Ford Performance NSCS Notes and Quotes
STP 500 Advance – Martinsville Speedway
Saturday, April 2, 2016
Richard Petty is the all-time winner in the NASCAR Sprint Cup Series at Martinsville Speedway, but one of his drivers – Brian Scott – will be making his first start at the half-mile track in Sunday’s STP 500. Scott, who received his first Mustang earlier this morning from Petty’s Garage, will start 26th. Both Petty and Scott spoke about Martinsville and how it’s a one-of-a-kind facility.
RICHARD PETTY, Owner – No. 44 Goody’s Ford Fusion – HOW MUCH HAS THE ON-TRACK RACING CHANGED AT MARTINSVILLE SINCE YOU WERE COMPETING HERE? “It used to be that we had all kind of brake problems and rear end problems and all that, and half of the cars fell out of the race. Now they start the race and if they don’t crash nobody has a problem. The cars are so much better as far as being able to run a whole race. It used to be survival, but now they race each other. Even though we raced each other then, a lot of us didn’t survive. Now, they don’t worry that much about surviving. For the long part of the deal it makes a better race out of it because you’ve got more cars running at the end of the race racing against each other.”
WHAT ARE SOME OF YOUR MEMORIES AT MARTINSVILLE? “We always looked forward to this race. We knew what it took to run 500 laps and back in the day you had drum brakes and when the race was over there probably wasn’t but two or three cars on the track that had brakes. We would just idle around and run half the race and when everybody wore their brakes out, then we would start racing. That was our advantage up here, I think. It wasn’t that we ran that much better, but we could just race at the end of the race where a lot of people couldn’t. We had a couple of bad days up here. I don’t remember if I spun out and my dad ran into me, or he spun out and I ran into him, but we wiped out two cars up here down in the third corner one day. That was probably the lowest point we’ve had here.”
WHAT WAS THAT CONVERSATION LIKE WITH YOUR DAD? “It wasn’t good (laughing). But I was working on the cars, so I had to fix both of them – mine and his.”
HOW DO YOU LIKE THE WAY YOUR SEASON HAS STARTED? “We’re just a wee bit better than we were last year, but we’re doing a lot of our own stuff and feel like we’ve got a lot better opportunity of improving over the year than what we did before because most of the time what we started the season with is what we wound up with. Now, we can make our own changes with the body or the chassis or whatever the rules are, so it might not be there, but we’re gonna have a better chance of our destiny being in our hands from the car standpoint.”
THIS PROVIDES YOU MORE FLEXIBILITY. “Being we’re doing it in-house we can do it so much quicker. We don’t have to wait until somebody else does it or go through engineering. We can say, ‘OK, cut this off and move it over there and weld it on. We can try it and see if it works.’ Again, that gives us a chance to keep up with technology or help ourselves in technology by making new changes.”
BRIAN SCOTT – No. 44 Goody’s Ford Fusion – WHAT IS IT LIKE DRIVING A CUP CAR HERE AT MARTINSVILLE FOR THE FIRST TIME? “I love Martinsville Speedway. Running the Truck Series here it’s a unique short track. It’s not like anything else that we do for being flat, tight corners, long straightaways. It presents its own unique challenges and I like that. To me, I look at it a lot like almost a road course. I think going into a road course I get the mindset of you need to be really disciplined. You need to minimize your mistakes because they can really cost you, they can really add up and they can affect your finish. To me, that’s the same way I’m going to approach Martinsville. I think it takes a lot of discipline. Don’t make unforced errors and mistakes on your end. Don’t speed on pit road. Don’t make the day anymore difficult than it already is because it’s already a challenging race track. Yes, there’s a higher probability that things are going to happen like people are going to run into you and the field stacks up, but I think for the most part if you can – we always say on a road course ‘stay on track, don’t go off track, don’t blow a corner.’ It’s kind of the same thing here. If you just stay on track, keep your nose clean, don’t make the day more difficult than it already is, I think you can capitalize and you can take a 20th-place car and finish top-10 with it because all of the other guys will make mistakes.”
HOW MUCH DIFFERENT IS QUALIFYING HERE VERSUS WHEN YOU’RE IN THE ACTUAL RACE, BESIDES THE FACT THERE ARE 40 CARS OUT THERE AT THE SAME TIME? “It becomes more and more challenging the further back you get in the pack because there’s an accordion effect going in these corners. Each car has to brake a car width sooner than the one in front of it to not run into it, and when you multiply that by 20 rows, all of a sudden you’re slowing down 20 car lengths earlier than you really need to for the corner. That catches some guys off-guard, especially guys that are looking in their mirror or looking at somebody that might be trying to pass them or get position on them. You always see it here, where 10 cars will end up with nose and tail damage in one corner.”
HOW IMPORTANT IS IT TO FIND THAT RHYTHM WE HEAR ABOUT AT THIS TRACK? “Especially under green when it spreads out a little bit it really becomes a rhythm deal, where you need to just take care of your stuff. I feel like Jeff Gordon was very good at that last fall here when he won that race. He wouldn’t fire off a run as fast as he could go. He would take care of his tires a little bit and run them down towards the end. He kept his nose clean. He didn’t get into a lot of those scuffles and things that happened around him. He made it through them clean and, like he said, he was probably a third or fourth-place car, but when the cards sorted out a bunch of people tend to take care of themselves here and you don’t have to worry about them. You let 500 laps at Martinsville take its own toll and as long as you can kind of rise about that challenge, you can capitalize on a lot of other peoples’ misfortune.”
