Ford Performance Notes and Quotes
NASCAR Cup Series
Wood Brothers Racing Media Availability | Thursday, July 15, 2021
Wood Brothers Racing announced this morning that Harrison Burton will take over as driver of the No. 21 Motorcraft/Quick Lane Ford Mustang in the NASCAR Cup Series next season. Co-owner Eddie Wood, along with Burton and Mark Rushbrook, global director, Ford Performance Motorsports, participated in a conference call with media members to discuss the announcement.
HARRISON BURTON, 2022 Driver, No. 21 Motorcraft/Quick Lane Ford Mustang — WHAT DOES IT MEAN TO YOU TO GO FULL-TIME CUP RACING NEXT YEAR? “For me, it’s humbling, it’s exciting. How can you not be excited? I’ve worked for this my whole life. I’ve been through a lot of ups and downs in my career. I’ve enjoyed some success in the Xfinity Series and I’ve really worked hard to get here and I’m just really proud of the fact I was able to get to a spot like the Wood Brothers with the alliance with Team Penske. Those two organizations together is such a strong combination and you add Ford Performance on top of that, it’s gonna be an exciting opportunity for me. The Next Gen car adds an element of unknown and some fun to it and I couldn’t have thought of a better group of people to make my first jump into Cup racing with and I’m just really, really excited to kind of live out my childhood dreams and go try and beat the best in the world.”
EDDIE WOOD, Co-Owner, Wood Brothers Racing — HOW NICE IS IT TO HAVE ANOTHER FAMILY-FOCUSED DRIVER LIKE HARRISON JOIN YOUR ORGANIZATION? “That’s really a cool part of this. Obviously, we come from a racing family that goes back generations and the Burton family as well. Harrison has got a lot of people to pull from in his family. He’s got his dad, Jeff, and his uncle Ward raced. Jeff and Ward won a number of races and then there’s Jeb, his cousin, so the family part of it I think is really important because there’s more downs in this business than there are ups, and the ups are so good when you get them that it kind of weighs itself out that you forget about the bad, but it takes a strong family to get through life. As owners, I’ve worked on race cars, my brother and got kids that raced and our dad raced, so I know that side of it, but the driver side is really, really hard and drivers need a lot of support and I think the family, I know Jeff and Kim, all of those just a really strong bond and then you through in Ward and Jeb and just a whole group of people and I think it’s really gonna be good.”
MARK RUSHBROOK, Global Director, Ford Performance Motorsports — WHAT IS IT LIKE TO HAVE HARRISON AND AUSTIN JOINING THE FORD CUP PROGRAM NEXT YEAR TOGETHER? “We’re excited about the future that this brings. As you know, Ford Motor Company is still a family company with involvement from the Ford family, and it feels like you’re working for a family when you’re here at Ford. The Wood Brothers and the association they’ve had with us racing, they’re part of our family. Harrison and his racing family with the Burton family, it’s just bringing all these families together and that’s how we go racing with our teams, and especially with the Wood Brothers and Penske alliance. To have Austin and Harrison coming together into that alliance program with the relationship that they already have and the opportunity to build that for the future, we’re really excited about it. It’s great talent, great people and families working together to go racing and do great things together.”
