Ford Performance Notes and Quotes
NASCAR Cup Series
Brickyard 400 Media Availability | Indianapolis Motor Speedway
Friday, July 19, 2024
Team Penske drivers Ryan Blaney, Joey Logano and Austin Cindric met with media members at Indianapolis Motor Speedway ahead of on-track activities Friday afternoon. Below is a sampling of driver quotes from their media scrum sessions.
RYAN BLANEY, No. 12 Ford Mustang Dark Horse
QUESTION INAUDIBLE:
“I feel like they do a great job at finding things that need to get better. And, you know, even though we won last week, we’re not complacent about where we’re at. We’re always trying to be better. So, it doesn’t doesn’t worry me one bit. It just makes me feel even better about when the playoffs come in a couple months.”
DO YOU ALMOST HATE TAKING OFF THIS TWO WEEKS BECAUSE YOU GUYS ARE SO STRONG RIGHT NOW.”
“No, I need a break. I’m excited for a break.”
EVEN WITH HOW STRONG YOU GUYS HAVE RUN OVER THE LAST MONTH OR SO, YOU GAINED 40-SOMETHING POINTS ON THE CHAMPIONSHIP LEAD. DO YOU THINK YOU CAN EXTEND THAT INTO THE 70S?
“I don’t know if we can get there. I feel like I’d like to have a couple races back like New Hampshire running second got dumped and run 25th. Gateway we had a good shot to run top three and finish like 29th. You look at it, there’s like 50 points right there, but 70 plus is kind of far. You never know what’s gonna happen, but all we can do is just try to keep inching in on it. Like I said, it’s nice to kind of gain some of those, but that’s hard to gain. Those guys in front of you are super competitive, really, really good. I just don’t see all of them having bad days consecutively, so we’ll just try to keep inching in. We’ve done a good job so far.”
CAN YOU TALK ABOUT THE TIRES FOR RICHMOND?
“I think it’s good they’ve tried something. They tried it at Wilkesboro. I don’t think we really got the full option tire experience at Wilkesboro, just because of the new pavement, but I think Richmond will be a little bit more. It has to be two sides of the scale. It has to be half a second faster like the option tire has to be half second faster for like 10 laps and then fall off a second after that. So it has to be two ways and hopefully Richmond helps that out. I’m happy they’re doing something. We’ve done everything else with the race car to try to help the short track stuff, almost everything. The tire is kind of the last piece that we can touch, so hopefully that helps it out a little bit.”
WOULD YOU LIKE TO SEE THEM GO FURTHER?
“Yeah, you just kind of see where it’s at, you know, just see what that tire does, how much it wears. You never want to kind of jump the ship, you know, and go way too far going into a weekend where you don’t know what’s going to happen and then you’re stuck with it. I think just little steps here to try to learn for the future I think is the right way. I mean, everyone beats the dead horse about the horsepower, but I just don’t know if that’s ever going to happen again, unfortunately, but those two things, keep working on tires and we’ll keep yelling for horsepower, even though we might not get it, but those are the two things we can try to do.”
YOU DROVE THE OLD CAR HERE. MICHAEL MCDOWELL JUST DESCRIBED THIS PACKAGE BECAUSE THE TECHNOLOGY AND STUFF THAT IT HAS IN IT, IT’S A LITTLE MORE NIMBLE BECAUSE THE TURNS HERE ARE SO PRECISE. HOW MUCH DO YOU THINK THAT WILL CHANGE THE NATURE OF THE RACE HERE ON THE OLD?
“It’s hard to tell. I wasn’t part of the test here, so I don’t have a lot of knowledge I could confidently speak on about that. I hope it’s a good race. Gosh, I mean, this place definitely deserves a good showing and it’s nice to be back on the big track and that’s the Brickyard to me. The road course was fun for a few years but this is the Brickyard and so hopefully, this car is raceable. We all talk about it. You need more clean airspace to get anything with this car and here there’s just no other options, right? With the old car, you could kind of peek a headlight out and you’re good. This car, you need like half a car. Someone’s really going to have to miss the corner for you to get half a car. So we’ll see. But yeah, hopefully the runs are big enough to where you can kind of lay back, get a run on somebody down the straights and make moves but we’ll find out in a few hours.”
