Ford Performance Notes and Quotes
Monster Energy NASCAR Cup Series (MENCS)
Friday, April 12, 2019
EVENT: Toyota Owners 400 Media Availability
RYAN BLANEY, No. 12 MoneyLion Ford Mustang — WHAT IS THIS ABOUT YOU BEING TOO NICE? “Who has been saying that? I didn’t see that. I don’t know. What am I too nice about? I don’t think you can be too nice.”
I GUESS ON THE RACE TRACK? “Oh, well, I guess I will start being a jerk then. Make everybody happy. I race everybody the way they race me. I race well with a lot of people. There is time for racing hard. I race really hard. I don’t really know what too nice is. Cause I am not running over people? I put Newman in the fence? Does that make me nice? Maybe I will start being mean. I don’t want to hear anybody complaining about me being too mean then.”
YOU LAUNCHED THE RYAN BLANEY FAMILY FOUNDATION TODAY? “We did. That is pretty cool to finally get rolling. We have been working on that for eight months, nine months. By the time we got it to the point where we figured out what we wanted to do and a couple companies we wanted to partner with. The Alzheimer’s Association people have been really great to get to know them. Everybody starts foundations for something that is personal to them. That is personal to me. My grandfather on my dad’s side got really sick with it 10-12 years ago and ended up passing away. It is something we can do. The Gateway Bronco thing is going to be really unique. It was nice to sit down with those guys and discuss it. There are so many cool people and companies that are helping us out. Ford is giving us their charity slot at Barrett Jackson which will be great. PPG and Discount Tire and Body Armour, they have a really great deal going on at the Chicago race where families can sign up and get their names of family members who have it on the deck lid. That is cool to see them be a part of it. We have a couple more things lined up that I am excited to do and try to help some people out on the back end. That is the main goal. It is a cause for something and hopefully we can do our part and try to figure it out. It is one of those diseases that nobody knows much about and not a lot has been done about it. I know they are working hard at it but it is hard to figure out. I am excited about the future with that and helping out in a little way.”
HAVE YOU EVER HAD A PIT ROAD SPEEDING ISSUE? IS IT JUST RISK VERSUS REWARD? “I think a lot of the times Denny has been able to overcome that. The deal at Texas he ended up winning the race. Does it work out most of the time? No. Most of the time it hurts you but that time it worked out. Speeding on pit road, yeah, you can gain spots on pit road by maximizing you speed limit. If the limit is 50 and you are running 49.8 down pit road you will maybe gain a little bit of time. People always look at pit crew and pit stops and that is a big part of it but getting on and off pit road is big too. Your mph average down pit road is big. I have always been one to give a little bit on pit road. If it is two-tenths, I will give it just to not have that penalty. Everyone speeds on pit road, it is just going to happen. Some drivers are very aggressive at it and some will give up a couple tenths. Look at guys that can do it great, you will get caught with speeding if you are pushing it to the limits. That is something I have actually wanted to get more aggressive on and if it bites you it bites you.”
DOESN’T THAT START AT THE SHOP THOUGH WITH THE TEAM DECIDING HOW FAR THEY WANT YOU TO GO? “Yeah, it starts with the engineers. The dash we run now is all lights and things like that. It has gotten a lot better. When the digital dashes first came out, I feel like you saw a lot more pit road penalties speeding because the dashes were jump and not smooth and now the software is way better and you can be a little more accurate with it. The way I run it is dots. One red dot is 49.7 or 49.8. You have a little to gain and some to give. That is something that you see a lot of teams right now over the past few years that they do pit road speeds during practice. You see a lot of cars going down pit road. If we qualify on Friday and race Sunday, they will start off Saturday practice in their box and work on getting in and out. That is something you work on at the shop and tweak all weekend. We bumped mine up a little here this weekend. This place is tough, and Bristol. When they have curves, you can run faster in the curves. That part is something we really like to do to try to maximize that deal. It starts at the shop each week and goes through the weekend.”
