Ford Performance NASCAR Notes and Quotes
Coca-Cola 600 Qualifying – Charlotte Motor Speedway
Thursday, May 25, 2017
KEVIN HARVICK POLE-WINNING PRESS CONFERENCE
KEVIN HARVICK – No. 4 Mobil 1 Ford Fusion – “I never thought I’d be close to anyone on that list for years, but I think as you look at our cars have been fast, we’ve qualified well, we’ve had a lot of speed and we just hadn’t put together the weekend. But we’ve been running well and tonight is no different. The car unloaded fast and was very edgy to drive. It was definitely a hairy lap, but I think the main thing is the car went really well through turns three and four and that’s always our goal – to get the car to turn through the middle of three and four and be able to stay in the gas. The first round I about spun out in one and two and had to make some adjustments in what I was doing from the XFINITY car to the Cup car is a big difference, so I was a little bit too aggressive in the first round. I was able to find a happy medium with what I needed to be doing and they made the car a little bit better and we were able to capitalize on a fast Ford.”
HAVE YOU GUYS HIT ON SOMETHING HERE? THIS IS TWO POLES IN A ROW. “We did it in a Chevy too, so I think Dax (Gerringer) and Rodney (Childers) are doing a good job of getting all the speed out of the cars no matter what brand it is or tires or spoilers or rules packages. It’s something that we develop trends no matter what the rules are and I think as you see those trends, whether it be qualifying or racing or setups or whatever the case may be, it’s important to recognize those trends and follow those trends through your setups and things as you go through the years. No matter what the spoilers are there is still going to be balance and things that you look at in the simulation and setups and things that we do, so I feel like the communication and things that we have of what I’m looking for in the car and what they’re putting in the car, I feel like that’s been really good over the last two years. Obviously, with Buga going to the 14 we had a little bit of a learning curve in there, but we’ve long overcome that and I feel like it just keeps getting better.”
IS IT HARDER TO WIN THIS RACE THAN OTHERS BECAUSE IT’S 100 MORE MILES? “They’re all hard to win. I think the hardest part about this race is probably just keeping all the parts and pieces together just because of the fact we don’t normally run 600 miles, which means you run the same amount of laps in practice for the most part. They do put limits on how many laps we can run on the engine during a practice, but we don’t put limits on the parts and pieces and this is the one time of the year that we run 600 miles, so there’s always new parts and pieces on the car and you never know. I think you see some of that show up sometimes. Mentally, it’s a hard race because there’s a lot to take in starting in the day it will be hot, the cars will be different than what they were in practice and you know that it’s 600 miles and you go into the night. So there’s a lot of things that are going on that you have to take in, whether it be a 400 or 500-mile race let alone a 600-mile race, so it’s a very, very, very challenging race just for the fact that it’s long, it’s hot and Charlotte is a demanding race track. You carry a lot of speed, so physically and mentally you better be ready to go in order to hold the pace that you need to for four-and-a-half to five hours.”
DOES HAVING AN EXTRA STAGE AND PLAYOFF POINT AVAILABLE MAKE A BIGGER IMPACT? “It definitely will have an impact. I don’t think you’re gonna race any different because you’re gonna want to lead as many laps as you can and score as many points as you can, so I think obviously for us we gained a big advantage with the pit stall. Pit stall one here is a huge advantage under caution, so I think as you look at the fourth stage and the extra 10 points and the extra bonus point you want to go out and grab those, and we’ve obviously had a little bit of trouble in the first 11 or 12 weeks. We’ve had three or four little bump ups and cost us some points, and Sunday is a good night to gain some of those back. You’re not gonna gain them all back, but you can gain a good chunk of points just by having some good stage finishes and hopefully maybe winning one or two here or there.”