JOEY LOGANO, No. 22 Ford Mustang Dark Horse
THE 2014 PLAYOFFS WERE THE FIRST PLAYOFFS WITH THE ELIMINATION STRUCTURE AND YOU MADE THE CHAMPIONSHIP ROUND THAT YEAR. WHEN YOU LOOK BACK ON THAT, NOT JUST THOSE 10 RACES, BUT KIND OF HOW IT’S IMPACTED EVERYTHING IN NASCAR SINCE, WHAT’S YOUR TAKE ON IT?
“It was probably the biggest change in our sport from a sporting side of things. From how you win a championship, I think that we’ve ever seen, right? The introduction of the Chase, that was one piece that was pretty big, but I think when they started the playoff rounds, that’s equally as big, maybe bigger in the way it’s done. More do-or-die moments, right? More back up against the wall, gotta make it happen moments. Equally as big as the playoffs is how they did the playoff points and making every race more important. I think it works. I think it’s done really well. It has created a lot of drama in our sport. A lot more storylines for you guys to talk about. So to me, if it’s lasted this long, I don’t see anything about it that I would change at this point. I think it’s just like any other sport now. You can have an incredible regular season and still lose the first game of the playoffs and be out. Well, the same thing happens here. You still get seeded off of how you do, right? You get those playoff points throughout the regular season that help you get through the playoffs, but it’s no guarantee you’re going to win the championship. I think that’s what makes it critical.”
DO YOU HAVE MORE PRESSURE WITH ROGER OWNING THIS PLACE FOR THIS WEEKEND?
“We want to win. We want to win more, sure, absolutely. It’s been like that every time you come here, you want to win, but when Roger owns it, obviously he wants to see the success of his cars on this racetrack. He doesn’t specifically call us and say, hey, you’re coming to our track, you need to make sure you win and run well. But it doesn’t have to be said to know that all of our partners are here. This is a big race for Team Penske. All of our race car partners are partners with the racetrack most likely one way or another. It is one of the crown jewel events of the year. So yeah, it’s a little extra there.”
SO WHEN JOSEPH NEWGARDEN BRINGS THE BORG WARNER TROPHY FROM BACK-TO-BACK INDY 500 WINS, TALK A LITTLE ABOUT THAT:
“It’s great. That’s what you want to see, right? He was able to come up here the last couple of years and collect the ultimate trophy. This is our opportunity to do the same, and we’ll try to do the same.”
GIVEN YOUR SUCCESS WITH THE OLD CAR AND THE NEW CAR AT RICHMOND, HOW ARE THE TWO TIRE COMPOUNDS GONNA AFFECT THE RACE THAT WE SEE IN A COUPLE OF WEEKS?
“It depends on the speed difference from compound to compound. I’m not 100% sure what that’s gonna be, right? And what does the fall-off look like? I don’t know, maybe you know, but I don’t know. So I think when we get out there and we practice, everyone’s gonna make a couple long runs most likely and say, okay, here’s the differences and that’s gonna affect the strategy a lot. I don’t think it will be like it was at Wilkesborough, where there wasn’t any tire fall-off, so just putting the softs on made sense. Or the option tire, whatever you want to call it. There’s a lot of fall off at Richmond. So if you can have a tire that lasts longer on a long haul, most likely there’s long runs there. You’re going to want that at some point. But we’ve seen Richmond also come down to where you have a green-white-checker or a 15-lap to go caution and you’re going to want the softs for that. So I don’t really know how it’s going to play out. It just depends on what the tire difference ends up being.”
