Ford Notes and Quotes
Monster Energy NASCAR Cup Series (MENCS)
First Data 500 (Martinsville Speedway)
Saturday, October 27, 2018
Clint Bowyer heads back to Martinsville Speedway looking to kick off the Round of 8 playoffs the same way he did at the track in the spring, with a win. Bowyer spoke about returning to the site of victory and what it will take to advance into the Championship 4 at Homestead.
CLINT BOWYER, No. 14 Rush Truck Centers Ford Fusion — LAST TIME WE HAD YOU HERE IN THE MEDIA CENTER IT WAS A GOOD DAY: “It wa a really good day. That is what we do this for. We do this to win. Certainly it was a big win for myself and our race team and our organization. Obviously it was a big confidence booster for me and it was a long time in between those wins. I keep looking at that photo of the dirt track over there on the wall. This place used to be dirt. Can we go back to that? That is awesome. I would like more roll cage though.”
WHAT IS IS LIKE TO BE A PART OF A TEAM WITH ALL FOUR CARS IN THE FINAL EIGHT AND DO YOU HOLD ANYTHING BACK KNOWING THAT THEY ARE THE ONES YOU ARE BATTLING FOR A CHAMPIONSHIP? “A total team effort across the board is the reason you have all four cars in the round of eight. We have half of the battle. I think that because of the willingness to cooperate with one another from a driver standpoint and the willingness to work with one another from the crew chiefs, engineering and everything involved, the teamwork is what makes the dream work. I think that is a quote somewhere. The manufacturer at Ford. Everything. It is the total package right now. It is a ton of fun to be on a team like that, an organization like that, with teammates like I have. You come every week and we have just as good a shot as anybody. Our cars are capable of getting the job done every single weekend, no matter the conditions or what track we are at or anything in between. I am very proud of that. You roll into the shop on Tuesday and the first thing I do, the goofball I am, is grab the receptionist intercom and thank everybody and tell them what a good job they are doing and how much fun it is to drive their cars. It really is an honor to be able to drive for an organization like this with the effort that is going on.”
IS THERE EXTRA PRESSURE? “I think the pressure come from yourself. Yes, there are outside pressures. Knowing that Kevin has won seven races this year and he is a teammate in the same equipment I have, knowing that I need to be winning that many races. There is pressure knowing that the last time I was here that 18 car was right on my heels. The Penske cars are fast. There is always pressure on the outside. It comes from within. When you are driving that two-lane road up here you start thinking about what you are doing and where you are running on the race track, what you need to focus on today. You have to adjust. You have to adapt. Not only your thought process but your setups and communication and your driving style. You can’t go out there and drive it the same when it is 50 degrees warmer. The track seemed like it too rubber faster than the spring race because of the warmer conditions and things like that. You have to be able to adapt to all of those and kind of collect your thoughts. For us, we had such a good run in the spring. For me, I have been really good here over the years, I just have to keep that thought process. The biggest thing for me is that I just try to stay along those same lines. I don’t want to overshoot knowing you have to be one direction or the other and then get on the other side of the fence, whether it is tight or loose. I like staying focus on one direction and kind of inch toward that as you go methodically through practice.”
WHERE DO YOU THINK YOUR BEST SHOT IS? “I am sitting where I think my best shot it. I know that. Again, just because you won in the spring doesn’t mean you will come here and run well. If you look back at our spring race, it took a couple stabs at adjustments and the track coming on and things to get us in a situation where we went ahead and dominated the last half of the race. There are things you have to make sure you check off to make that happen. We made mistakes in the spring race. I made mistakes. You are not going to be able to put together that same race and get the job done. There is too much data and experience and things that people can learn that stack up against you from that last race. Any time anybody wins, whether it was last weekend or the last race here, when everybody goes home the teams dissect every single aspect of that race. The drivers dissect every aspect of what that guy did in the car and things like that and you come back and you are better. We are no different. We are no exception to that rule. That is what we have been doing too. We have been learning what things we did well and what things we need to improve on and that is where we focus.”
CAN YOU LET YOURSELF THINK ABOUT IF YOU WIN HERE YOU ARE IN THE CHAMPIONSHIP FOUR? “Hell yeah you let yourself think that. Confidence is everything in sports. You have be rolling down the highway coming up here confident. I pulled on the highway this morning and this has happened twice. I live in Mocksville and all my peers live down south and two years in a row I have literally pulled on the highway off the ramp and met door to door with a peer. Last year it was Denny Hamlin driving some sort of space shuttle car that he was driving and I think it was kind of driving itself it looked to me like. This year I pull on the highway literally door to door and I thought I saw it out of the corner of my eye because you can’t miss that jughead and as he went by I saw his manufacturer plate and I told my buddy who was with me that it was a driver. He said, ‘How do you know that?’ So we pulled up and sure enough it was Newman. I followed him up here all morning long. The reason I did that is because I was hoping that he would get the ticket at the Virginia state line instead of me this time.”