SINCE YOUR COMMENTS ABOUT THE TRUCK SCHEDULE AND GOING BACK TO THE GRASSROOTS TRACKS. HAVE YOU GOTTEN ANYMORE FEEDBACK? “I can’t walk anywhere and not have somebody talk to me about the Truck Series schedule. I think it’s something that a lot of people want to say and haven’t said, but I think it’s definitely time to look at the grassroots sides of things and I think the Truck Series is a grassroots division. If you could just for example take it somewhere like Nashville Speedway and pair it up with the All-American 400 and put the All-American 400 in Nashville back on the map with a Truck Series race with some SAFER barriers, get the city of Nashville involved and that’s just one race. I think it would be very interesting and I feel like that regionally is a big touring race. You go up to Oxford, Maine, but getting the TV to these cars and these local racers and these people and the enthusiasm that it brings to a local market, that’s what the Truck Series does. When you look at Eldora and you look at the road race in Canada, you look at these one-off events and every one of them are well attended, every one of them are exciting and well attended. We need events and I think it’s a great way to reinvest from the bottom up in different facilities and you could sit here and name a bunch of them, and what better way to show them you care than by putting soft walls up at the race track somehow and some way to get the cities involved and the race track and work on getting those sanctioning fees down and get them to places where they can knock the fenders off of each other and put on a great show, much like they do at Eldora. I mean, it’s got 20-some thousand people there every time we show up and everybody loves watching on a Wednesday night.”
LOOKING AT IT FROM AN OWNER’S PERSPECTIVE THESE ARE ALL GREAT IDEAS, BUT HOW DO YOU MAKE IT WORK? “TV money is still how everyone survives. That’s the reason a lot of these race tracks take these Truck races now because the TV money went up, so there’s a reason that they want to keep them. But there are ways to make all of this work. Everybody doesn’t need to have their hand out, they need to be thinking from the bottom up and how do we make this better? You look at some of these historic, just really great short tracks across the country. I’m not saying we need to take them from Daytona or Phoenix or some of these other places, but there are some places that they don’t need to be going and I think it would be interesting to revive the Copper Classic and start the season with the Trucks out there and see the sprint cars show back up and TV is gonna be there to cover it, so now you can film all these races and put these guys on TV. All of a sudden there’s TV there and they can get better sponsorship, so there’s a lot of things that you could do and, like you say, it has to be something that everybody buys into that is worried about making money.”
DO YOU FEEL YOU’VE FOUND A PEAK IN YOUR DRIVER SINCE GOING TO SHR? THAT YOUR DRIVING HAS GOTTEN EVEN BETTER SINCE THAT MOVE? “I think it’s a number of things. I think as a driver I feel like I can get better every week. I think there are a number of things to look at every week of what other people are doing. You see young people, old people, new drivers, old drivers come through that look at things differently and that’s really always been my approach is to walk in the garage every week with an open mind. But I think the biggest thing for me since I’ve come to Stewart-Haas is just how the team has jelled, how myself and Rodney get along and, really, everybody on the team get along from the top down. You have that chemistry really throughout the whole company. Obviously, Tony and Gene are very young compared to a lot of the other owners in the garage. Management is very young and in the same generation I guess you could say that I am, and we have a lot in common. Most all of us have kids. We all want to accomplish the same goals. Nobody is arguing and fighting. On a non-productive weekend you come back and you say, ‘Here’s what I screwed up. Here’s what I think you screwed up,’ and they’ll tell me, ‘Here’s what I screwed up and here’s what you screwed up.’ As long as you can have that open dialogue and communicate and be honest with each other about when things are going good and when things are going bad, and have an open mind to change, it’s been great for me and it opened my mind up to when I had change to how refreshing and how exciting change can be. I think I’ve just been able to be more balanced, I guess you could say, from a personal standpoint in life, and I think the race track has helped my life too, just because of the fact you see how much better it is over here and they just bounce off of each other because you keep fine-tuning both sides and things continuously get better with that same open-mind approach, whether it’s at home or professionally.”