BOTH OF YOUR PENSKE TEAMMATES HAVE WON. IS THAT JUST YOU NOT SEALING THE DEAL OR IS IT AN OVERALL LACK OF PERFORMANCE COMPARED TO THOSE GUYS? “I don’t think it is an overall lack of performance. We just have to finish races a little better. That goes all around, from me to working on the car throughout the race, me knowing how to finish these races and knowing what to ask for. It is a full deal and so hard to finish out these races. Sometimes you win with the best car and sometimes you win with the fifth best car. I feel like our cars have had speed enough to win all year. Some races haven’t gone our way where I felt like we had the best cars to win the race and just dumb luck happened and not being able to seal it out and some race we faded toward the end and didn’t make the right adjustments. Our speed is there, it is just a matter of fine tuning to figure out what we need to do at the end.”
THE FIRST TIME YOU GO TO A PLACE LIKE TALLADEGA, HOW DO YOU KNOW WHEN YOU HAVE HIT YOUR COMFORT LEVEL THERE? “I feel like you learn every time you go back. Just learning new things and stuff like that. If they make a change to the car, how you draft is different. I remember my first Cup race at Talladega was in 2014. I ran trucks at superspeedways but the Cup stuff is way different. You have a lot more people who know what they are doing and they are more used to it. It is just overwhelming at first. The biggest thing is just knowing what are the right moves to make. You just don’t know. You can watch film but until you are in the race car out there with 39 other people you don’t know. You don’t know what is right and what is wrong. I feel like we have gotten a decent grasp on it as far as when you take runs, when to go with somebody and when not to go. When to block each lane. It will be different in a couple weeks because the rules are way different and you will see way different drafting I think. When you feel like you have a decent grasp on it the draft changes and you almost have to relearn it all over again. It takes a while. Even the first 1.5 mile track I went to, I was lost. It is just such a big race track and you just don’t know what to do in those situations because you have never experienced it. It just takes time to figure it out.”
DOES IT HELP THAT TEAM PENSKE HAS SUCH A GOOD SUPERSPEEDWAY PACKAGE? “Some of it is that. If your cars are really fast it is a little easier to make moves and pull them off. At the same time, if you don’t really know what you are doing — in 2014 when I ran Talladega, Brad and Joey already had a bunch of speedway wins and our cars were fast and I ran up front a lot of that race but I didn’t really know what to do when I got there are how to pick my way through the pack. You can have a great car but if you don’t have experience you don’t know when to go and when to no. It takes time to figure out and know when to get runs and when to lay back and how the air is pushing you around. That just takes a lot of time. A lot of the best guys, they can pick it up within a few years but it takes a little while to get comfortable with it and have confidence in yourself and your spotter to get those “clear by two inches” situations at the end of the race or any part of the race for that matter.”
PAUL MENARD, No. 21 Menards/Maytag Ford Mustang
HOW DO YOU FEEL ABOUT THE RACE THIS WEEKEND? “The track is in good shape and the tires fall off here. The surface is old and we have a lot of horsepower back. It is going to be a good race.”
IS THERE A REASON, FOR THE LAYPERSON, WHY YOU WOULDN’T RUN THE TRACTION COMPOUND HERE? “Because it is a great race track to begin with. It has a bottom groove, a middle groove and an outside groove. It is a 3⁄4 mile, fairly flat track but we can get up to the fence during races and that is something that you don’t have at Martinsville and Bristol the preferred groove is up by the fence. They made the bottom groove come in. Here you have a lot more options.”
HOW WOULD YOU GAUGE 2019 SO FAR? “Up and down. We had a good run at Bristol and have had some good runs but haven’t had the finishes. The whole rules package and everything is a lot different than anything we have done before, both to setup for and to drive. It is a lot different.”
WHAT ARE YOU THINKING FOR TALLADEGA? “Talladega is going to be different with the big downforce, smaller plates, I don’t really know. I haven’t thought that far ahead yet. We have an off weekend in between I think.”
