Ford Performance Notes and Quotes
NASCAR Cup Series
Phoenix 1 Media Availability | Saturday, March 8, 2025
Chris Buescher, driver of the No. 17 RFK Racing Ford Mustang Dark Horse met with media members at Phoenix Raceway ahead of on-track action Saturday afternoon. Buescher and the NASCAR Cup Series will practice and qualify Saturday for Sunday’s Shriners Children’s 500.
WE HEARD PEOPLE SPEAK YESTERDAY ABOUT RACING PHOENIX IN THE SPRING IS A WHOLE LOT DIFFERENT THAN WHEN YOU GUYS COME BACK HERE. IS THAT KIND OF THE WAY THAT YOU LOOK AT IT AS WELL?
“Yeah I’d say that’s pretty accurate. You know, one thing, we run these races so far apart so it does go through temperature changes and track changes and intensity changes just on where it is during the season when we close out here. So yeah it’s accurate. The races do seem to play out quite differently year to year. That’s something that we try and understand. Everybody, for the most part, everybody knows it or admits it, I guess. But it just doesn’t 100% make sense. I don’t know what it is, if it’s just the track sitting through the winter or what, but the races do seem to typically play out a decent amount differently.
QUESTION INAUDIBLE: “It’s not a plug-and-play no. (t certainly is the same track still and we take a lot of what we learn and try and use it for championship weekend but it requires tuning and it requires our teams going through a lot of their notes and what they have seen as typical offsets from the spring race to a borderline winter race, right? So it’s definitely something that we have to plan for and there is something that everyone has built in or tries to understand as best as possible.”
WHAT DOES IT TAKE TO RUN THE WALL AND WHO DO YOU THINK IS THE BEST AT IN THE CUP SERIES?
“This racetrack has not been going quite as wide over the last couple of races. It just keeps inching back down. I guess my theory, which could be a hundred percent wrong, is just that I don’t know if it was PJ1 or resin or what that was sprayed last. It just seems to steadily be wearing out or going away. I haven’t messed with it in several years now. With that, I think that you get in these races and everybody thinks the shortest distance around it is going to play out and there’s plenty of grip at this racetrack still, even as it’s aging. But you slide up the groove and find yourself not where you wanted to be and discover, oh, there’s a little bit of grip out here still. Then that just becomes the line for a while until it just starts to steadily move up. Some of it’s based on tire wear and what we fight. Trying to keep that smaller radius running the bottom of one and two, where it’s coming off the top, you can just kind of straighten out the wheel and be able to put power down easier. It’s wearing out. We haven’t been able to see it make quite the benefit from behind the wheel as we had in a couple of races back where we were sailing it up right against the fence. Now it will come in at points and it will be better for some people, but it’s not dominant. I think that’s a good thing. I think that makes the lanes stay more even here, which I do think is creating better racing here.”
OBVIOUSLY, THE OPTION TIRE IS GOING TO BE IN PLAY HERE. HOW DO YOU SEE THAT PLAYING OUT? WE SAW IT IN RICHMOND LAST YEAR. HOW DO YOU SEE THAT IMPACTING THINGS THIS WEEKEND?
“Until we get on track with it I don’t have the best answer, but a lot of study has gone into this. Realizing that North Wilkesboro, when we did this the first go-round, the surface was just new and we ended up running the whole race on reds, right? That was probably not the best read for it, but then Richmond, a track that has a rather abrasive surface, and we did see big movers when they would bolt on reds at certain times during the race, and then have more fall off with them. We have a lot of notes from that race that we have applied towards this one in trying to take into account that the surface is different here, but it’s on our minds. We’ll have one set of each one for practice coming up here, so we’re gonna be paying attention to others. It’s gonna create more work for our teams as they try and decide or figure out what other teams are running, just to make sure that we have that data right. If you just look at timing and scoring, you don’t know if it was a red tire versus a yellow. I don’t know what the official names are, that’s the only way I can keep up is red versus yellow. But for us it’s just a matter of keeping up with who’s on what so that we can understand where their speed is, whether that’s fire off, fall off, and try and compare it to what we’re going to do and we’ll obviously know what tires we’re on at any point during the run. We’re balancing that out across our three cars this go. So obviously we have some more data for our organization, which is exciting for us and we feel like it will be beneficial throughout the year, but it’s going to give us more notes to lean on after this practice here today and be more prepared for tomorrow. It’s certainly not going to be a race where you can put the reds on and just run this thing out. We’ve had some rather long runs here and that’s been our strong suit for RFK. So with this option tire, if it’s got some fire-off speed and if we can make that last longer than competition, then maybe it works out great for us. Or if it kind of falls off the same for everybody, then maybe we lose some of what we had. We’re not staying still though. We know what our cars did good last time here and what we need them to do better. So we are working on that and trying to make it be better on both tires.”
YOU’RE TRYING TO ACCUMULATE DATA AND NOTES FOR NOVEMBER, HOW MUCH DOES IT COMPLICATE THE FACT THAT YOU’RE RUNNING TWO DIFFERENT TIRES THIS WEEKEND?
