Ford Performance Notes and Quotes
NASCAR Cup Series
NASCAR Zoom Media Availability | Thursday, April 29, 2021
MATT DIBENEDETTO, No. 21 Dickies Ford Mustang — WHAT ARE YOUR EXPECTATIONS THIS WEEKEND AT KANSAS? “I’m looking forward to it. We have some good momentum as everybody has seen, so that’s encouraging. At the start of the season we had a lot of things out of our control that happened. There’s nothing we could do about that, and now we’re kind of on a roll and showing the strength that we do have as a team, that we’ve known that we had, so that’s awesome. It’s super encouraging. I’m feeling good about it. Obviously, we had a shot to win at Talladega, which is great, and a top 10 the week before, so a top 10 and a top five and going on to Kansas we have Menards and Dickies on our Mustang this week, so the car looks good — nice and bright — and our mile-and-a-half program is really strong.”
THOUGHTS ON RACING AT DARLINGTON ON MOTHER’S DAY? “I’m looking forward to that one. It’s gonna be neat to race there on Mother’s Day. It’s cool. It’s neat. It’s also cool we’re gonna be able to have some limited guests back at the track. I still wish we could have all of them. That would be preferred, but it will be nice. I’m looking forward to Throwback Weekend. Obviously, anytime that we run a paint scheme or do anything with the Woods we can run Darlington for 50 years and have throwbacks for every single one of them just because of the history of the Wood family and that 21 car, so that’s a special one to us.”
HAVE YOU WATCHED THE FINAL RESTART FROM TALLADEGA? “Yeah, I finally pulled through and watched it.”
IS THERE ANYTHING YOU WISH YOU WOULD HAVE DONE DIFFERENTLY? “It’s a good question. I’ve got that a lot this week, and the first part I would answer is, am I beating myself up over it? No, absolutely not because you may have seen a video I put out on social media because a lot of people have talked about it and rightly so, no, not because it just as well could have been — from my perspective — it just as well could have been the race-winning move if circumstances happened differently behind us with the 8 car. The 12 car kind of got shuffled and that line broke apart, so the circumstances could have been where it was, ‘Oh man, Matt. You made a great move taking that run and that momentum from the 12 car. You got shoved out, stayed out in the lead and won the race.’ You could be saying that same thing, so, no, I’m not beating myself up. Of course, hindsight is 20/20 and I’m like, ‘Oh, I wish I would have stayed on the bottom because if I would have known that lane and all that momentum broke up on the back straightaway and the 8 car pulled out of line and all of that, but I didn’t. So, no, I’m not beating myself up over it. I think my spotter, Doug, and I and our whole team did an excellent job all day. I’m really proud of them and the hard work we’ve put in on the superspeedways to make sure knowing we have such good cars, places the Fords are really fast with Roush Yates power. Our Penske teammates, all that, we run so good we want to make sure we damn sure do the best job we possibly can and have the best shot at winning and two years in a row we’ve been leading on the white flag and need circumstances to work out. To answer your question, I haven’t beat myself up over it. Obviously, it stinks. I want to get that win so bad, but I can’t live every second beating myself up over it.”
