since it was at the race track, but that’s cool for people who want to do that stuff. It doesn’t really affect me at all if you bet money on me or somebody else. I wish you the best if you do, but, no, I won’t be making a visit to that just because I don’t gamble.”
IS NASCAR UNIQUE IN THAT YOU GUYS HAVE INTEL AND COULD TELL A FRIEND INTERESTED IN PLACING A BET WHO MIGHT BE GOOD AND WHO ISN’T ON ANY GIVEN WEEKEND? “That’s a good point, but I do think that NASCAR is a little bit different sport than say you’re betting on a basketball game. I don’t know if Lebron James’ buddies come up and are like, ‘Hey man, you gonna put up 40 tonight or are you gonna slouch off and put up 20?’ I don’ t know if he’s like, ‘Yeah, I’ll put up 40,’ because he can put up whatever numbers he wants, but all of that information is not really limited to the teams and drivers. Any fan can get that information, just look at practice sheets and then 10-lap averages, 20-lap averages. You can figure all that stuff out just by watching times if you get the sport and you know where to look, but if someone comes up to me and asks who is good and tell me they’re gonna bet on whoever, I don’t know, is that cheating? Is that illegal if you do that?
“I don’t know the rules, but I’d tell them who I thought was good if they didn’t tell me they were gonna bet. People ask me about their fantasy stuff all the time. They’re like, ‘Should I take you this week?’ I don’t care. I don’t know. Look up and see if you think I’m good or not. That’s your choice, not mine. It’s not my money. I don’t want to tell you how to spend your money, but I don’t know. It might be a little bit different, but you can find all that stuff without asking teams or drivers who would be good or not that weekend. There’s so much information being pumped out there nowadays especially that you can figure that out on your own.”
HOW MUCH IMPORTANCE DO YOU PUT ON QUALIFYING FOR THIS RACE AND WHERE IS THE BEST PLACE TO PASS ON THIS COURSE? “I do think qualifying towards the front is important everywhere, but here especially because the track is so tight and really narrow. You can look at some corners and try to figure out passing zones, but until you kind of get out there and racing cars and you can see where you get runs on people that’s kind of hard to figure out. Coming off of turn eight leading onto the backstretch that’s a big speed place where you’re going pretty fast, so there’s a couple of them just looking at the paper where you think you can pass people, but I think if you can qualify up towards the front that’s gonna be great, but you never know how things are gonna play out with cautions and pit strategy and things like that. You can get shuffled to the back pretty quick, so just try to stay up front and stay out of potential danger because you don’t know how this race is gonna go. People have been saying it’s gonna be wild and crazy and, yeah, it may have moments of being like that, but I don’t think it’ll be the whole race like that. I think it is really important to qualify up front.”
HOW MUCH CHAOS DO YOU SEE ON RESTARTS? “Yeah, it’ll be interesting. I think it’s really smart that they cut out that chicane coming to restarts and just run the normal line because the way it would play out is three-quarters of the field would be in that chicane and it would be mayhem, but turn one is pretty tough as is. A couple cars have wrecked there trying to go through there by yourself and now you’ve got 40 cars trying to go through there side-by-side, I don’t know. I think everyone is gonna be cautious just because we don’t know at the beginning of the race and then as the race goes on you’ll see more people get aggressive obviously when it comes down to crunch time, but, yeah, it’ll be sketchy at moments and it’ll be fun to watch. Hopefully, it’ll be fun to be a part of. I know it’s gonna be fun to be a part of if you don’t get caught up in anything. Obviously, that’s every race, but it’ll be interesting for sure. I’m excited to get out there today and see where we stack up.”
WHAT’S THE STRATEGY FOR PRACTICE? “The whole weekend kind of looks like that. I think Sunday looks OK, but you never know how the weather is gonna be. If it looks like Sunday’s weather is looking iffy and it looks like it might be a little bit wet today, you want to get out there today so you have a little bit of wet practice and just try to figure out how to drive this track because obviously you hear all the time that you drive a wet track completely different than a dry race track. I don’t know. If it starts to rain here, that’s kind of a last-minute decision that crew chiefs have to make if they want to do it. They don’t change a ton to the car – you mess with the rear end of the car and put tread tires on it – but I don’t really know. It would be nice to get some laps just in case Sunday turns that way, but we’ll see.”
