FORD RACING NOTES AND QUOTES
Great Clips 300
September 3, 2011
Atlanta Motor Speedway
EDWARDS GIVES MUSTANG 10TH WIN OF 2011
. Carl Edwards won his sixth NASCAR Nationwide Series race of the season. . The win was Mustang’s 10th of the season, more than any other car make in 2011.
. Ricky Stenhouse maintained his points lead over second-place Elliott Sadler.
Ford Finishing Results:
1st – Carl Edwards
3rd – Ricky Stenhouse, Jr.
17th – Matt Carter
33rd – Trevor Bayne
35th – Clay Greenfield
36th – Timmy Hill
41st – Carl Long
TREVOR BAYNE – No. 16 Ford Drive One Mustang – “That’s the best mile-and-a-half car we’ve ever had, I believe. We had a shot to win this thing on a short run. I got a little bit free after about 20-25 laps and we were at a run that was gonna be 20 laps. It was gonna be perfect. We should have been around fifth and we came out 11th and you just get back there where you shouldn’t be and get around some guys that are racing really hard and end up getting wrecked. That was a hard hit and I hate it for this Ford Mustang because I think it could have had confetti on it tonight, but I’m really proud of what my guys have done – Chad Norris and everybody for giving me a great car – so we’ll just take it to them at Richmond, I guess.”
RICKY STENHOUSE JR. – No. 6 Blackwell Angus Ford Mustang – “Our Blackwell Angus Beef and Cargo Mustang was strong all night. We struggled there in the pits in the middle part of the race and were able to overcome it. We caught a right-front tire that almost gave us some trouble there. It almost went down, but I’ve just got to thank all the fans for coming out. We had a good crowd tonight, and Nationwide Insurance. I’m just glad to have this Blackwell Angus Beef and Cargo Mustang paint job back on this thing.”
CARL EDWARDS – No. 60 Fastenal Ford Mustang – VICTORY LANE INTERVIEW – “I’ve got to say Happy Birthday to my grandma, Phyllis. They’re watching the race from Kirkwood, Missouri and we’re gonna take the trophy home to grandma. Thank you guys, I love you. I’ve got to thank Fastenal. This was a big week for Fastenal. We announced a big partnership for next year. That’s huge. I’ve got to thank Ford, Valvoline, the Nationwide Series, all the fans here, Wiley X and Aflac. We had a big day yesterday and I was inspired by the kids at the Aflac Cancer Center, so if you folks want to donate, Aflac will double your donation at Aflac.com/friends, so it’s a big weekend for us here. I can’t believe we got the pole and the win. What a heck of a race.”
YOU TRIED TO STAY POSITIVE AND KEEP YOUR TEAM IN IT EARLY ON. “I’ve got a great team. These are great guys. Man, everybody raced really well. That was as hard as we could race out there. Kyle and I, Kevin. I raced Kasey. That was a lot of fun. This track is as good as it gets. This is a blast. I can’t wait for tomorrow.”
RICKY STENHOUSE JR. PRESS CONFERENCE – “The race itself was fun. This race track is a lot of fun. It’s old and it wears the tires out and it’s rough. That’s my kind of race track. I like to get up on the wheel and drive it hard and it worked out for us tonight. Our Blackwell Angus Beef and Cargo Mustang really ran well. We struggled in the pits and got behind and had to make some time up, but once we did we were okay. We caught a good break and caught the right-front tire, it shredded but it didn’t blow, so we caught that. If we would have stayed out one more lap it probably would have blown the right-front and there at the end it was just fun racing with Kyle and Kevin. I wish we could have had a little more for Carl, but it was a good weekend for Roush Fenway. The last few laps there, the last run, I think we had a tire coming loose, so I kind of had to take it a little easy and made sure we finished and it was a good points night for us.”
DOES THIS TRACK REMIND YOU OF RUNNING YOUR SPRINT CAR AROUND THIS PART OF THE COUNTRY? “Definitely. I think that’s one of the reasons why I like this place. You can move all over the race track. You’re sliding no matter what. There are other race tracks you can slide, but not everybody is sliding so it doesn’t pay off. When everybody starts slipping and sliding and you can turn right going through the corner most of the time it reminds me of any sprint car race track that I’ve run on. I think that’s where it helped us out here tonight.”
DID YOU FEEL PRESSURED KNOWING SADLER WAS STRUGGLING OR DID YOU JUST TACKLE THIS RACE AS YOU ALWAYS DO? “When you have a good race car it’s really fun to drive and when you have an opening it’s tough not to take it as a race car driver. It seems like if you take that chance and kind of take control of it, you feel a little bit better instead of just riding. So I felt a little more in control making some of those moves, a few I probably shouldn’t have made, but they worked out.”
CARL EDWARDS PRESS CONFERENCE – “The car was spectacular from the first lap on the race track the car was great. Mike and Scott and all the guys did a really great job with it. It’s amazing how these cars have progressed over the last year to year-and-a-half. They’re really fast. Trevor was fast. Ricky was fast. Our car was great. It was just a fun race. I love this race track. Whatever it is about this race track that makes it so much fun to drive we need to figure out if we can engineer that into some other race tracks. This is as good as it gets, so I’m excited for tomorrow. I’m really excited to go run 500 miles here.”
MIKE BEAM, Crew Chief – No. 60 Fastenal Ford Mustang – “I thought we had a good strategy there and then we got penalized with the air hose, so we had to start at the rear. Then we wanted to go to lap 131 where we could go from there and then some of those guys started pitting, but we stuck to our plan and then the caution came out. It was nerve-wracking there for a while, but, like Carl said, the car was great and the engine ran great. It was just a lot of fun.”