WHAT GOES THROUGH YOUR MIND IN MAKING THAT DECISION AT THE END OF THE RACE AND HOW FAST DOES IT HAPPEN? “I talked about that a good bit is just out of defense of all the drivers on superspeedways how fast things happen. Out of defense of my spotter, all the spotters, is that it’s hard for people to understand how fast those things happen. I feel like where people were missing a little bit is how much your race is also dictated off of what people do, not only with cars directly behind you, but two cars behind you, three cars behind you, so it’s circumstances is what I call it. I made that video on social media to kind of give people an understanding of, ‘Hey, you’re making these decisions at 200 miles an hour when the runs are happening like the snap of your fingers and making these decisions.’ You’re driving 95 percent out of your mirror, you have a little mirror up here and a little side mirror and you’re trusting your spotter 100 percent. He’s making these decisions and calling them so fast. It’s like, ‘Up, up, up.’ Stuff happens in a split-second, and it’s really easy for people to just watch and be like, ‘Oh, why didn’t you pick this lane?’ And I just wanted to do it more so not in a negative way, I wanted to do it in an encouraging way and just to give an understanding of how fast the stuff happens, how hard these superspeedways are and how much it’s a chess game and how much we study for these things, how perfect you have to be and how much also, on top of all that, is based on what happens with guys around you and behind you. So, I hope I gave people an understanding of how tough it is. It’s like watching an NFL game and being like, ‘Oh, man. That quarterback, why didn’t you throw it to this guy instead of this one there,’ when they’ve got 300-pound guys running at him and the stuff happens in three seconds.”
HOW DO YOU LOOK AT KANSAS? “I kind of look at the restarts like a superspeedway at Kansas, so the restarts are wild and it stays pretty crazy for a bit with the way racing is. I think there are actually similarities in the restarts at Kansas and Talladega because those get two, three, four-wide. People are all over the place pushing each other, but Talladega is its own animal, so it’s kind of nice to go to a mile-and-a-half, where we have to study hard for the restarts in the race and to be the best we can be and track position, restarts are huge. That’s a big deal at those places. We couldn’t do superspeedway racing every week, to answer your question. That would be too mentally stressful.”
HAS YOUR TEAM APPLIED ANYTHING FROM LAS VEGAS FOR THIS WEEK OR ARE THERE DIFFERENCES YOU HAVE TO TAKE INTO ACCOUNT? I think there are a lot of similarities, to answer your question. That’s probably one of the strongest points in our program are the mile-and-a-halves. For whatever reason, our cars just run really well at those places and at a variety of them, so there are definitely some similarities between Kansas and Vegas, and places where we run really well they just seem to be tracks that suit our race car. We have strong race cars pretty much everywhere, but I have a lot of confidence in the fact that we usually start with our setups pretty darn close. Our engineers and team do a great job of starting close and it’s nice that we have the track position to go along with that and we can start our day up front and be in front of the mess and hopefully keep it up there and have a good, solid day. It’s a big deal. Even though I know it’s a long race, starting up front is a big deal on top of having fast cars on these mile-and-a-halves.”
IS THERE EXTRA PRESSURE TO COME OUT STRONG AT KANSAS AND GET THOSE STAGE POINTS RIGHT OFF THE BAT? “I don’t know if pressure is a good word. I feel like I’m almost numb to pressure because of my whole career path and some of the obstacles we’ve overcome, so I look at it as more it’s encouraging and exciting that we have so much momentum on our side. We’ve gained so many points in such a short time and recovered at a level that I didn’t even know we could recover that quickly in such a short time, and we’re still on the up. I feel like we’re just getting started, so instead of pressure I probably look at it more as exciting like, ‘Heck yeah, we’ve got a top five starting position.’ We’ve got great momentum. We’re putting together smooth races. We know we have fast race cars, a great team. All of that would probably be — right or wrong — that would just probably be my personal perspective in how I look at it and approach it.”
HAVE YOU NOTICED THE KANSAS TRACK DEVELOPING SOME CHARACTER 10 YEARS AFTER THE REPAVE? “Oh yeah, 100 percent because I remember racing on the surface when it was pretty newly paved and it just had tons of grip. You were barely letting off all the way around there and the groove was just kind of the bottom or the middle maybe, pretty narrow. Fast forward when you look from then what I remember with the racetrack to now is when we’re looking at our race cars people put a lot of downforce into them because with our package you’ve got to choose whether you want to be more trimmed out or more downforce, so guys will put more downforce into them or searching for grip. We can run from the very bottom of the track all the way up to against the wall. The tires wear out. Lap times fall off. It’s very sensitive to heat and temperature. If the sun is out, all that stuff, so that’s just a short glimpse as to how much that track has changed and aged over time, which makes it better and more fun every year that we go there and just continues to become a better track with more character.”