EDDIE WOOD — WHY NOT KEEP MATT, IF THAT WAS AN OPTION? “If you go back nine months, back in the fall of October, it was announced that Austin Cindric was going in our car. Matt was gonna move onto whatever his next step is, and then you fast forward with Brad obviously making a move, that kind of changed things. So we all got together with Team Penske, Ford Performance, all our partners, and we decided — keep in mind the Next Gen car is coming and that’s a white sheet of paper so far as drivers. It’s a white sheet of paper for everybody, but driver’s in particular, so we felt that was a good time to bring in a young rookie, so we just made the decision to figure out what we wanted to do. We could bring a young rookie in to kind of team up with Austin, who is obviously now going into the 2, and those two guys could work together and develop themselves into a great race car drivers. Being rookies, they’re both on the same level and this new car, like I said, is such a white sheet of paper that even if you’re a veteran, if you’re a 20-year veteran, you’re really not gonna have a lot on a rookie. Everybody is kind of starting in the same place, and one thing I’d like to say is some people have asked why we didn’t say thank you to Matt in our release. Well, in our eyes, we’re not done. There are five races left before the playoffs. We’re gonna try to win a race and get in the playoffs. We obviously have to win a race, and then there are 10 races after that, so it just didn’t feel right. I’m not ready to say goodbye. Everybody who has ever driven our car becomes family and we view Matt as family. Everybody knows Matt. Everybody loves Matt. Matt’s a great driver. He’s a great person, got a great big heart — got big arms, too — but it’s just a thing that we viewed that as we get through the year. We give our best effort. He’s gonna give his best effort and that way when it comes time to say goodbye and thank you, that’ll happen, but Matt will always be a part of our family. I’m in the museum now. You can go look on our walls. Every driver who has ever driven for us is in here and, like I said, he’ll always be family.”
HARRISON BURTON — A LOT OF QUESTIONS ON WHETHER YOU’RE READY OR NOT, BUT HOW MUCH DID NEXT GEN COMING IN MOVE THE DECISION? “Yeah, I don’t know if you’re ever ready for the Cup Series. It’s a grueling season with amazing drivers and amazing race teams that you have to find a way to get an edge on and the edges that you find are tiny, so your margin for error is tiny. When you’re a young guy and the opportunity arises to align yourself with a group like these people and you have a chance to kind of get into this sport at a time when the sport is going through a lot of change, I think there’s an opportunity in that. You can look at it the other way and say there’s gonna be a lot of craziness, a lot of change, it’s gonna be tough, but it’s never not gonna be a challenge going from Xfinity to Cup. There’s always gonna be growing periods. There’s always gonna be a spot where you’re trying to learn against guys that are 20-year veterans. That gap of experience will still be there, but this is an opportunity for me to get hands-on, learn how to be a Cup driver, learn how to race at the level these guys race at each weekend and do it with a group of people that understand that. They understand that I’m a young driver. They understand that I’m gonna have my good days and my bad days, and they’re gonna help me and give me all the resources in the world I could ever need to be great. When you put those things together and you lay down in bed at night, you try to figure out what the right decision is, that’s a powerful combination is a team like the Wood Brothers and with the help from Penske and Ford Performance to help me become the best driver I can be, that’s all I can ask for.”
HOW BIG IS THE JUMP FROM WHERE YOU ARE NOW TO THE CUP SERIES? HAVE YOU THOUGHT ABOUT IT? “Not really. I don’t know yet. I’ve got an opportunity to run in the Cup Series at Talladega, got to have an opportunity with Gaunt Brothers Racing to run that race and had a lot of fun and learned a lot, and, yeah, there’s a jump. You go from the Xfinity race to the Cup race and there’s a difference and the intensity is higher and the amount of drivers that are just amazing drivers is higher, and you have to find a way to bring yourself up to that level and, for sure, it’s a jump. I don’t really know what the jump is gonna be like. I know it’s gonna be a challenge, but anything that’s worth doing is normally a challenge and that’s what excites me. Those are the things that motivate me, big challenges and how do you overcome them. I’m a really competitive guy by nature, so those opportunities to put myself in a spot where I have to great, I have to find a way to give these people what they deserve and that’s race wins. I think if I put the work in, I can do it. I believe that. If I look back on my career, there have been times where I’ve had great stretches and won plenty of races and there are times you go through spots that are tougher. All of those made me who I am today and prepared me for the amount of work I’m gonna have to put in to race with these guys every weekend.”
MARK RUSHBROOK — DID YOU LOOK AT HOW HENDRICK HAD YOUNG DRIVERS AT ONE TIME AND THEY’VE BECOME SUCCESSFUL? “For us that’s certainly a consideration because the drivers, the teams within an organization or within an alliance like this, they need to get together to optimize the performance across all four cars, so that’s definitely a consideration in the selection for this. But, I don’t know whether we necessarily looked at Hendrick and said, ‘Oh, let’s copy that,’ but, certainly, yes, that is in some ways what they did two, three, four years ago was they reset their driver lineup with a younger lineup and brought them up together, and it’s clearly, with other things, worked well for them. I definitely like the model with teamwork potential between Harrison and Austin to be able to lean on Joey and Ryan and that combination to have great performance across all four cars.”