DID YOU NOTICE ANY DIFFERENCE WITH THE GRIP AT THE TOP OF THE TRACK? “With the Cup car, I never really went anywhere but the middle of the race track coming to the green through turns three and four. In the XFINITY car I ran up there a lot just trying to keep the temperature on where the race track was going, but it’s not gonna be immediate because of the fact when you look at Bristol it took it a while to kind of get run in and I think by the time we get done with the XFINITY race I think that the track will be run in and I really do think there’s gonna be multiple grooves and it’s gonna be interesting because it’s not going to be like it is today. There’s just not enough action on it, but it definitely got better during the two XFINITY practices that we ran and by the time we got done the middle of the race track was pretty close to as fast as the bottom of the race track, which is what everybody is looking for.”
DO YOU FEEL THESE INTERMEDIATE TRACKS HAVE BEEN WHERE YOU’VE BEEN BEST SO FAR OR HAS IT BEEN MORE CIRCUMSTANCES? “No and I think especially switching over manufacturers and switching to Ford, I mean that’s got to be your first focus because that’s where a majority of things happen. We ran great at Bristol and Richmond. The superspeedways have been good. Our worst race track has notoriously been Martinsville and has been Martinsville this year too, but our mile-and-a-half stuff we obviously put a lot of effort in to because that’s the bread and butter of what you need to be the best on and I think that’s what we’ve done the past few years. We’ve definitely had a lot of speed and put ourselves in position to have some opportunities, but you’ve got to remember that we’re only 11 or 12 weeks into this whole thing and we’re still chugging along. They’ve done a great job, don’t get me wrong, but we’ve got a lot of room to make things better and a lot of things to still iron out. You guys don’t see a lot of things that happen and they do a great job of doing what we need to do at the race track, but sometimes it doesn’t go 100 percent smooth like you would want it to, and I’d say over the last month it’s been a lot smoother, but it’s still been a huge undertaking and the progression has been good. I feel like it can be better and I think everybody feels it can be better and that’s the cool part about everything we have going on is that everybody knows it can be better, so they’re all constantly working and thinking and pushing forward and that’s been great to watch. It’s been a huge project, but it’s been something that, for me, it’s been fun to watch because you just see all the moving parts and pieces and the people come together to do when it’s fine-tuned hopefully something great.”
YOUR THOUGHTS ON RON HORNADAY BEING VOTED INTO THE HALL OF FAME? “I’ve been fortunate to sit on that Hall panel and when I walked in I had five names written in my notebook and I walked out with four different names and one that I started with. I’m the worst fan in the world when my friends or client, and I looked at the ballot and I’m always pulling for Ron as I did, and I’ve been pulling for Ron the whole time, but you look at all the other names and you’re like, ‘Oh man, how is he gonna be Bobby Labonte or Alan Kulwicki or Roger Penske or this guy or that guy,’ and I saw the voting actually this morning and I sent him a text. I know he’s probably got a million texts and I haven’t had my phone in six hours, but I remember, and I don’t remember who exactly said it, but it was definitely one of the veterans of our sport. I remember the conversation like it was yesterday because I remember him saying, ‘This is not a NASCAR Premier Series Hall of Fame, this is the NASCAR Hall of Fame.’ And when you think about it that way and a guy’s got four championships and came along with the start of the series and changed the complexion of a sport and drove for one of the icons in our sport in Dale Earnhardt and started the Truck Series and had his own chassis shop and raced in all the regional and late model series at every short track across the country. And then to have him drive for me and the history that Ron and I have together from a personal standpoint it’s just neat to see. When you see all that come together and I saw it this morning I was like, ‘Man.’ That is just the ultimate compliment to a guy who has given his whole life to building and racing and being a part of it and sacrificed everything that he’s had, been in debt, been upside-down and just helped half the garage get to where they are with giving them cars or letting them sleep on his couch or whatever the case may be. And it’s just great to see that happen for him and I’m just proud to be a small part of it because he’s earned everything that he’s ever gotten his whole life. It’s been neat to see.”