ARE YOU AN ADVOCATE THAT RAIN TIRES ARE AN OPTION? “Yeah, you’ve got to be. You can’t run in the wet on slicks. It’s just not possible, so you have that option. I did an XFINITY race at Mid-Ohio in the rain three years back and that was a lot of fun. It was a blast. It wasn’t wet, it was pouring rain and you couldn’t see anything in front of you and then your wiper blade gets cocked sideways and it’s not even working, so it’s pretty nuts, but you just go with whatever situation is presented to you and try to overcome it.”
WHAT WILL IT BE LIKE ON PIT ROAD, GETTING ON AND OFF? “I was thinking about that earlier this week after looking at the map and kind of where everything ends – the pit road line ends – and I think that’s gonna be a big deal for the spotters to kind of give you information. If you’re side-by-side with a car coming off pit road and you’re making that first sharp left and then you blend onto the race track, one, if there’s another car coming off of turn two that’s three cars in a really tight spot that’s not gonna work. There might have to be a little give-and-take there because it’s almost a blind corner pretty much. So that will be a big deal for the spotters to let us know if someone is coming or if you need to back out or something like that. It’s a lot on the driver too, but you just can’t see on the race track. If you’re two-wide and you’re coming off pit road and no one is coming off of turn tow, I think you can do it. You should be OK, but it’s a big deal if someone else is on the race track because they’ don’t know if you’re coming out or not at that wall. They have no idea, so it could be trouble, but that situation you just have to get all the info you can.”
HOW WILL YOU LOOK AT THIS EVENT AFTER THE WEEKEND IS OVER? “That’s a better question for after Sunday. I just don’t know how it’s gonna play out. You can make all the assumptions right now, but when there’s not been a race on a track before you can’t really judge it too hard. I know some people have been giving it a hard time and that it might have been thrown together quick and maybe not laid out the best, but it is what it is and it’s a race track and we have our job to do. You can’t keep bashing a place. It’s not gonna do anything different, it’s just gonna kind of sit in your mind. You have to make the best of it and I don’t think you can judge it really at all right now. You have to get on it, race it and overcome it. If you have a bad outlook on it already, you’re kind of already behind the eight-ball. You have to be positive about it and just try to go do the best you can, especially in our position where we have to have a really good day on Sunday to try to advance into the next round. I don’t know. We’ll see. I don’t think it’s a bad idea to maybe put it at some other tracks. There are a handful of other places with road courses inside. I think Indy has a really good road course inside it that Indy Cars go on that I enjoy watching each year, so I think you have to get the feedback after Sunday and then maybe implement something here in the next couple of years to maybe go forward with something like this at other places.”
DO YOU WISH THIS RACE WAS EARLIER IN THE SEASON OR ARE YOU LOOKING FORWARD TO THIS EXPERIENCE NOW? “I think there are two ways to look at that. Me personally as a driver who – this situation would be out of the Playoffs – but when you go to a completely different race track for the first time that had just been constructed, you really wouldn’t like to see it in Playoffs. That’s just me personally because there are so many unknowns about it, but I understand why they did it in the Playoffs because, A, this is close to Charlotte’s normal race weekend for this time of year, and, B, it makes it exciting for the fans and exciting for everyone to watch because the stakes are really high. People love watching high stakes games or races. That’s what draws people in and, honestly, that’s what teams live for. There are both sides of it, just kind of different opinions and outlooks on how you view everything, but this kind of goes either way. Like I said a little bit before, you can’t have a bad mindset. If I wished it was two months ago, it’s now so you have to just realize and try to go accomplish whatever you can the best you can.”