WHAT CAN YOU BRING FROM BRISTOL AND TRANSLATE TO HERE IF ANYTHING? “It is totally different. It is a lot different race track. Concrete versus asphalt. Multi-grooves versus pretty narrow groove. A lot different animal. This is kind of a truer short track where you want mechanical grip in the car. Bristol is pretty damn fast still.”
HOW IS THE CHEMISTRY WITH GREG? “It has been good. We have a notebook now and we can go to these race tracks and look back and what we did last year and try to improve. That is something we didn’t have last year. We didn’t have a notebook. Now we have notes to go through both races and see what we did in practice and how the track reacted with sun or clouds and we can make changes accordingly.”
ARE YOU GUYS LEANING ON PENSKE OR DOES THE 21 TEAM KIND OF DO THEIR OWN THING? “We get a lot of support from them for sure. At the end of the day it is up to Greg and myself and our engineers to figure out what to put in the car. We know a lot about what those guys are doing, and we use them for sure as a big tool.”
BACK TO TALLADEGA, YOU HAVE NEVER HAD MORE THAN 400 HORSEPOWER, SO THERE WILL BE MORE THAN YOU HAVE EVER HAD WHEN WE GO THERE. “Yeah, I have no idea how it is going to race. There is talk that the tandem might come into play. The big restriction with tandem racing is cooling. Our radiators and things aren’t made, the spec radiators don’t have the cooling we had a few years ago when we did the tandem. I think you will see people get to people’s bumpers and push as long as they can.”
HAVE YOU STARTED THINKING ABOUT YOUR LONG-TERM FUTURE IN THE SPORT? “I don’t have many more years left, that is for sure. I really don’t have an answer for you as to when or where to call it a day. It has been a part of my life for a long time. I hope to always stay involved on some level, whatever that is.”
YOU LOOK LIKE YOU ARE HAVING FUN IN A GOOD SITUATION WITH THE ONE-ON-ONE KIND OF DEAL WITH THE WOOD BROTHERS: “Yeah, I have said it a thousand times. They are really good people and a lot of fun to work with and we have a lot of resources we can draw from Team Penske so it is kind of the best of both worlds. We have a small team that is very personalized with a lot of support from a larger team that we can draw from.”
ARIC ALMIROLA, No. 10 Smithfield Get Grilling Ford Mustang
IN HINDSIGHT, WAS IT A MISTAKE TO TAKE THE CAR BEHIND THE WALL LAST WEEKEND? “We wouldn’t have been able to finish anyway. They jacked it up on pit road and saw that the right-front suspension was KO’d and so they made the decision to go behind the wall. We were going to have to go behind the wall to fix it anyway. Not knowing if running one lap and not really anybody getting up to speed, we thought it was okay to go behind the wall and fix it because nobody had really made a lap up to speed so there wasn’t “minimum speed requirement”, but it was going to take way more than five minutes to fix the right-front suspension.”
DID YOU TALK TO WILLIAM BYRON ABOUT THE INCIDENT? “Yeah, we talked on Monday. The lesson learned is that the bottom of the race track, the PJ1, when it sits overnight and they reapplied it Sunday morning, we saw in our practice that it is really slippery and slick. You have to kind of tip-toe around down there until it gets heat and then it gains a lot of traction and actually becomes a more preferred groove. When it is cold and you are one of the first cars in it, it is really slippery. I thought, and he agreed obviously, the pace that he was running to try and run in that PJ1 that early in the race was just too fast and his car couldn’t hold it and they were loose and probably on low air pressure and all those things. The cars are a handful to drive. He got down into turn one and his car got really loose and we touched, and I wrecked. I think it is kind of a byproduct of that particular race track with them applying the PJ1 on the bottom. I think William being in that position, and I sympathize with him, he was starting on the front row and their year hasn’t been great so taking off on the front row you want to run up front and you go into the race thinking you are going to run up front all day and have good pit stops and execute all day. When you fire off on the start and are already losing three or four spots, you start to panic even if it is the first lap. I think he just made a mistake. We talked about it Monday and we are good.”
