Ford Performance Notes and Quotes
Monster Energy NASCAR Cup Series (MENCS)
Saturday, April 6, 2019
EVENT: Food City 500 Qualifying
Ford Qualifying Results:
3rd – Ryan Blaney
6th – Aric Almirola
7th – Joey Logano
8th – Clint Bowyer
9th – Paul Menard
11th – Ryan Newman
12th – Brad Keselowski
13th – Kevin Harvick
18th – Michael McDowell
19th – Ricky Stenhouse Jr.
20th – Daniel Suarez
22nd – David Ragan
29th – Matt Tifft
32nd – Corey LaJoie
BRAD KESELOWSKI, No. 2 Discount Tire Ford Mustang – IS THE TRACK MORE SLICK THAN USUAL? “No, not really – just more unpredictable than before.”
ARE YOU OPEN TO TRYING THINGS LIKE THAT? “Oh yeah. That’s good. That’s healthy. That’s how you progress and get better.”
WHAT KIND OF RACE DO YOU THINK WE’LL SEE SUNDAY? “I think it will be the same that it’s been the last three or four races here. The bottom will have a lot of speed for about 200 laps, it will wear out and then the race will be on the top for the next 300. That’s just kind of what we’ve been seeing and I would expect anything different.”
IS IT A DIFFERENT FORMULA? SOME HAVE SUGGESTED IT MIGHT RUN DIFFERENT? “I’m not a chemist, but I’ve heard those rumblings and either way I don’t think it matters what formula they put down it’s gonna wear out 200 laps into the race and then we’ll move up to the wall and we’ll race up there.”
CLINT BOWYER, No. 14 Haas Automation Ford Mustang – “It wasn’t the most spectacular thing in the world, but a single digit here and starting up front and seeing the front it’s a fun, fun race track. It’s a long race, 500 laps around this baby is a lot to ask – a lot out of your equipment, a lot out of yourself, a lot out of your communication, out of a lot of different things. Tomorrow will present a whole different can of worms that we’ll have to overcome and then on into Sunday, but on this track as they put this stuff down it just evolves. I was happy. Usually, we struggle on Fridays here and kind of get ourselves buried and it takes three-quarters of the race to get established where we need to be, and then you fight a bad pit stall. Today enabled us to have a little bit better opportunities at a lot of those things.”
YOU SEEM TO HAVE AN IDEA OF WHAT THE PJ1 IS DOING. “No, I mean that stuff is wicked, man. It’s temperature sensitive. You hate to complain about qualifying and having to wait and everybody is like, ‘Well, they’re still waiting.’ We’re still kind of in a deal where you need somebody to get out there and get some temperature burned into that stuff and wake it up, I mean literally wake it up. Once it does, it’s like, ‘Oh, man. Here we are.’ You can see. Those first couple cars that go, they have their hands full. It’s kind of like being at the dirt track – every now and then you have to pay your dues and roll the track in.”
HOW LONG DOES IT TAKE TO GO AWAY DURING THE RACE? “I don’t know, we’ll find out. We’ll watch it as everybody will during the XFINITY race. Usually, the track will make a decision accordingly. A lot of times we’re worried about it and then we get rain and stuff like that that prevents them from doing that. I still think with the downforce and everything that we have in our cars I still think you’ve got a different outlook of a race regardless of the PJ1/VHT or whoever is sponsoring it.”
ARIC ALMIROLA, No. 10 SHAZAM/Smithfield Ford Mustang – “I chose not to wait at the end. I figured it was gonna get bottled up there with everybody waiting until the last minute, so I went right away and that was a mistake. The track had way less grip than it did the rounds before when I waited, so we went back out and actually went faster with only two minutes to turn our car around, so our car is really fast. I made a mistake by being the first guy out on the race track in that final round.”
RYAN BLANEY, No. 12 PPG Ford Mustang – WHAT HAPPENED IN THE THIRD ROUND? “I got greedy. I got greedy into three and missed it. I probably run about a .45. The first lap was our best lap and I just got greedy into three and missed it and then got loose out of it. We lost it by just a little bit for how bad I missed it, so just greedy. I ran one lap in every round, but messed up so bad the first lap in the last round that I had to run more and it just wasn’t as good.”
RYAN NEWMAN, No. 6 Wyndham Rewards Ford Mustang – “I saw some of the guys doing it in XFINITY practice, but didn’t expect to pick up what we did down there on the bottom, so that kind of surprised me and that’s what you’ve got to keep up with in this game.”
WAS THAT A PLEASANT SURPRISE? “It doesn’t matter. I wouldn’t have cared if it was right around the top three inches off the wall. I don’t care about that part of it, it’s just that you’ve got to keep up with the game that’s all.”
HOW LONG WILL THAT STUFF STAY IN ON SUNDAY? “I don’t know. It all depends on what they do and how they keep addressing it and dressing it, literally, with more – and what the K&N cars do. You just never know. You just go with the flow.”
