Ford Performance NASCAR Notes and Quotes
Pocono Green 250 – Pocono Raceway
Saturday, June 10, 2017
Ford Finishing Results:
1st – Brad Keselowski
7th – Cole Custer
11th – Darrell Wallace Jr.
14th – Ryan Reed
BRAD KESELOWSKI – No. 22 SKF Ford Mustang – VICTORY LANE INTERVIEW – “It’s a little surreal talking to Ryan Blaney in victory lane. Crazy. Blowing my mind. We were leading or second or whatever it was. Elliott (Sadler) gave me a good push to clear the 00 but it carried all the way into Turn 1. I got down there and my rear tires were off the ground and went straight trying not to back it into the wall. Kind of a never give up. It felt like 30th. I drove by a bunch of cars and just pushed as hard as I could. It looked like Kyle’s (Larson) car was struggling just a little bit and he was getting tight in the middle, loose off. He was doing a really good job holding it low so I couldn’t get a run. Just on the last lap I got on his bumper and got him loose. He was trying to do the side draft thing down the backstretch and all the way down the apron. That had to look pretty cool. I can’t wait to see the replay on Fox. Hell of a race. Really happy for the 22 team. It’s been a while. I think it’s been well documented that they haven’t been in victory lane. Discount Tire has been a part of this program for a long time. They deserve it. Without them I probably wouldn’t have a career in NASCAR. They’re on the car today…SKF…proud of them guys. It’s good for Ford and everybody. It feels good for me, the team. They deserve it.”
COLE CUSTER – No. 00 Haas Automation Ford Mustang – “We had a really solid car. I thought Jeff had a really good strategy and got us up there. I think me and one of them just got our communication a little bit messed up there on how we were gonna push each other going into turn one, but it was a good day. We had a solid car and made a lot out of it, got to lead some laps, so I’m really happy with our Haas Automation Mustang.”
HOW GOOD DOES IT FEEL TO PUT SEVERAL OF THESE TOGETHER? “It’s nice because at the start of the year we couldn’t even put one race together. It’s been a good stretch for us so far and we just want to keep it going through this 20-week stretch.”
WHAT DOES IT MEAN TO BE ABLE TO LEAD LAPS AFTER SUCH A TOUGH START? “It means a lot. This makes you feel like you deserve to be here a little bit more. It reaffirms your confidence, I guess. I still need to try and win some races, so we’re gonna try and focus on that in the future.”
WHAT ABOUT YOUR STRATEGY OF PITTING LATE IN STAGE 1. DID THAT TURN YOUR RACE AROUND? “Yeah. I felt like at the end of the race we were right where we finished. We were like a fifth to eighth-place car. We got the lead because of strategy and we could keep it, we just needed a better restart there at the very end. It was a solid day and we ended up where we should have.”
DARRELL WALLACE JR. – No. 6 Ford EcoBoost Ford Mustang – WHAT ARE YOU EMOTIONS RIGHT NOW? “Yeah, it sucks. I love these guys and I had a lot of fun this year, but it’s just circumstances and it’s the business to shut this program down. We wanted to be a lot better than what we finished for sure. I gave it my all for them right there on that last restart. They said we picked up 12 spots and it would have been cool to finish 10th and get a top-10 to close it out. It’s just unfortunate. These guys deserve a full season. We were hitting on some things this year, but I’ve got the big picture to focus on tomorrow. This one is behind us. Best of luck to them finishing out the year strong. Ty (Majeski) is gonna run and I think Trevor (Bayne) is gonna run some, so best of luck to them. It will be fun to watch them on Saturdays, but I’ll be damn sure wishing I was in it.”
RYAN REED – No. 16 Lilly/American Diabetes Association Ford Mustang – “It was a tough day. Obviously, you don’t want to finish 14th, but given a lot of the adversity that went our way like the caution coming out right after we pitted and a bunch of guys stayed out. That put us behind and that was just a no-win situation there. We still found our way from 21st to 14th at the end of that. Our car had decent speed, but we still need to get better for Pocono. There’s only one track like this, so while we need to get better here, this doesn’t really kill our momentum for the tracks coming up.”
