FORD PERFORMANCE NASCAR NOTES AND QUOTES
Date: Saturday June 3, 2017
Event: OneMain Financial – (Post-Race)
Series: NASCAR Xfinity Series
Location: Dover Speedway (1-mile oval)
FORD RACE RESULTS
2nd Ryan Blaney
4th Cole Custer
5th Ryan Reed
8th Darrell Wallace Jr.
RYAN BLANEY (No 22 Fitzgerald Ford Mustang) — Finished 2nd
CAN YOU TALK ABOUT THE PROGRESSION OF THE 22 TEAM THIS YEAR? “Yeah, it’s starting to get back to that performance. They put a lot of work in the offseason towards where this car should run again. Just a lot of hard work by everyone, from Greg Erwin and everybody who puts effort into the team. Not only everyone at the race track but those who put these cars together. They put a lot of time over the winter to try and get back in contention, to win eight to 10 races a year and win an owner’s championship. I think we’re really close. It’s just a matter of closing those little gaps on all race tracks…short track, mile-and-a-halfs, longer tracks. It’s been fun to be a part of that progression. Obviously, we want to be winning races but you have to put the work in to get there. They’ve definitely done that. Just a little bit more is what we need.”
COLE CUSTER (No. 00 Haas Automation Ford Mustang) — Finished 4th
HOW WAS YOUR DAY? “A solid day for us. We just guessed wrong a bit on our adjustments. I think in the race we were a fifth-to-eighth-place car and just got stuck back there for a while. We just played the strategy game and it worked out perfect for us. Once we got the clean air we were able to stay up front.”
TALK ABOUT YOUR TOP-FIVE FINISH: “It’s good. I think we moved up in the standings. It’s good to build some consistency. (That’s) what we didn’t have at the start of the year. If we can continue to make some consistent runs when things aren’t going our way, that will really help us.”
RYAN REED (No. 16 Lilly Diabetes Ford Mustang) — Finished 5th
SOLID RUN TODAY: “It was just a solid weekend. I didn’t feel like we had a winning car but I felt like with Dover being one of my worst race tracks…here and Bristol… I have to get better the most. I spent a lot of time in the Ford simulator and appreciate them for helping me out. We made a great call late on strategy and thought that we had a good enough car to hold on to a top five. It was a nice, cleanly executed afternoon.”
ONLY ONE LONG RUN TODAY IN THE RACE. DID THAT MAKE IT DIFFICULT? “Our car was better in the middle part of the run today. Restarts weren’t that good. We could get going pretty decent and then we would get tight at the end of the run. It didn’t feel like the 00 and 18 were beating us that bad at the end of the run. Yeah, we were better after getting going on a run.”
BUBBA WALLACE JR. (No. 6 Disney Pixar Cars 3 Ford Mustang) — Finished 8th
TALK ABOUT YOUR RUN TODAY: “Heartbreak day. We have one more race left and this one was the one we were going to win, for sure. It just didn’t happen. We can’t get any luck. I got a little sideways on that one restart and it cost us a little bit. It was a good day for our Cars 3 Mustang team. It was ours. It would have been nice to get the $100,000 and bought us our Michigan race that we don’t have.”
WITH ONLY THE ONE LONG GREEN FLAG RUN, TRACK POSITION WAS CHALLENGING: “Yeah, for sure. Caution…when you get lot at the beginning… you usually don’t see many at the end. That’s what happened. We just couldn’t get back up there. I don’t know where we ended up, but not a win.”
