Ford Performance NSCS Notes and Quotes
Food City 500 – Bristol Motor Speedway
Sunday, April 17, 2016
Ford Finishing Results:
5th – Trevor Bayne
10th – Joey Logano
11th – Ryan Blaney
12th – Greg Biffle
16th – Ricky Stenhouse Jr.
18th – Brad Keselowski
21st – Chris Buescher
22nd – Landon Cassill
30th – Brian Scott
32nd – Jeffrey Earnhardt
34th – Aric Almirola
TREVOR BAYNE – No. 6 AdvoCare Ford Fusion – “It was a lot of battling back. We went through a lot of adversity to get there, but we just didn’t give up. We had a really good race car. That’s what paid off. You can’t come back if you don’t have good race cars and we’ve got that now. I need to minimize my mistakes going forward, but we were able to make mistakes and get back to a top-5 finish. I kept getting on the bottom on restarts every time, but it came back to me at the end. We were able to start on the top those last three and that’s really what got us in the top-5.” DOES IT MEAN MORE AT THIS TRACK? “Yeah. If there’s somewhere I could choose to run well it’s Bristol. It’s a tough race track. It’s my home track. I have a lot of fans here and it just feels good to be in contention every week. It’s a short track and we know we’ve had our struggles with those and we wanted to get better at them, and we’ve made a quick turnaround to get better here.”
RICKY STENHOUSE JR. – No. 17 Zest Ford Fusion – “Every restart we were on the bottom. I thought we had a top-5 car there at the end with speed, but we just couldn’t break out.” YOU BATTLED BACK AFTER PROBLEMS EARLY. “Yeah, we never gave up, but we’ve still got a lot of work to do.”
GREG BIFFLE – No. 16 Roush Performance Ford Fusion – “We were up in sixth and those last two restarts we started on the bottom and that just killed us, but I will say that all day long I started on the top. Those last two were the only ones where I didn’t and that’s just luck. You’re not gonna get the top every time and the last two I didn’t get it.” ALL THREE RFR CARS WERE STRONG TODAY. “Yeah and we needed that. Again, it was lane choice that depended on a lot of that, but we all fought hard for track position and it ended up a good day for us.”
BRAD KESELOWSKI – No. 2 Miller Lite Ford Fusion – “It was an eventful day. I had a pit road speeding penalty and recovered from that, and got up towards the front and then the 18 spun out in front of me. I barely touched somebody and the front end fell off the car. We keep having that problem on short tracks, so I don’t know what we’ve got to do there, but we drove back up and the car was really fast. We got up to third and then got a flat tire. We lost two laps on that and fought really hard with the wavearound and lucky dog and got back to the lead lap with like eight to go and passed three cars in the laps we had and that was our day. I feel like we were a pretty good car. I was pretty happy overall with our performance, but we couldn’t get it all to come together.” WHAT WAS THE TOUGHEST PART OF TODAY? “The speed is all at the top. That makes it a one-groove race track. That makes it kind of fun, but also kind of frustrating because the cars aero push behind somebody so terrible that you can’t really keep up with the guy in front of you even when you’re faster in that groove and that’s the only groove there is, so that’s part of the fight.”
JOEY LOGANO – No. 22 AutoTrader Ford Fusion – “We fought hard and we got all the way back, and then the car just shut off there at the end for some reason. We’ve got to figure that out a little bit, but I just hate it because I feel like we’ve got a car that’s capable of winning this thing and every time we come here in the spring it’s the same story. We have a fast car and we just blow it somehow.” CAN YOU EXPLAIN WHAT HAPPENED AT THE END? “It just shut off.”
RYAN BLANEY – No. 21 Motorcraft/Quick Lane Ford Fusion – “It was good until the end. We should have run fifth, easy.” WHAT HAPPENED ON THOSE LAST FEW RESTARTS? “The bottom (lane) is terrible here. You can’t go anywhere on the bottom. If you’re lucky enough to restart on the top, then you’ll move forward even if you’re a terrible race car. We had a good race car and got stuck on the bottom for three straight restarts and went backward. That’s pretty disappointing when you know you have a top-5 race car.” YOU SEEMED TO BE CHASING HANDLING ALL DAY BUT LOOKED GOOD AT THE END. “We were okay for a little bit and then fell off. That last run when we were running fifth was our best run (handling). We could do a lot of stuff. We got it better throughout the day. Unfortunately it didn’t play out for us.”
CHRIS BUESCHER – No. 34 Love’s Travel Stops Ford Fusion – YOUR BEST FINISH OF THE SEASON. “Lining up there at the end just got us. We were 14th on the board and we were lined up 13th or 15th, I don’t really know, but things like that. This track is so line sensitive now and it’s so hard to pass that there’s not much we could do on the bottom on restarts, except try to get to the top and get rolling. It wasn’t bad. There’s a lot of hope there. We had a lot of speed there and it was fun racing.”
LANDON CASSILL – No. 38 Snap Fitness Ford Fusion – “Track position is so important. We were good enough to keep it for a while, but we weren’t good enough to drive back up through there, but I don’t think anybody was. You just needed to have good track position all day, and we had it most of the day and I had a little tangle with the 14 and it was just a hard racing deal. I kind of went over my head a little bit.”