BRAD KESELOWSKI WINNER’S PRESS CONFERENCE
BRAD KESELOWSKI – No. 22 SKF Ford Mustang – “What a day. First off, we had a great car, which of course is always helpful, and there was good strategy and all that, and that kind of carried us through the first two stages. Then you saw the mix-up in the field in Stage 3, which I can’t say was a surprise. We kind of knew if we won Stage 2 we would maybe not be in the best position for the start of the stage, but you don’t want to give those points up and you don’t want to give away running up front. In my heart, that’s what this sport is about – it’s about running up front and doing the best you can at all times. In a lot of ways, that’s what the stages do. They reward those who run up front and push hard all race, but then on the other side of it there are guys obviously looking for the opportunity that stages provide to play the leapfrog game, especially at tracks like Pocono where you can pit under green and not lose a lap so close to the edge of a stage. I think you saw a lot of teams take advantage of that. I thought that was a pretty smart move on their part, so as the race was unfolding in that third stage we just kind of were clawing through those guys that had that situation. I got all the way up to the best car on that strategy, the 00, and the yellow came out. I thought, ‘OK, I’ll be in good position here,’ but unfortunately on the restart I got a good push, but the push didn’t stop when I got to the corner and the next thing I knew I found myself in the third lane in turn one, which is not a good place to be by any stretch. That of course sent us to the back and I thought, ‘Man, there’s no way I’m gonna be able to pass all these cars in 15 or so laps,’ and it kind of surprised me that we started clicking them off. A couple guys made a few mistakes. A couple guys I just caught at the right place at the perfect time, and so it takes some of those breaks and we caught them. Then I got to I think it was the 7 and the 42, the last two cars with probably a half-dozen laps roughly left to go and I was just clawing trying to get by them. I got a little break on the 7 car got loose in one and that got me to the 42 and we were a little bit faster than Kyle Larson was, but he was just doing a really good job of holding a line that was taking all the air off my car. These cars in clean air are a good half-second faster than they are in dirty air, so despite the speed we had in the car, Kyle did a great job of nullifying it with his driving technique and line. I was just trying to push him as hard as I could and get him a little bit loose and it worked off of one on the last lap, and from there it was just a drag race down the Long Pond, where we just inched in front of him at the right time and I felt very lucky to be able to do that. Man, a heck of a battle, a heck of a finish. I don’t know if it gets any better than that, but I was proud to be a part of it and I’m really happy for this team to get back to Victory Lane.”
GREG ERWIN, Crew Chief – No. 22 SKF Ford Mustang – “First off, this team has been really close and been in position to win several races this year. For one reason or another I haven’t been able to get it done in the third stage, either with adjustments or strategy or what-have-you. We’re glad to get that monkey off our back. Really, the truth is we worked really hard to try and come here with a piece that quite honestly right off the truck on Friday morning we knew that we were gonna be in a situation speed-wise to run for the win, and then obviously you bring a special talent, put him behind the wheel, and he’s proven his capabilities as a driver here both on the Cup side and this is only the second XFINITY race here, but everyone is building a notebook right now on what to do with XFINITY cars. We had a good start last year. We kind of knew where we needed to be and where we needed to go to, and our team back at the shop put that together, so I’m pretty complimentary to everybody in our program. Honestly, I think we fell back to 13th after that mix-up down there in turn one and I said, ‘Golly, how many different ways can you lose a race this year?’ And then Joey Meier gets on the radio and he’s a very calming influence, he’s a very positive influence and I know this guy has another gear when the chips are down, and he found it and he brought the thing home. I feel like we had a little better car than the 42 all practice long yesterday, and our group went to work last night. We made a few adjustments today that I think made it better, and I think it was pretty clear at the end of the race. Thank you to everyone that has supported us. It was a good race. Quite honestly at Pocono we generally don’t see those types of finishes with three cars, 1-2-3, side-by-side, two-wide, three-wide like that at the end of the race, so the XFINITY boys are putting on a great show and hopefully the fans got everything they paid for today. I think so.”
WHAT WAS YOUR MINDSET WHEN YOU GOT SHUFFLED? “I cannot wait to watch the replay of this race. Of course there was the driver in the booth thing, but it was a really fun finish to go with it. First off, I’m not sure I know everything that happened. And then second off I think it’s gonna be cool to watch all of the different moves that everybody was making. If someone missed this race today, I feel bad for them because they missed a good one. I was just trying to recover and get the best finish possible. As doors started opening up it became a real possibility of getting the win. You want to win, but I just wanted to get the best finish possible. I caught a couple breaks getting through traffic, made a couple breaks getting through practice as well that really gave us a shot to make it happen at the end.”
DID ERWIN BRIBE YOU SINCE THIS IS HIS HOME TRACK? “I didn’t know this was his home track. He’s so cool and relaxed I thought he was from California.”
HAVE YOU HEARD FROM ROGER YET? “I don’t know. I’m buried in messages, so my phone keeps dinging.”