A LOT OF THESE KIDS DON’T HAVE YOUR EXPERIENCE OR SHORT TRACK EXPERIENCE. MOST OF THEIR TRAINING HAS COME ON SIMULATORS AND SUCH, THAT DOESN’T SEEM TO PREPARE THEM FOR ON-TRACK SITUATIONS. IT FEELS LIKE IT MAY BE PROBLEMATIC MOVING FORWARD AS MORE OF THESE KIDS COME UP AND HAVEN’T REALLY PAID THEIR DUES: “Yes. So, here is what I will say to that. I think growing up short track racing, especially for me, I can’t speak for everybody, but for me I know that I was a teenage kid doing short track racing. I got a lot of “life lessons” and racing lessons from the peers that I raced with that were in their 30’s and 40’s and 50’s. Racing down in Florida against Wayne and Dick Anderson and Mike Fritz and the Cope brothers, all these guys that had raced Busch series back then and ASA and a lot of those things. They were the guys. Racing at New Smyrna during speedweeks against Junior Hanley and all of these guys that were really, really well-known big-name short track racers and me being a teenage kid racing against those guys and having them come up and talk to me and me going up and talking to them and asking them questions. I learned a lot. I gained a lot of experience based on them sharing with me or coming over and scolding me and ripping my ass. Either way I learned from it. So, I will say that has been somewhat lost in the racing community. Growing up and racing on a computer and doing all those things and video games and a lot of that stuff is certainly a lot different than real world experience. When you wreck on the simulator you can restart it. When you wreck on the simulator it doesn’t hurt. When you wreck on the simulator nobody comes over and chews you out.”
EVEN IF I WAS A NEW DRIVER AND DIDN’T HAVE MUCH EXPERIENCE, IT ISN’T SOMETHING I WOULD PROBABLY LEARN AT A SHORT TRACK RIGHT? THAT ISN’T REALLY APPLIED AT SHORT TRACKS IS IT? “In all fairness, it is really just something that comes with situational awareness. You go back and you watch last year’s race. You go back and you do all those things and you study and look and learn and see those things and you kind of draw conclusions and even base some assumptions based on what you learned and what you see. Me and William have talked, and we are good. And I am not by any means harping on William. He is a great race car driver. He is a champion of our sport in the Xfinity series. I think he is a great race car driver who just made a mistake and that happens. It is part of it. Unfortunately, I was just on the wrong end of that deal. Life goes on. I think the thing I was most upset about was that I know how hard we have worked at the beginning part of the season and we have been extremely consistent and ran up front and been a top-10, top-five car almost every single weekend. Going into the race at Bristol I thought we would be as well. We saw that with how well my teammates ran. Bowyer led laps and was really fast. Harvick probably had the fastest car on the race track and had a lot of different situations they had to overcome. I felt like we were comparable to them in practice. I knew going into that race that we had a good car that maybe had a shot to win, but for sure that we would run top-10, top-five. To have that end on lap one and end that streak, we had six top-10’s in a row and thought Bristol was another opportunity to run really well and fifth in points, only a few points out of third, I thought we were on the right trajectory. To have that happen and leave Bristol and now be ninth in points, that was the toughest pill of all of it to swallow.”
FOR HERE THIS WEEKEND, WHAT IS YOUR MINDSET COMING HERE? YOUR STRATEGY FOR TOMORROW NIGHT? “I think Richmond is one of those places almost like Bristol where you have to come here with the mindset of going off of a notebook. This place changes so much from practice and it is hot and the sun it out to night time, under the lights, cooled down, long runs. In practice, the most you run is 20 or 30 laps at a time on a set of tires and then you fire off the race and certain times in the race we will run a whole stage without a caution. Just knowing and preparing for that, you really rely on the notebook and go off of history. I think this weekend is going to be very similar. I don’t think, for us at least, that we really learned a whole lot in practice. A lot of what you will race, setup wise and things, are going to be based on history.”