ARIC ALMIROLA, No. 10 Smithfield Ford Fusion – WHAT’S THE STRATEGY FOR PRACTICE AND HOW WOULD YOU FEEL IF WET WEATHER IMPACTED THE WEEKEND? “Nervous. I’m not gonna lie. I think the course is tricky enough and it’s a challenge all on its own in the dry, so you add water to it not knowing where there could be standing water and how the drainage system works around the road course part of the track inside the infield part. I’ve not seen the race track be wet yet, so you just don’t know, like I said, where the standing water would be, where it would be dry, where it would puddle up, and I think that’s cause for concern. And then just the shear fact that there’s less grip when it’s wet, so that makes it much more challenging on an already challenging course.”
IS YOUR STRATEGY TO GO ALL-OUT FOR THE WIN OR JUST TRY TO REMAIN IN THAT TOP 12? “Honestly, Johnny and I have sat down and talked this week going into this weekend and we really can’t afford to do anything different. I think our M.O. has been show up, go through practice, work on our race car to get it driving good, get the most speed out of it that we can, and then go execute the race and that’s really been what’s got us to where we’re at today. I think for us going into this weekend trying to change that mentality or change that strategy and trying to be conservative, I think, would be a mistake, so we’re just gonna go and do what we do and race and try and put down good laps and try, for me the driver, not to make mistakes. Hopefully, our pit crew is on it. They’ve been so good the last couple weeks, so if we all do our parts, I feel like we should run top 15, top 12, top 10, which is very standard for us, especially on a road course. We ran top 10 most of the day at Sonoma. I think we finished seventh. We qualified seventh at Watkins Glen and had a really fast car, so I think looking at where we stack up, I think we should be able to run top 12 and that should be good enough on points to do what we need to do, considering we have that 23-point cushion going into this weekend.”
ON A SCALE OF 1-10 HOW DO YOU RANK YOURSELF AS A ROAD COURSE RACER? “Going into this year I would say on a scale of 1-10 about a two (laughing). Slightly above novice, but I have put so much work and so much effort into it this year, knowing that I would be the weak link, knowing that the cars were gonna be good, and knowing that I was gonna have the tools and resources at my disposal to get better, and to have teammates that are really good at it to lean on. That’s the first time in my career that I’ve had the car, the tools, the people, the teammates and so I’ve put a full-out effort on getting better at road course racing because I knew that has been my weakest link on all the tracks that we go to, and I feel like I’m probably a seven now. I don’t think I’m even close to being good enough to challenge to win on the road courses that we go to, but I think that I’m very competitive.”
WOULD YOU PREFER THIS EVENT NOT BE A CUTOFF RACE? WOULD YOU RATHER IT BE THE FIRST RACE OF A ROUND? “What difference does it make? I have that view, that approach. What difference does it make where it’s at? You still have to score the most amount of points you can and they take your point total or whether or not you’ve won from those three races, so the fact that it’s a cutoff race or if it was the first race, I honestly think it makes no difference, at least for me and the way that I view it. Other people might view it differently, but it being a cutoff race makes no difference. It doesn’t change the way we’re gonna race. It doesn’t change anything.
“We’re gonna go and hopefully we have a fast car. Hopefully, the driver does his part. Hopefully, the crew does their part and we all execute and we go and maximize our day. Whether it’s the first race or the last race it doesn’t matter, in my opinion.”
HAVE YOU LEANED ON YOUR TEAMMATES FOR ADVICE ON ROAD COURSES? “Yes, some. And then obviously we had the test here, so we tested for two days. The 41 and 4 tested one day and the 14 and 10 team tested the other, so that was helpful. I spent some time in the Ford simulator and that’s been helpful, and then looking over data. I’ve had that opportunity to look at those three guys’ data versus my data. One thing that’s been challenging is the course changed a little bit from the first test to the second test and then now the tire is different than what we tested on, so that will be different as well. But, yeah, I’ve had the opportunity to look at some data and talk to those guys and obviously we have our competition meetings and we talk about the weekend past and the weekend ahead. This week there has been a lot of talk about the Roval and getting ready for this weekend, so it has been nice to lean on those guys because they are really good road racers, but talking and doing all that stuff and listening it’s still different when you’re in the car and actually applying it in the car and your natural instincts are to do whatever they are that comes naturally to you. So trying to apply what you’ve learned from them is the challenge and that’s where I really try and focus on the data and look at what am I doing? What are they doing? How do I do what I do differently? And those different things, but I think as a whole our company puts a lot of effort into every single race that we go to. It doesn’t matter if it’s a speedway race, a short track race, an intermediate race or a road course, and that’s the beauty of being at Stewart-Haas Racing is I feel like they have really no weak links, that there’s a full-out effort on every single race that we go to and that’s the kind of effort that it takes and I have to do my part.”