ABOUT LAST NIGHT IN THE TRUCK RACE. WATCHING ON TV WE THOUGHT YOUR TEAM WON THE RACE. “Yeah, same here (laughing), but we didn’t. It was frustrating. Once I kind of saw the facts and our team was presented the facts it made a lot more sense. It’s just unfortunate that those facts weren’t available to everyone in the timeliest of manners, but it is what it is. You can’t go back in time.”
CHASE BRISCOE HAS A BRIGHT FUTURE. “He’s one of those guys that I look at and I go, ‘Wow.’ I wish I was as composed. I wish I was as talented as he is at his age. You never know with young drivers where they’re gonna go. I had the luxury this past Thursday of doing a charity event for my foundation. I sat next to coach Jim Harbaugh and we were telling this story about they’re in the middle of their pre-season spring training and so forth. We’re telling the story of athletes and you never know which ones are gonna be great and you think you know, and how sometimes you’ll have a five-star and if you look at the five-star recruits, a lot of them don’t ever make it to the pros. And then you look at some of the gusy that do make it to the pros that are maybe one-star or no-star at all in high school, and we’re kind of talking through why that is. How does that happen? I looked over at coach and I said, ‘I’ll still never forget when I was first getting starting in racing and there was this article that came out and it was the Top 50 prospects or something of that nature and I didn’t even make the list.’ And every year would go by and I’d progress a little bit and someone would fall off the map and someone would fall off the map until I won the championship, and no one else on that list did. It felt pretty damn good, and I told him, ‘The only thing I can tell you is young drivers, young athletes, young professionals, they’re dynamic. Who they are today is not who they’re gonna be tomorrow and the ones that are able to grow, building confidence, building skill set, and have the work ethic passion, talent and etcetera to do so are the ones that make it, so there are some guys that start off with loads of natural talent, but they don’t have the other characteristics that you need to really grow on that and make something of it. Chase, to me, is one of those guys who has loads of natural talent, but he also has the intangibles to grow with it, to take it to the next level and to not just rest on his talents. So, to me, I look at him and I think he’s a future Cup driver. That’s what I see out of him. I hate to say that in the media because I want him to think he’s a zero-star prospect so he’ll continue to work, and he still has a lot of work to do, but if he stays with his current attitude and combination with his talent level that he starts off with, he has the opportunity to be a Cup level driver in the next two or three years. I’m really happy for him. I think Ford’s got a good one through their Driver Development Program to make something of.”
GREG ERWIN CONTINUED – CAN YOU TALK ABOUT THE PROGRESSION OF THIS 22 TEAM? “We kind of got caught off-guard a little bit with the 22 team. I’ll be quite honest with you. I’ve been with it for a couple years now on-and-off, in-and-out in a managerial role and then a crew chief role and then a managerial role. Really what’s happened this year is we took a little bit different philosophy. There has been a huge rule change and I don’t think everybody really quite understands the impact of what NASCAR did to our cars in the offseason, taking the spoiler out of them, taking the splitter out of them – a tremendous amount of downforce has come off of our car. That combined with a pretty major shift in setup philosophy, the travel has changed by an inch in the front end, so all the geometry has had to change, the aero loads, everything is different so we sort of took a clean notebook, sort of a fresh sheet of paper approach to it, quite honestly at Atlanta. We knew Daytona was gonna be a very similar program, but our first intermediate race this year I stood on the truck and kind of crossed my fingers and when we came by the first few times and were right near the top of the board we knew, quite honestly a lot of things are guesses, a lot of things come from experience, a lot of things come from little background testing and I knew that we had a very solid, fast package right off at Atlanta and we’ve carried that same philosophy, almost Barney Basic style back to racing and that’s what we’ve done every race this year. To really answer your question, we’ve injected about four to five people in this nine-person program A, that had never run a full XFINITY schedule, never run a full Cup schedule, and some of them have never won races, so we sort of mixed a whole new car, a whole new set of rules and a whole new group of people to start this season. Any other year in the old NASCAR points we’d be walking around pretty proud because we’ve got an 80-point owner’s lead and we’ve got all these second-place finishes that I’ve been hearing about for the last six weeks and I’m kind of tired talking about it. You’d feel pretty proud to have six or seven seconds and be leading the owner’s points like we are, but, truthfully, we know we had a little ace up our sleeve with the driving talent we get to put in our cars every week between Brad, Joey and Ryan. I mean, we’ve got Cup caliber, championship Cup caliber guys driving our cars every week, so we know we’ve got a little bit there on the field, quite honestly. But, right now, to get a lot of these guys their first win and to finally get that monkey, weight, whatever you want to call it, off our back, I think the sky is the limit for this program. We’ll go to Michigan next week and I think this guy is in the car again, and we’ll double down in his home state is what we’d like to do, so that’s pretty good.”