IT WILL BE IN THE UPPER 70s TO EARLY 80s. HOW IMPORTANT IS A SLICK TRACK FOR YOU? “Yeah, that’s big. I like it when it’s hotter. If I could make it 90 and sunny, I probably would, and if I could put low downforce on the cars as well. Drivers are wanting to slip and slide around. That makes it the most fun, so the fact it’ll be warmer and the character that the track has makes it to where we will be searching around. You know what interesting is at that place I found you may find the groove and be like, ‘Oh man, I’m ripping the top and we’re flying and we’re fast,’ but it can also go away where you’re like, ‘Oh man, I was fast on the top, but now it’s kind of rubbered in,’ and you start having to search and be like, ‘Oh, all of a sudden I’m faster running the middle,’ so it actually continues to change throughout the race so it almost applies to some of the dirt racing characteristics, where you’re searching for grooves and it doesn’t always stay consistent.”
HOW DO YOU GAUGE YOUR PERFORMANCE AGAINST YOUR PENSKE TEAMMATES? “I think we’re fortunate to have them to lean on, and their information. We are still our own team, technically, but we’re very lucky to have a strong alliance with Team Penske and our teammates to lean on, notes, all that stuff. It’s very open book, which is great, so I think we really, in no comparison to anybody, we just had rougher circumstances than anybody starting off the season. Us and guys like Aric Almirola, things that were just out of our control, but you look at our recent performance and we want our entire camp to be strong — all of the Penske cars and us on the Wood Brothers side. We want us all to be strong and lately I think we’ve had the best average finish or something over the last few races or whatever it may be, but it just is a testament to how great our alliance is with Penske, how lucky we are to have that and the support from Ford. What makes our team great is because when we have those smooth races like we’ve had, we have incredible strength as a team and more so this year I feel better about it than last because we have all that time under our belt. Last year, we were a new group working together, trying to figure each other out and we had no practice, no qualifying, no nothing, no track time, so we had a lot to figure out and learn, so this year with all of that under our belt, these last few races I think are a better reflection of the strength and ability that we do have as a team.”
IS THERE A SCENARIO YOU COULD ENVISION WHERE YOU WOULD STAY WITHIN THE TEAM PENSKE ORGANIZATION IN SAME REALM? “I don’t know. Honestly, I’m pretty clueless about next year, not in a bad way, just as far as my focus is so heavily on right now and being the best that we can be and letting the performance speak for me. To answer your question better, so I’m not giving a runaround answer, I’m just being completely an open book and honest, you guys know me and that’s how I am. My whole career I’ve had to just become more accepting and OK with the unknown and rolling with it, so that’s my best answer to you is I know nothing. Is there a scenario where I envision that happening? I don’t know. Anything is possible, I guess. Heck, getting the 21 ride I didn’t even envision that in the slightest bit. I had no clue it was even a possibility because I had no clue Paul Menard was retiring. And going back to the 95 car, I had no clue that Kasey Kahne was gonna step out of that thing and retire as well, so my career has been full of so many unknowns and I couldn’t have envisioned any of the things that have happened to get me here, but it’s also trained me and groomed me to just focus, be better at focusing on what’s in my control and that’s why I don’t even stress the slightest bit about it is because of my past experience and knowing how I got here and reflecting back on that, so your guess is as good as mine. If I give you an answer, it’s literally just a guess, exactly the same as yours would be because I know nothing more than any of you guys do, so I’m thankful my career has taught me just, ‘Hey, go out. I’ve got a heck of a good ride. I love driving the 21 car. Go out there and keep doing what we did. Keep positioning ourselves to have a shot to win and one of those wins will come, and run up front, run well, let the performance do the speaking for me and things will work out for next year.”