EDDIE WOOD — “I agree with what Mark said. The biggest thing, when you’re a young driver like that, a rookie, like I said I’ve never been a driver, but I’ve been around a lot of them and I know they always feel like the world is like way, way big and I’m by myself, I’m alone, and I’ve gotten to know Austin through the last nine months because we thought that’s the way it was gonna be and we got to know him really well and he just seems to fit Harrison. They’re both young and they’re both ready to go and both come from racing families, and it just feels like they would stick together. Race car drivers don’t have a particularly good habit of sticking together. They stick together until they don’t, and that’s OK. That’s why they’re race car drivers and I’m not, but I just feel like those two will have a really good chemistry together, just because they’re both in the same spot and I think it will help their growing pattern, like maybe not double it, but I think it’ll be close.”
HARRISON BURTON — WERE YOU LOOKING FOR AN OPPORTUNITY AWAY FROM TOYOTA? “My years that I spent with Toyota have all been amazing ones and I really am thankful for the opportunities they’ve given me. We’re gonna finish this year out strong with them and try and win championships with them. Really, I think what it all comes down to is kind of what I spoke on a little bit earlier is when these conversations first started, just the amount of support and the amount of stability that was in the organization that I’m going to now, and the belief in me as a driver is really hard to say no to. I’ve got such a great opportunity now to learn in a really tough environment, but a great environment, and I don’t really think that anything Toyota did or didn’t do influenced my decision. I think that it’s just the decision that was best for me. Obviously, Toyota has a lot of great drivers and those seats are filled, but, to be honest with you, I think this is as good of an opportunity as a rookie going into the Cup Series could ever hope for and my hope is that my career with Toyota can finish with a championship in the Xfinity Series, and I can go on to do great things with Ford and Wood Brothers and try and bring some great success to them as well. It’s really not having anything to do with that, it’s more that this is an opportunity that I’m really excited for and fires me up, for sure.”
EDDIE WOOD — IS THERE A PLAN OR IS THERE A HOPE HE WILL BE A LONG-TERM DRIVER FOR THE WOOD BROTHERS GOING FORWARD? “Yeah. You start where you start and that’s certainly the plan. Like I said, the Next Gen car, I keep bringing that up, but that kind of changed the ball game to make it easy. Everybody is starting in the same place. WIth him being a rookie, and Austin, I go back to that and those two guys working together. Hopefully, he’ll be in our car a long, long time and we’re just excited to get going and it’s just one of those deals that I think he’s gonna have a learning curve as both of them will, as everyone that gets in a Cup car, because the competition is so stiff in a Cup car. I mean, it’s nuts to think how close these cars are compared to things I grew up with when guys won races by a lap and stuff like that. Now, if you win them by an inch you’ve done something. Again, to answer your question, we hope he’s in here to stay.”
MARK RUSHBROOK — FROM YOUR PERSPECTIVE HOW HAS THE FOUNDATIONAL SUPPORT HELPED YOUR YOUNG DRIVERS GET TO THE LEVEL WHERE YOU CAN WORK WITH THEM AND BE COMFORTABLE WORKING WITH THEM WHEN THEY’RE SO YOUNG? “We put a lot of focus on our own development program and bringing drivers up through that as you saw with Chase Briscoe, but the way the sport works the timing of bringing drivers up and having them ready when seats are open you can’t always plan on that or be ready for that, so when drivers are available that have come up through different systems, you need to take advantage of that and bring them into the overall Ford program or with the team in the right way with the right support, and we’ve already been talking about that with Len and Eddie and Jon and Harrison to make sure that we’ve got the right plan to bring him in — not just to the Wood Brothers, but the Wood Brothers/Penske alliance and Ford, using our resources to make him feel at home as part of the family and ready to be successful.”