KEVIN HARVICK, No. 4 Hunt Brothers Pizza Ford Mustang – “Our car was good I just missed my mark the first two laps in the center of the corner and just got out of the traction compound. It’s just as wide as the car and I just was a little bit too aggressive to keep it where it needed to be and finally calmed down the third lap and got a decent lap and just came up one spot short.”
HOW IS THE TRACTION COMPOUND? “Faster.” IS THAT GOOD? “I have no idea.”
IT SOUNDS LIKE THE PJ1 DIDN’T COME IN UNTIL LATER IN THE DAY. “Yeah, it’s kind of that and then they cut us so short on tires that when you get into a situation like this nobody is going to practice to save tires.”
YOU GUYS ARE GOOD AT ADAPTING. HOW DO YOU FEEL ABOUT HAVING THE PJ1 OUT THERE OR WOULD YOU PREFER JUST A NORMAL TRACK? “It doesn’t really matter one way or the other to me. I think you had two XFINITY practices to kind of just watch and see and in the end it just came down to me not doing a good enough job in the car. Our car was fine. I’ve run enough laps around here in the traction compound and up high to know what I needed to be doing and it didn’t really matter whether we practiced or not. I think that you probably could have enough cars here to probably have run before Cup qualifying, but I don’t make the schedules or anything.”
RICKY STENHOUSE JR., No. 17 SunnyD Ford Mustang – “Qualifying we were on the bottom. In practice we were in the middle until the bottom came in. It was really slick to start, so nobody ran down there in practice. It’s normal Bristol. Tomorrow we’ll probably move up quite a bit and move around and get the track even wider than it is.”
DID IT CHANGE MUCH AFTER THE OTHER SERIES WERE OUT THERE? “No, the bottom came in a little bit because cars got out there in race trim. We’ve all been in qualifying trim, so we didn’t have time to go just make laps and get the bottom run in, so the XFINITY cars got the bottom ran in and we were able to run down there in qualifying, which is a lot faster. We just missed it with our car. We were too loose in practice and then too tight there in qualifying.”
PAUL MENARD, No. 21 Menards/Sylvania Ford Mustang – “It was a solid day, a good starting spot. We were just too tight in practice and freed it up, but we needed to go more because we were too tight again in qualifying. Still, we had a nice pickup.”
JOEY LOGANO, No. 22 Autotrader Ford Mustang – “The track changed mostly through practice to qualifying with the XFINiTY cars. Us being the first cars out there in practice, we pretty much learned nothing in practice because where the line was was in a different spot, so you’re just kind of guessing on where you’re gonna run, what you’re gonna need in your car and what that’s going to change to the balance of your car. We tried to make the best guesses possible. I think we made a couple gains to our car, but, honestly, I think we would have qualified in the same spot if we just unloaded and qualified. It was a challenging day because you’re waiting for the bottom to come in, you’re waiting for the top to come in and we’re all in qualifying trim and not making laps helping any of that, so you just kind of go through the motions in practice and didn’t really learn a whole bunch. The good news is we’re not that far back. I think we’re seventh, so we’ll race from there.”
DAVID RAGAN, No. 38 MDS Transport Ford Mustang – “We just slowed down a tenth and we needed to probably pick up half-a-tenth. In this knockout qualifying you’ve got to run a little better each round to advance and I felt like we had a really good lap the first round. We made a little adjustment and didn’t have the cleanest of laps in round two and I think we ended up 22nd, so that’s better than 25th, better than 23rd, but not as good as top 12 or 14 starting spot. The track changed a lot today. We’ll have some good practice tomorrow I’m sure to tune on our Mustang and I look forward to a good Bristol race. Bristol has been great to me over the years. I love coming up here. It’s always a good show.”
DANIEL SUAREZ, No. 41 Haas Automation Ford Mustang – “I wasn’t very happy with the balance of the car, but we’ll see what happens tomorrow. I feel like tomorrow morning’s practice is gonna be a mass kind of thing because we’re gonna be everywhere, but hopefully in happy your we can be a little bit better.”
WHAT DID YOU THINK ABOUT THE PJ1? “I think it’s coming in for sure and getting better. The problem we had was after practice we made adjustments to run the top and we didn’t qualify there, so we just didn’t have the right balance to run out there.”
MATT TIFFT, No. 36 Surface Sunscreen/Tunity Ford Mustang – “It (the track) went through a big transition. That’s kind of what hurt us there was most of today we’ve been in the middle to the top of the race track, but it seemed like when the K&N cars ran a little bit earlier the grip strip started to come in some. We just missed it, being able to hook up our rear tires to be able to get enough throttle down and make a lap time, so it definitely went through a big transition from our first practice where you couldn’t touch it, so it’ll be interesting to see how that moves throughout the whole weekend.”
DO YOU EXPECT THE BOTTOM TO COME IN ON SUNDAY? “I feel like it will some. It seems like whenever you get the top super-rubbered up you can have a bit of a passing lane down there, but it doesn’t seem nearly as grippy as it has been in year’s past here. I don’t know if that’s because of the rain last night or this morning, but it certainly seems like it’s taking a lot longer to work in than it usually does here.”
