Ford Performance NASCAR Notes and Quotes
AAA Texas 500 – Texas Motor Speedway
Friday, November 4, 2016
Trevor Bayne, driver of the No. 6 AdvoCare/SEAL Legacy Foundation Ford Fusion, met with media members at Texas Motor Speedway Friday afternoon in advance of Sunday’s AAA Texas 500 NASCAR Sprint Cup Series race.
TREVOR BAYNE, No. 6 AdvoCare/SEAL Legacy Foundation Ford Fusion – HOW BIG IS IT FOR YOU THAT ADVOCARE HAS ANNOUNCED THEY ARE COMING BACK AGAIN AS YOUR SPONSOR FOR THREE MORE YEARS? “AdvoCare has meant the world to myself and my team and my career. For a company to come on like they have for the last three seasons and be on my cars in the XFINITY Series starting out and grow that relationship and come to the Cup Series and compete full time for those guys has been incredible. Now to be able to know I will represent them the next three seasons kind of lifts the weight off your shoulders a bit so you can continue to build. At Roush Fenway Racing we are looking forward to the stability with a sponsor like AdvoCare to build on our team. I know my guys really appreciated the announcement and are excited on what we can build on. We can build on this season and the relationship we have had the last three years and look forward to the future with them. Beyond just announcing a deal, AdvoCare to me has been a perfect fit. It is something I believe in. I take the product in the race car and when we have distributors out to the track I am able to show them the inside of the car and where my rehydrate gels are that I am taking during the race. It isn’t just a brand on the car, it goes beyond that and I enjoy that relationship.”
AND YOU ARE RACING IN THEIR BACK YARD THIS WEEKEND, SO NO PRESSURE RIGHT? “They are only about 45 minutes from here, the home office, which is where I spent most of my day yesterday trying to pack up some boxes. That is a lot harder than it looks. They have a crazy system of lights flashing everywhere and I was running around trying to load up a box to ship out. Those people are pretty talented that do all that stuff.”
HERE IN THE SPRING, YOUR TEAM TOOK A GAMBLE TO TRY TO GET THE WIN HERE. “Yeah, that is kind of how it goes here. Kind of like Martinsville last weekend. We had a really fast race car here last time and that put us in position to lead some laps. We stayed out longer than the 78 and were leading the race, waiting on the caution, and it never came. We pitted and two laps later the caution came out. We feel like we had an easy top-five car that day and finished 15th with it so that is never what you want to do. That was strictly based off strategy. Staying out a long time put us behind but we took the risk because with this Chase format if you get a win early in the season it sets you up well. You have to have a fast car to do those kind of things and we did. Here today in practice we seem to have some speed again so I am looking forward to this weekend.”
CAN YOU RATE YOUR SEASON? “I like to rate sections of the season. I feel like the first quarter of the season we had some really strong performances with qualifying and racing. We kind of hit an area where we stopped improving a little bit. Jack has been candid about the things we have gone through this season and I think he has been more than honest about our struggles. At the beginning of the year I think we shocked ourselves with how far we had come and the ground we had made up. Nobody was complacent. It wasn’t a matter of that, it was just hard to continue to make gains like that. The middle of our season was not on fire like the beginning was. We wanted to continue to improve and make the Chase. We were very close to that edge. At the cutoff time we were around 15th or 16th the whole time but with Buescher and Stewart winning it bumped us out. If we had made the Chase I would give us a better ranking but I feel we have made huge improvements as an organization and a team and my relationship with Matt Puccia has been very healthy and good for our racing program. We have been able to have some good success. This last part of the season we know it is crucial to get back on track and back on qualifying into the final round the entire time, run top-15 each week so we can build on that going into the off-season and going into February next year.”
NEXT YEAR WITH STEWART-HAAS RACING COMING OVER TO FORD, HAVE YOU THOUGHT ABOUT WHAT THAT WILL BE LIKE TO HAVE MORE TEAMMATES ON THE TRACK? “It is going to be very similar to our Penske relationship I believe. We talk in groups when we are with Ford but apart from that we kind of go our separate ways and develop our cars separately. I am sure it will be very similar to that versus our relationship with RPM where we have the same meetings together. I think it is great for Ford to have more horses in the stable to go out and win races and great for our brand. For Roush Fenway specifically it is going to be on our shoulders to turn it around. We can’t depend on a relationship like that to pick us up and get us where our performance needs to be.”
DO YOU HAVE ANY TONY STEWART MEMORIES? “I think everybody does but I always give him a hard time about this one specifically. Back in 2011 before he won his last championship we were at Chicago and we were on pit road with Leonard Wood, myself and Tony standing there talking. He is telling us how awful his race car is. He is going on and on, kind of like Sonoma earlier this year telling me how bad it is. Then he goes out and wins the race and then wins like five races out of 10 and wins the championship. I was thinking that I wished my car was that bad. It seems like every time he tells me his car is awful he goes out and wins the race. Just like Sonoma this year. So I always ask him how bad his car is and give him a hard time about that all the time.”
