Ford Performance NASCAR Notes and Quotes
Food City 500 – Bristol Motor Speedway
Sunday, April 23, 2017
Today’s Monster Energy NASCAR Cup Series race at Bristol Motor Speedway has been postponed due to rain. The Food City 500 has been rescheduled for 1 p.m. Monday and will be broadcast live on Fox and the Performance Racing Network.
Ford Performance spoke with Kurt Busch, driver of the No. 41 Haas Automation/Monster Energy Ford Fusion, and Matt Puccia, crew chief for Trevor Bayne and the No. 6 AdvoCare Ford Fusion, about how the rain will affect track conditions for tomorrow’s race.
KURT BUSCH – No. 41 Haas Automation/Monster Energy Ford Fusion – WHAT WILL THIS RAIN MEAN IN TERMS OF TRACK CONDITIONS FOR TOMORROW’S RACE? “The rain is somewhat of a blessing in disguise you could say because the track was talking about laying down more VHT and they can’t do it while it’s wet. The VHT is like a grip applicator and you have to heat it up to make it work, so in the drag racing world the guys do a burnout through it and you have that stripe that you just heat it up and that’s what has to happen for us oval guys. We have to have more cars out there to heat it up, so it’s gonna be like ice when we first start off and then the grip will come back once we do heat it up after this rain delay. I’m hopeful that once we burn through some of that top surface, and we get through to where we’re starting to wear it away, then the outside groove will come into play. We didn’t see super-long runs yesterday in the XFINITY race and that’s where our cars when we get into those big, long runs we’ll groom in that outside groove. Hopefully, you’ll have a bottom and a top once it gets down to it.”
IT’S BEEN A LONG WEEKEND ALREADY WITH THE RAIN, BUT THERE’S NOTHING YOU CAN DO ABOUT IT, RIGHT? “It’s Mother Nature and we saw it coming on the radar for probably a week. We all thought we’d be racing on Monday and that’s just part of it.”
MATT PUCCIA, Crew Chief – No. 6 AdvoCare Ford Fusion – WHAT KIND OF VARIABLE DOES THIS RAIN PUT ON TRACK CONDITIONS FOR TOMORROW? “I don’t think they’ve prepped the track since last week, so from all the rain we had last night, and the rain we’ve had over the last couple of days, the VHT is slowly but surely getting wiped off. In looking at it this morning after the XFINITY race, it looks a little less coated down there in the bottom groove. All that being said, I think that you’re gonna see the top groove move up and you’ll see more of the two and three-lane racing that we’ve traditionally seen here. I think there might still be a little bit of an advantage on the bottom, but I definitely think the top groove will come in, which, for us, makes it a little bit more challenging because we haven’t had any opportunity to run up on the top yet. The fast groove has always been on the bottom and the top hasn’t been rubbered in yet, so it’s a little bit of an unknown and a guessing game for us tonight when thinking about what you’ve got to do to your car to be able to run that top lane.”
SO IT’S JUST ANOTHER AVERAGE WEEKEND – DEALING WITH CHALLENGES. “Pretty much. It’s a little bit of a guessing game, but, fortunately, we’ve got a pretty decent notebook. This isn’t the first time this has happened where we’ve practiced the bottom and ended up racing the top, so I think we have an idea of what changes we have to make because, at the end of the day, I think that’s where we’re gonna be racing.”