HOW PHYSICALLY CHALLENGING CAN THIS COURSE BE TO THE CAR? “That’s a great question and I don’t know the answer to that. I do know that at the test looking at how violently we were going across the bumps and it’s gonna take a toll on the cars for sure. We ran a lot of laps at the test and so I feel like from an endurance standpoint we should have a pretty good idea, just based on the amount of laps we ran at the test and taking the cars back to the shop and looking at all the components and identifying weaknesses or things that held up good, so from that aspect I feel comfortable, but there are still a lot of unknowns. Like you said, apparently the curbs are different from the test and those little things that might pop up that create issues and that’s honestly from the standpoint that we’re in on points and stuff, those are the things that we worry about. I’m not as worried about just getting plainly outrun. I feel like we’ll be competitive enough and do our job on that part. The things that I worry about are the things that are out of our control. Those are things I shouldn’t worry about. I should be able to put that in the back of my mind and not worry about it as much because I just need to worry about the things I can control, but those are the things that naturally bug you because they can creep up and bite you and it’s something you didn’t have any control over, so hopefully those things don’t happen and we’ll have a good race. The cars are gonna take a beating.
“If you take a look at most of the cars at the test and the noses are beat up on them, the rockers and side skirts are all flared out on them from running over the curbs. You look at the sides of the noses where they hit the curbs and the noses and stuff are all wrinkled up, so there is a lot of damage that’s done to the vehicles going across the curbs.”
NOT MANY PEOPLE PICKED YOU TO MAKE IT OUT OF THE FIRST ROUND. HOW GOOD DO YOU FEEL NOW AND HAVE YOU USED THAT AS MOTIVATION? “The beauty about my race team and I feel like I hopefully lead by example is I don’t really care what anybody says or thinks because your guys’ opinion or anybody else’s opinion doesn’t make my race car go faster, and none of you sign my checks, so I don’t care. I think we hone in on what we do and we show up and put our head down and go to work, and some weekends it’s good enough to run up front and win, and some weekends it’s not, but our goal is to go and maximize every week and these last couple weeks we’ve showed up to the race track with speed and run up front and we’ve been kind of riding that high and riding the momentum. I really think, going back to June, we’ve had a lot of speed. We’ve showed up to race tracks and been really competitive, led a bunch of laps at Chicago and felt like we had a shot to win there and it didn’t go our way. We went to Loudon and led a bunch of laps there and had a shot to win and it didn’t go our way. We’ve been kind of riding that high and that momentum from showing up at all sorts of different race tracks with speed, and our team is coming together. Our team is gelling. Johnny and myself are getting on the same page. We’re a young team. Most of our guys on our team are in their late 20s and early 30s. It’s Johnny’s first year of being a crew chief at anything. He’s never been a crew chief in K&N, Truck, or XFINITY. This is his first year being crew chief, period. And this is my first year with the organization, so we’ve kind of gone through some growing pains and continue to go through some, but building together and working together has been so much fun and I feel like we’ve had a lot of success and we’ve run really good, and our ceiling for potential is so high. I don’t even feel like we’re close to it yet just because we’re still new and working together, so I’ve enjoyed that. I’ve enjoyed these last couple weeks have been a lot of fun. The intensity level certainly picks up in the Playoffs and rising to that challenge and showing that we are capable, I think we’ve proven that the last couple weeks with the runs that we’ve had, and then kind of riding that high and that momentum and then this week announcing we’ve got a new partnership with Valley Technical Academy, it just feels right, like everything is going right and you see that in sports and especially in racing, where when things get on a roll they just kind of continue to go and I feel like we’re right there. I feel like we’re on the brink of just continuing to keep this momentum going.”
