Ford Performance Notes and Quotes
Monster Energy NASCAR Cup Series (MENCS)
Saturday, May 18, 2019
EVENT: Monster Energy NASCAR All-Star Race
Ford Finishing Order:
2nd – Kevin Harvick
4th – Joey Logano
6th – Aric Almirola
11th – Brad Keselowski
12th – Clint Bowyer
13th – Ryan Newman
16th – Ryan Blaney
KEVIN HARVICK, No. 4 Busch Beer Millenial Ford Mustang – HOW WOULD YOU DESCRIBE THIS NIGHT? “A letdown. That’s how you take the fastest car and don’t win the race with it. You spot them the whole field and just an incredible Busch Beer Ford. Rodney and all these guys on the team just did a great job and it was unfortunate the way pit road went tonight because it wasn’t even close for anybody having a good car like we had tonight. It was a great night for performance, just a bad night on pit road.”
IS SECOND A GOOD FINISH OR DOES IT SUCK? “It’s terrible. I mean, we shot both of our feet off with the absolute dominant car. The guys did a great job preparing the race car and we just weren’t ready to make a pit stop on pit road tonight.”
DO CHANGES NEED TO BE MADE? “No, they just need to be ready to race. They’ve done it all year. You can’t just show up and have it be a disaster. I mean, they’ve been great all year and tonight wasn’t great, that’s for sure. We spotted them the whole field. We started tail back with 15 laps to go.”
BUT THIS IS KIND OF A DIFFERENT NIGHT WITH NON-POINTS. “Not really. All you have to do is do the same pit stop that you do every week. It’s not really any different. You’ve just got to be prepared and they just weren’t prepared tonight.”
HOW DO YOU HANDLE THAT? “They’re experienced enough. They know that it didn’t go the way that they wanted it to go and they’ll go back and they’ll be ready. That’s the great part about having an experienced pit crew is they can go back and fix it. They better fix it.”
DID YOU FEEL LIKE YOU HAD A CHANCE TO CATCH LARSON? “Once they get single-file as soon as they drive in your lane they pushed up the groove, so you’ve got to go where they aren’t and he was fast enough to run the bottom and that’s where I needed to run to really make time. Everybody was wide-open, so once the restart thinned out everybody just kind of goes where they go.”
JOEY LOGANO, No. 22 Shell/Pennzoil Ford Mustang – “All-Star racing, that’s what it’s all about. It was intense and the way these cautions fall and the strategy, we were there in the lead and then what do you do? You can stay out and that’s what I thought was our best shot to keep the clean air. If we got passed I knew we were gonna be in big trouble and we weren’t able to maintain the lead there. They did a better job up top pushing and pushed by me on the bottom and I lost the clean air and everyone with tires just drove by me. We had a caution there with 11 to go and pitted and went back to last, but got back to fourth. It’s frustrating. Everyone wants to win the All-Star Race. It’s fun. It’s for a million dollars. There’s a lot of prestige about it to say you’ve done it. We’ve done it before, but you always want to do it again. We’ve got the Coca-Cola 600 next week and I’d say that’s bigger than this one, so let’s make it happen there.”
THE DECISION TO PIT OUT OF FIFTH PLACE. THOUGHTS ON THAT? “That was the only play at that point. Our play to stay out was kind of the one that kind of got us in that position, but I feel like we had to. Our shot to win was from the front row and as the leader I was hoping I could clear those guys and be able to keep that clean air. If I kept the clean air, the tires weren’t gonna be that bad. I was gonna be all right, but as soon as I got passed on that restart when the 18 did a good job pushing the 9 I lost the clean air and I was in trouble. Once we lost that and the caution came out I was like, ‘Well, we might as well put tires on it this time and give it a shot.’ We went back to 17th and got back to fourth in 10 laps or so. If we had one caution. A caution would have made a difference because we were in the best position tire-wise and we were in fourth-place, so if we get a caution we would have been in a really good spot to be able to try to take that million dollars from them, but it just wasn’t our night.”
ARIC ALMIROLA, No. 10 Smithfield Ford Mustang – TAKE US THROUGH THE AGGRESSIVENESS TONIGHT. “You have to be super-aggressive. You can’t really pass after it gets strung out, so you’ve got two or three laps to be as aggressive you possibly can be and if you check out of the throttle for just the slightest little bit, they go by you three and four-wide. It’s crazy. It’s all about momentum. It’s all about the right lane on the restarts. Everything is very situational. If the guy in front of you wiggles and he checks up and you check up to keep from running over him, you lose four, five, six spots in one straightaway. It’s aggravating, but that’s kind of the way it is when you don’t have a lot of horsepower and the cars are so draggy. It’s all about momentum.”
WHAT DO YOU MAKE ABOUT THIS RACE? “It doesn’t matter. If you don’t win the million dollars, everybody else leaves mad.”
RYAN NEWMAN, No. 6 Acorns Ford Mustang – “We struggled all night. I’m really embarrassed about our performance with the Acorns Ford. We missed it on the balance, missed it on the package. We had a good restart and got up to fifth, but didn’t have anything after that. Our car was just too tight there at the end and struggled in traffic.”
