Ford Performance Notes and Quotes
Monster Energy NASCAR Cup Series (MENCS)
Friday, April 12, 2019
EVENT: Toyota Owners 400 Qualifying
KEVIN HARVICK, No. 4 Mobil 1 Ford Mustang — POLE WINNER PRESS CONFERENCE
LAST YEAR AT THIS TIME YOU WERE THE BIGGEST OF THE BIG THREE. DO YOU THINK YOU HAVE GOTTEN TO THE POINT TO GET BACK IN VICTORY LANE? “Not sure. We are doing all we can.”
DO YOU FEEL LIKE WITH THE SPEED YOU SHOWED LAST WEEK AT BRISTOL AND TODAY THAT YOU GUYS HAVE TURNED A CORNER TO SOME EXTENT? “We haven’t raced yet, so we will find out tomorrow.”
TALK ABOUT THE QUALIFYING AND WHAT LED TO YOU FEELING LIKE YOU NAILED THE POLE? “For me, all three rounds went really good. We had a good race practice for a 30-lap run there at the beginning of practice. Obviously it rained out the second practice. They did a good job with the car and I didn’t really know but the second lap ended up being our fastest lap. I just over drove the car probably the second and third lap. The first lap was probably the smoothest lap for me. I felt like I needed to roll a little more speed and wound up rolling too much speed and it wound up being too much brake. The cars had a little fall off from a time standpoint and I think it was really just managing the fall off and be consistent with the laps. Stickers were definitely faster in the first round than they were the second and third round.”
DID YOU LIKE THE FIVE MINUTE ROUNDS? “I just race by whatever they tell me we are supposed to do.”
ARE YOU OKAY WITH REALLY JUST ONE RUN PER ROUND? IS THAT OKAY WITH YOU? “It doesn’t matter if it is okay by me or not because I don’t make the rules.”
DID YOU FEEL A DIFFERENT SENSE OF URGENCY WITH THIS FORMAT? “It was really just more congestion. I think when you come to a place like this with everyone running three or four laps, it is hard to get 40 cars going in the first round, or however many cars are here, 35 or 40 or whatever it is. To get those cars to run three or four laps, you run into traffic and it becomes more congested than it probably needs to be in the first round. The second and third rounds were fine.”
DID YOU LEARN ENOUGH WITH JUST ONE PRACTICE FOR RACE CONDITIONS TOMORROW NIGHT? “I hope so. We will find out tomorrow. As you look at this place, this is really one of those places where you kind of have to go off of what happened last time. New tire, so you don’t really know exactly what the cars are going to do deep into runs as far as how bad they will push, will the get looser. What conditions will you be fighting? We wind up guessing a number of times when they change the tires like this because you don’t know what to anticipate. A lot of the changes you see in the sport, once you get done changing the rules on the cars come from Goodyear because of the fact that they change the tires all the time from a compound, construction and sidewalls. This is one of the places they change them a lot. I really don’t know exactly what we are shooting for so you kind of go off past knowledge of what you think you need to do with the car from a balance standpoint. You really don’t know until you get 50-60 laps into the first run and hopefully have an idea of where to go and that it isn’t so bad that you can’t adjust on your car.”
LOOKING AHEAD TO TALLADEGA BECAUSE OF THE UNCERTAINTIES WITH THE DIFFERENT PACKAGE — “I am at Richmond, I have no comments on Talladega. I have no idea. You just show up and see how it develops. That is really all you can do is show up for a weekend and see how it develops and go from there but right now we are just worried about Richmond.”