EDDIE WOOD — WHAT HAVE YOU LEARNED FROM WORKING WITH YOUNG DRIVERS BEFORE AND HOW WILL THAT HELP WITH HARRISON? “We’ve had quite a few young drivers. A lot of drivers have won their first race in our car going back all the way for years and it’s really exciting to watch them. It’s just like watching your kids grow up. They go to the first race and it is what it is and things start to develop and they start to run better and they learn how to race, and when I say that I mean just how to race the people they’re racing against because this is new ball game for Harrison and I’m sure he’ll adapt very well, but we’ve got a lot of patience and Ford Motor Company has a lot of patience. When we had Blaney, we ran a limited schedule for the first year and then we ran full time and then the third year together we won a race, so it takes a little while. Sometimes it doesn’t, but I look forward to that because it’s just like watching your kids grow if you can imagine it like that.”
MARK RUSHBROOK — WHAT WILL FORD’S PRESENCE IN THE XFINITY SERIES BE NEXT YEAR? “The way we use the Truck Series and Xfinity Series, they’re important as series, but they’re also important as developing drivers, crew chiefs, race engineers, everything that’s important for the race teams. That’s the way we continue to look at it. We’ve got a lot going on certainly in the trucks with DGR and Front Row, and the drivers that they have and the potential for them to move up to Xfinity, through Xfinity and to Cup, so still very important to us.”
DO YOU SEE MORE OF AN ALLIANCE BETWEEN ALL OF THE FORD TEAMS AS OPPOSED TO JUST THE PENSKE/WOOD BROTHERS ALLIANCE? “The way we go racing is as a family. We call it One Ford or Ford Plus across the teams and the drivers, and I think you’ve seen that play out, especially at the superspeedway races, but it also happens off the track in terms of preparing and adjusting to the rules, or, in this case, for 2022 preparing to race the Next Gen car, so instead of having independent silos, we look across the teams of how can we prepare together so that all the Ford teams are the most successful across all of our teams.”
ULTIMATELY AREN’T YOU SEEING THIS BECOMING A MORE FACTORY-BACKED SPORT WITH A FACTORY-BACKED ALLIANCE? “To maximize return on investment, that’s absolutely the best way to do that. We did it a long time ago as a program in the engine shop with one engine shop to support all the Ford cars, and especially when there is a new car like this there is no reason for paying three times over to have separate aero development or chassis development programs when you can learn together to understand the basics and the fundamentals and then the teams continue to compete against each other on track as they need to win as drivers and teams.”
EDDIE WOOD — WAS HARRISON ON YOUR RADAR FOR NEXT YEAR OR DID IT COME ABOUT RECENTLY, AND DID HIS FAMILY BACKGROUND PLAY A ROLE? “We get back to the family part of it and racing families, but, like I said, nine months ago Austin was gonna be our driver and then things changes as you guys are seeing today, so when that started to happen, that’s when we got together and figured out what the next step was and here we are.”
HARRISON BURTON — DID YOU KNOW LEAVING THE TOYOTA PIPELINE WAS GOING TO BE A FACTOR FOR YOU AND HOW HARD WAS IT TO TELL THEM YOU WERE LEAVING? “It’s obviously an easy conversation. The Toyota family has been really supportive of me and even though I’m moving to the Ford Performance group, which I’m obviously super ecstatic about, they’ve also supported me in that move. They understand it’s a great move for me and they understand and are just happy for me as a person. Obviously, it’s a little bit sad. I’ve been with them since I was 13, so I’ve kind of grown up around a lot of those people and to race for another team is exciting. I have no regrets about that decision at all. It’s gonna be an amazing group of people. I’m more than excited to work with Ford and to work with the Wood Brothers and to work with Team Penske — all of those things put together is just amazing, but when you leave people that you’ve worked around for a long time it’s obviously a little emotional. At the end of the day it’s the racing business and the people at Toyota are happy for me and that’s really all I can ask for is a group of people that’s there for me and Toyota and now Ford have both done that.”