BRAD KESELOWSKI CONTINUED – WHAT’S THE BIGGEST LESSON YOU LEARNED TODAY THAT YOU CAN APPLY TOMORROW? “Probably about the stages. At some point tomorrow someone is gonna make a decision to throw away the second stage and get a bad finish in that stage to help advance themselves for the next stage. So running up front is not gonna be a guarantee of track position throughout the whole race, and at some point, no matter who you are and what you’re doing, you’re going to cycle to the middle of the pack at the very least because of the stages. You’re gonna have to have a lot of patience to endure going through that traffic and those scenarios.”
HOW IMPORTANT WILL TRACK POSITION BE TOMORROW? “I think I know, but I’m not sure I know. The XFINITY cars today had a little bit of draft to them, which was good. I like that, but I’m not sure. Pocono, to my knowledge, is the longest straightaways we have on the circuit of a non-restrictor plate track and it’s usually that last 100 yards where the cars really draft, so we really haven’t seen this configuration Cup car on a track at Pocono in a traffic scenario. So I’m very curious how will the cars draft. The ability for the cars to draft tomorrow is really gonna dictate how important track position is because if you’re able to get a small draft at the very end of the straightaway and I call it pop the bubble and get a little bit closer to that car in front of you, you can create some aerodynamic effects that displace the advantage of a lead car. That’s yet to be seen. We’re gonna learn together tomorrow because I don’t know, but that’s really going to be the key, so I don’t have a great answer for you. We’re gonna find out.”
BRAD KESELOWSKI CONTINUED — DID THE DRAFT HELP YOU GET BACK THROUGH THE FIELD? “A little bit, yeah. Absolutely. That’s an important dynamic in the XFINITY Series and part of the reason why I think these cars have the potential to put on great races on these bigger tracks. I think looking back 20 years at races at tracks like this and mile-and-a-halves, that’s really the big difference is the cars have lost the ability to draft at the Cup level because that opens up so many boxes for the way you can break the track position stalemate. So it’s interesting to see that work.”
WOULD YOU LIKE TO GET BEHIND THE MICROPHONE ONE DAY AND TRY WHAT THE DRIVERS DID TODAY ON TV? “I don’t know. I think there’s a lot of drivers retiring right now that are gonna beat me to the TV booth and they probably aren’t gonna want me, so I’ve kind of wrote that off as supply and demand. There’s a large supply and there’s probably not gonna be a lot of demand by the time I get that far in my career. Who knows? Maybe that will change, but right now I’m happy being a race car driver.”
THE WRECK LAST NIGHT IN THE TRUCK RACE. IS THERE SOME SORT OF RIGHT COMBINATION BETWEEN SPLITTER AND TIRES AND GRASS THAT WOULD HELP IN THOSE SITUATIONS? “I’m not certain I have the perfect answer here, but it does seem like those tracks with the quad ovals struggle to get the infield level and that gives you something to hook on, but I haven’t honestly spent a lot of time staring or watching or replaying the accident to really get a great feel for what happened or why that happened to give you a great answer.”
IS THERE CONCERN TO SEE RED HORSE SHUT DOWN AND A SHORT FIELD LAST NIGHT AS A TRUCK SERIES OWNER? “Yeah, it’s not good. I don’t think there’s anybody cheering that, but there’s always been an ebb and a flow to that series. The NASCAR dynamic without franchises in any of the three series has always lended itself to owners that overspend, including myself, and make it to where it makes no sense financially to compete in the series and it just comes down to the level of passion that car owners have. I think it’s part of the ebb and flow and it’s probably on the downside, and I imagine it will swing back up in the next few years. I don’t sweat it too much. Maybe I should, I don’t know, but those are my thoughts right now.”
HOW KEY IS TOMORROW’S RACE FOR YOU? “Honestly, I really want to win tomorrow. That would be great. I really want to have a great day tomorrow. Michigan has got really terrible garage areas and the higher you are up in points the better you can park in those terrible garage areas, so I’d like to make sure we get a good finish because we’re really close in points to three or four other cars and get a better garage area spot because it’s my home track and it’s kind of embarrassing to not be parked in a good garage stall, but for my team I’m looking forward to getting back on our feet. We’ve done everything within our power and it’s frustrating, but I’ve had a few people come up to me and say, ‘You’ve had a lot of bad luck in the playoffs the last three seasons and you probably had a shot at winning the last three championships and something bad has happened to you, so maybe it’s good that it’s all happening early in the season and it won’t happen in the playoffs.’ So that was kind of good. That was inspiring, so that’s kind of been my outlook and attitude and it really hasn’t got me down much because I feel pretty good about where we’re at as a team.”