YOU FINISHED THIRD HERE A YEAR AGO. IS THERE ANYTHING YOU COULD HAVE DONE IN THAT RACE DIFFERENTLY TO FORCE THE ISSUE? “I don’t remember. A lot has happened since then. The spring race is what you have to focus on. That was our best stab at all of this. It was our best foot forward. That is what you have to build on and where you start your weekend here. You have to go through these weekends methodically and have a game plan. I was saying before, I don’t like overstepping and going exactly to the destination you think you need to be at because sometimes you go to far and get to looking over your shoulder and asking if you are too far one way or another and then you start second guessing yourself. I like to stay on one side or the other and migrate towards that slowly.”
HOW MUCH DO YOU REMEMBER ABOUT YOUR DEBUT HERE IN THE CUP SERIES AND WHAT DID YOU TAKE AWAY FROM THAT RACE THAT HELPED YOU GOING FORWARD? “A lot just like anybody else. Have you ever shot a bow and arrow? You ever shot one without a feather on it? Pretty much everybody when they get here is a dart without feathers. I was no exception to that. You are all over the place. The hardest thing about here is you just want to get to a place and ride and learn and figure the track out and your conditions out and what you need to do and learn from your peers. You can’t do that here. You get in a hole and you feel like you are riding and this is where I want to be and the next thing you know somebody else is on your tail and have to overdrive yourself and drive too hard in the entrance. You just can’t figure out how to get into a safe zone to ride and learn as a rookie and when you are starting to learn this track. There is nobody that shows up to this place and just dominates right off the bat. It is an acquired thing. Experience prevails here. I learned from a lot of guys. Jeff (Gordon) and Jimmie (Johnson) and their dominance here. We were a close third or fourth, top-five to them over the years. Denny (Hamlin) and everything he applied here. It seems like the conditions over the year, the track hasn’t really changed. The tire has changed a lot and circumstances have changed around the Goodyear tire over the years and I think that it aids some drivers and hurts other drivers. Certainly it goes into the way they drive this place, how it rolls, gets of the corner, things like that. Those are all things that contribute to learning and finding success here.”
DO YOU FEEL LIKE IT IS ABSOLUTELY NECESSARY TO WIN FOR YOU TO BE IN THE FINAL FOUR AT HOMESTEAD? “I don’t think it is necessarily an absolute must-win. You can’t put that pressure on yourself the first of three races. If you do, you will probably go out there desperate and make a mistake. We are not in that situation. We need to take care of business on a track that is typically good for me. That doesn’t mean you will go out there and dominate stages or get a race win, but you have to go out there and take care of business on a track that has been good to you over the years and take advantage. Yes, a win would be huge. You allow yourself to think that if I win this thing this weekend I am in the dance. That is a cool thought and something to think about and extra incentive, but at the end of the day, you can certainly take yourself out of this thing easier than you can if you win or wreck. You can’t beat yourself. We have put ourselves in a hole before and I don’t think we can do it again. We showed up at Vegas and didn’t run the best and got wiped out when Jimmie blew a tire and did a good job of digging ourselves out of that hole. We went to Dover, typically a really good track for me, was running good all weekend then had a loose wheel and the rest is history. We dug ourselves a big hole. Bounced back at Talladega. You can’t continue bouncing back out of this as competition keeps getting better and better and better. There are no more mulligans. We are out of those. If we can win here it would be awesome but if we can’t we need to make sure we collect every stage point possible because we have tracks that aren’t necessarily my solid go to tracks coming up.”
HOW DO YOU FEEL ABOUT GOING TO TEXAS? WHAT IS YOUR STRATEGY NEXT WEEKEND? “I always like going to Texas. It is a lot of fun. Hardest thing there is balancing a little fun and your job. Everything is more fun in Texas. The race track since the repave is not so much fun but it is a challenge. Within those challenges you have to be open minded and excited about that challenge and ready to attack it. You definitely have to attack it. It is a track that the grip level is through the roof until it’s not. It is very tricky to get ahold of.”
WITH HALLOWEEN THIS WEEK. WHAT WAS YOUR FAVORITE COSTUME AS A KID? “Kyle Busch. It was pretty damn scary. Ha. It was too easy man! No, my favorite, I don’t know. It is all about having fun with your kids and trying to get more candy than the next guy. It is about the competition. Leave it to a racer to make Halloween a competition too.”