WHAT ARE YOUR GOALS FOR NEXT YEAR? “I don’t really know if I’ve thought that far ahead. I’m still so focused on trying to be an Xfinity Series champion, trying to kind of excel at the level I’m at right now, and I feel the more effort I put into this season, the more results I get out of this season, the better I’ll be next season. So, I haven’t written down any goals or anything yet. That’s something I normally like to do before a season starts in the off-season is look at things and look at where I am as a driver and where I need to improve, but, right now, I’ve still got my Xfinity goals I need to accomplish and that’s an exciting thing for me. It’s so fun in this sport to be a race car driver and to do it in an opportunity like I have now, where I know what’s going on for next year and I know what I have to prepare for, but I have that security of I have a little bit of time to get ready for it and the Xfinity Series is obviously a great proving ground for that, so I have a lot of time to work on it and get better, but my expectations are always high. I want to perform well and put the 21 in victory lane as much as possible.”
WHEN DID THE PROSPECT OF JOINING THE WOOD BROTHERS FIRST PRESENTED? “It’s been a bit of a process to get it all done. It’s been really awesome working with everyone to make it happen. It was presented to me, my dad is kind of my acting general manager. He’s got so many relationships with people in the sport and the introduction to the prospect was made to me by him, so he’d be a good guy to ask about all that stuff. For me, it was going up and meeting everybody and putting it together was a process and it took some time, but over the time that we went the more and more I thought about it the better the decision made sense, so I was really, really excited about that.”
HOW LONG AGO WAS THAT? “It’s hard to say. I’m horrible with dates. Like I said, my dad is probably more organized with that kind of thing. I’ve got a lot to juggle with racing Xfinity and working on this. I’m just trying to be the best I can be and thankfully I’ve got an amazing support system around me now with the Ford racing family and the Wood Brothers and Team Penske, and the people that help me every day to where I can just focus on being a race car driver and that’s all I have to worry about.”
HOW DOES THIS CHANGE YOUR DYNAMIC WITH TOYOTA? “I don’t think it does. For me, I think the dynamic obviously you know you’re not gonna be there next year, so there’s that in the room, but the goal is still the same for me as it was before this happened — the goal is to win races in my Joe Gibbs Racing No. 20 car, and so when I wake up every morning, that’s gonna be the first thing I think about is, ‘What do I have to do to be a better race car driver to do that,’ and the same feeling is said on their side as well. When this whole announcement was going on I was working out. When it first went live I was working out in the gym and thinking about Loudon. That was a good thing for me to do to just keep my head rolling in that direction because staying focused through times like this is obviously a challenge.”
EDDIE WOOD — WHAT WILL STATUS WITH MENARDS BE LIKE GOING FORWARD? “We haven’t got into the specifics of how that’s gonna break out. One thing for sure is our relationship with the Ford Motor Company, Motorcraft, Quick Lane and Ford Performance won’t change. Red and white will still have a presence on our car as always with the Motorcraft colors and we’ll get into all the rest of it as things kind of settle down. Right now, we’re just concentrating on we’ve got five races to try to get in the playoffs and we’re gonna do everything we can to do that.”
HARRISON BURTON — DID YOUR RELATIONSHIP WITH DEX IMAGING HELP WITH THIS RELATIONSHIP? “You look at Dex Imaging and they’ve been with me since I was 13 years old racing late models at local short tracks and they’ve had my back all the way up to this point in time, and it’s been an awesome ride to get here. And then you look at Team Penske and they’re pretty deeply embedded, Dex is, with Penske. They do work on their Indy Car side, obviously, they work with Blaney as well and they’re actually involved in the Indianapolis Motor Speedway as well, so you look at all those things and Dex is deeply embedded, but, to be honest, I don’t really have, like Eddie said, we don’t really have much to talk about on that side because this is such a fresh deal and we’ve figured out that I’m driving for them and the details of all of that stuff is still kind of up in the air, but the Dex relationship with Team Penske is obviously strong and I’m excited to hopefully try and grow that.”
EDDIE WOOD — “Dex has relationships with Gibbs as well as Penske, so all of that kind of stuff has yet to be determined. I don’t know. Like I said, from what I know about that company they’re a great company and they’re deeply embedded in both racing organizations, so we’ll just have to wait and see what happens.”