“Yeah, it’s going to make this weekend busier. I don’t know, it’s so far away. I don’t know what the plan is, I guess, in my mind, and I don’t think I’m making this up, but I think the idea is to try and run if the option tire is good and holds on and has good fall off and good racing, it’s my understanding is to try and run that tire as the only tire when we come back. I guess that’s what I thought I heard. I don’t, you are probably way more up to date in here than I am on that. But that is correct? I’m not making that up? Good, good. I would usually blame it on early morning, but it’s like one o’clock. For us, we’re obviously going to take everything that we can figure out. We know there’s an offset when we bolt on that red tire versus yellow based on Richmond based on North Wilkesboro. We’ll base that off today and we’ll kind of find out what that means for us and if we get to a place where we’re happy on the reds and we come out of this race, and we get that information that this is what we’re going to try and run, and we like this then yeah, it’s only three sets through the weekend that we got to run on the reds. But that’ll make those notes all that more important as we come back and get ready for the championship weekend.”
HOW WAS IT RACING IN FRONT OF MORE OF LIKE A HOMETOWN CROWD LAST WEEKEND AT COTA AND COMING OFF YOUR SUCCESS LAST WEEK, WHAT DO YOU HOPE TO ACHIEVE HERE AT PHOENIX?
“I’m fortunate enough, I guess, to get two home tracks in a sense, which is kind of a stretch when you consider they’re four and a half, five hours apart. From where I live in the Carolinas now, I think I have five or six of our races that are all closer than that. So it internally makes me laugh a little bit, but going back home and seeing that home crowd is always fun. Whether it’s intros or walking around the facility there and seeing old friends that are there for that race, it’s even more so when we go up to Texas Motor Speedway. It always is just a good time. It creates a little bit more chaos and it makes it a little busier, but all for the right reasons. For us, road racing has been pretty notably strong for RFK, for ourselves on the 17 team, and for whatever reason COTA has been our worst road course. I don’t know if it’s because it’s the first one of the season and we’re just trying to knock the rust off or what, but practicing and qualifying were just kind of mediocre. Qualifying wasn’t good and had a lot of work to do during the race. The team stepped up and did a good job and were able to really roll through and get a solid finish out of it and kind of just give us that little bit of a kick in the rear that we needed leaving there because it was a tough first day in Austin. It’s obviously a different time of year as well. You think about the way this schedule is played out at the beginning of the season, it’s hard to get a read on where the entire garage is at as far as what this year is going to look like from speed, from who is strong at ovals. We don’t even know right now. Kind of leading into the second part of your question, as we head into Phoenix, this is kind of our first traditional style race for the year. So we’re hoping to get a lot out of this. We’re hoping that everything is really good right off the truck so that we can use this as kind of our baseline to set the tone for the first quarter of the season. The largest goal for our team is to make sure that we fire off this season on a high note and somewhere in these first eight races are able to find victory lane. I feel like that’s what we’ve been missing. So that’s our goal for Phoenix. We finished second here in the spring race last year. So we were very strong. Bell was in another world that race, so still had a lot of work to do to win it but certainly looking at that, we were strong here in the fall and in the last couple of years at a racetrack that — I don’t know if anybody from the tracks in here — but I hated this place. I hated this place so much for so much of my career and it’s been nice to say that I don’t feel that way about it. Talking for real, I don’t hate coming to Phoenix any longer. The last several years now have been really, really good and it makes me excited to come back here and see what we can do.”
IT FEELS LIKE GOODYEAR HAS RECEIVED A LOT OF THE PRESSURE TO FIX A LOT OF THE RACING ISSUES AND THEY’VE BEEN WILLING TO TAKE RISKS. THEY BROUGHT A SOFTER TIRE TO COTA, THEY’RE BRINGING THE TWO OPTIONS TODAY. FROM YOUR PERSPECTIVE AS A DRIVER, WHAT DOES THAT SAY ABOUT GOODYEAR FOR THEM BEING ABLE TO GO OUT AND RISK THE NEW TIRE COMPOUNDS?
“I think it’s fantastic for our sport. We appreciate the willingness from them to do it and I think we’ve seen it starting to play out and pay off in some big ways. Obviously I’m not in their shoes and I understand it’s definitely tricky to be making a race tire for the best racing possible and production tires to put on your passenger vehicle. From a racing side of it alone and forgetting the rest, we’ve been able to get to the point where we’ve had some big fall-off races. We’ve been pulling strategy back into these things where you feel like you can decide if you want to stay out and take a risk on a tire that maybe only has five laps on it, but it is making a difference. We went through a period of time where you could run tires just as long as you could run a tank of fuel out, and that’s showing up to make better racing. The tire last week from COTA was essentially the same tire as Watkins Glen and the fall off that we’ve seen there. And maybe I’m a little bit biased to that one, but you know what, it worked at COTA too. We had some strategies that we hadn’t seen in a while. I think the Richmond race last year with the two tires, I don’t know that I love running two different option tires in a weekend, but I do understand the end goal of trying to use it as a real-world test. Because when you come here, and I’ve been a part of these many times throughout my career, you come here with six cars after a race or just somewhere in the winter, and you try and test something and see what works, it doesn’t relate. There’s just not enough cars, not enough heat, not enough rubber in the track. It just doesn’t give you the real world answers that you need. So this is a way to get those answers during a race weekend. It does create some excitement and some unknowns, but it also gives us answers on what we can do as a sport and what Goodyear is able to pull off so that we can have better racing as we head into the next short track or the next time we come to Phoenix or whatever it may be.”