WITH THE OLYMPICS IN A COUPLE OF WEEKS, IF WE DID AN INTERNATIONAL RACE OF CHAMPIONS WHERE EVERYBODY BROUGHT THEIR BEST SEDAN, YOU KNOW, LIKE A NASCAR SITUATION, HOW INTERESTED WOULD YOU BE IN HAVING A NASCAR OLYMPICS?
“100%, all the way in. I would love it. That’d be the coolest thing. It’s just hard to figure out a fair way of doing that, because you can’t bring a Cup car. Uou can’t bring an F1 car. You can’t bring a rally car. It’s gotta be something that nobody drives. I think having an American team to go up against other countries would be like really, really neat. It’s just gotta be fair. There’s so many different elements that go into it versus playing hockey. You kind of know what’s going to be — there’s no big advantage from skating on a different sheet of ice somewhere. Is it really gonna be that different? No. But for us, there are so many different variables with a race car and being used to driving on a certain type of surface or car or speed, it’s just really hard to make that fair. I’m good with it. Bring your best street legal car. Let’s go.”
WHAT’S CLICKING SO WELL WITH THIS TEAM RIGHT NOW?
“It seems like things are going pretty well right now. Whether it’s the IndyCar side, sports car side, Cup side, it has been good. You know, hopefully we can keep that flow going for the rest of the year. It’s funny, you look, at least on the NASCAR side, you look back at 10 weeks ago, it didn’t look like that. It looked pretty ugly, actually. So, yeah, we’ve just kind of been able to work hard and it seems like some of the gains that we’ve made are starting to show their face a little bit. that we’ve made are starting to show their face a little bit. There’s probably some other variables in there too, but it seems to be working out here recently.
AUSTIN CINDRIC, No. 2 Ford Mustang Dark Horse
A LOT OF PEOPLE MIGHT NOT REALIZE HOW YOU OBVIOUSLY DRIVE FOR THE OWNER OF THIE TRACK, BUT YOUR DAD, TIM, RUNS THE TEAM, EVEN YOUR GRANDFATHER, JIM TRUMAN, WON THIS RACE IN 1986 AS AN OWNER. WAS THIS TRACK THE ONLY TRACK YOU WERE THINKING OF AT THE DINNER TABLE GROWING UP?
“I think my earliest memories in racing only involved the Speedway and watching races here. The first time I didn’t go to an Indy 500 was the first year I raced the Coca-Cola 600. So if that tells you anything, this is racing to me. Other people might think of the short track they grew up going to or whatever else, this is it for me. So it’s very special to get to race here. It’s a special place for both sides of my family and obviously a special place for my race team.”
DESCRIBE HOW IMPORTANT IT IS FOR THE SPORT FOR THIS RACE TO BE BACK ON THE OVAL.
“I’m probably not the best person to ask to be honest because I haven’t done too many Cup races on the oval. I haven’t done any. I think just listening to some of my peers, everyone’s really excited to have this as a race, as a Crown Jewel race back on the schedule. I know it’ll be very cool for me to head the correct direction across the yard of bricks.”
WOULD YOU EVER CONSIDER DOING THE DOUBLE HERE?
“Absolutely. I don’t see a reason why not. I’m not in any rush to do it. But I have a love for that event. Yeah, I would love to find the right timing to do it.”
SO WHAT GOT THINGS GOING IN THE RIGHT DIRECTION FOR THIS TRIO HERE IN THE LAST 10 WEEKS OR SO?
“I think a number of things, but as a team, obviously we have all the resources we need to succeed, it’s just putting it together sometimes. It’s a super competitive series right now, probably more competitive than it’s ever been. I think it’s just a really good month, month and a half for our organization on a couple different types of tracks. It’s a long season and things can change quickly. You look at the beginning of the season and say, oh they’re off and now you look at us and oh they’re on. We have another month or two left of the season so we’ve got to keep it going.”