JACK ROUSH, Car Owner – No. 60 Fastenal Ford Mustang – “I welcome the opportunity to share the stage here, to be subordinated by my real fast teammates. To be in the company of fast drivers and fast crew chiefs is a great honor for an owner like me. Mike is the unsung hero here. He’s kind of bucked the organization some and he’s provided leadership for this Nationwide team this year and he had really fast cars here and I know that he won an argument in the shop to get the car the way he wanted it here and we won’t talk about that, but Mike has really done a nice job this year. He has carried it to them and I’m real proud of Mike and I’m real proud of Carl.”
CARL EDWARDS CONTINUED – CAN YOU TALK ABOUT THE BACK AND FORTH WITH KYLE AND KEVIN AND RICKY AND DO YOU ANTICIPATE THE SAME THING TOMORROW? “I think we’re gonna have just as good a racing tomorrow. I think the way the tire works with this track surface you can slide the cars, you can go in the corner and make a big mistake and get really sideways and you can save it. That was some door-to-door, hardcore racing out there. I don’t know what it looked like on the television or from the grandstands, but from the driver’s seat there was some really, really hard driving and I hope we get to see that tomorrow. We don’t race here enough. This place is a lot of fun. It’s really neat to race on a track like that.”
WERE YOU CONCERNED ABOUT BEING SHORT ON FUEL? “I was concerned then because one time we were supposed to make it to the end and we were half-a-lap short and that one got us. I’m just giving him a hard time because it’s not a perfect science. Jack explained it to me, you know he’s a mathematician and there’s a lot that goes into it. It’s very difficult with this new fuel system to determine exactly how far you can make it and that’s why we came down that second-to-last time. We went ahead and came for fuel just to make sure and, yeah, for a driver it’s important to really know. I don’t want him to lie to me because I know they wanted me to go out there and race really hard on the restart, so they didn’t want to tell me we were short, they wanted to tell me we were short 10 laps after the restart, but I said, ‘You’ve got to be honest with me. You’ve got to help me out here,’ so that was why.”
MIKE SAYS. “You’ve got to give us time to calculate it.”
CARL EDWARDS CONTINUED – KYLE SWEPT ACROSS YOU NOSE AT ONE POINT AND YOU OBJECTED TO THAT. CAN YOU TALK ABOUT THAT INCIDENT? “Yeah, that was almost really ugly. I wasn’t very happy about that. He apologized through his spotter and then he raced me really clean after that, so that was just hard racing. It was getting really aggressive out there. Everybody was racing really hard and that was a case where he started coming up and I almost hooked his right-rear. It was all I could do to kind of get out of the way and he stopped and then I ran into his back bumper. I wasn’t very happy right then, but it was still early enough in the race that it didn’t tear anything up and since he apologized I figured we’d have a good, clean race at the end. Fortunately, he wasn’t able to catch us those last few laps.”
MIKE BEAM CONTINUED – WERE YOU WORRIED AFTER THE PENALTY AND DID YOU CHANGE ANYTHING AFTER QUALIFYING? “About the air hose, luckily there was like only 14 cars on the lead lap, so I knew that we had plenty of time to make it up if things went our way. You just don’t ever know, but when you get in the dirty air you don’t know how it’s gonna react, but, luckily, the car was pretty good in traffic and the lap times were real competitive, so I just knew that if we kept our heads straight that we could get back to the front, so that worked out well. As far as after qualifying, we just did our normal deal, especially at a place like this. We didn’t run a lot in practice. We ran really 30 laps on the tires, but we just took a shot at it there. We figured the race track was gonna be loose at night and it worked out. We did tighten it up after qualifying a little bit and then we tightened it up during the race also.”
CARL EDWARDS CONTINUED – HOW NERVE-WRACKING IS IT TO BE BACK IN THE PACK AROUND CARS THAT AREN’T AS IN CONTROL AS YOURS? “My car was really, really good and it was still a handful to drive, and there were some guys back there that their cars were not handling well. I thought everybody was doing a pretty good job for as tough as this race track can be. It kind of takes the wind out of your sails to get a penalty like that. Most of them lately have been because I’ve been speeding on pit road. I thought when he said we had to do a stop-and-go that I had sped again. I figured Mike would be throwing stuff at me when I stopped there in front of the box, but, in a way, it was early enough in the race. We had a fast enough race car. I tried to just look at it as a challenge and something fun. I think sometimes everything happens for a reason. I thought that run, trying to come through the field, I learned a little bit more about my car than I had running up front, so, in the end, it may have helped me a little bit at the end. So I thought that was good.”
JACK ROUSH CONTINUED – DO YOU HAVE ANY ADVICE FOR STEVE TURNER AND CAN YOU TALK ABOUT STENHOUSE HAVING A 13-POINT LEAD? “Working backwards, this is the first race in the last three or maybe four that we’ve been able to pad or add some to our points lead. I was watching it slip away and I’m glad we stopped that. As far as the Turner organization is concerned, it’s always a risk when you’ve got a championship-contending car and another car that needs to race for its sponsor with great enthusiasm and with great effect, but when the cars come out of the same shop, if they’re done correctly, they’ll have about the same amount of speed in them and then it becomes a question of whether the driver and the crew chief have made the same decisions on the car, either good or bad, to keep them the same. But it’s not a surprise that team cars run that close together, but my advice is, and it’s just advice, is that the guys that are not in championship contention should consider the needs of the car that is in championship contention to make sure you give them plenty of room.”
ARE YOU BACK FLYING 100 PERCENT NOW? “Carl hasn’t been brave enough to fly with me yet. I’ve just had my medical for about 10 days, so people should leave me alone for a while and just let me do my own thing. I flew from Detroit to Charlotte the other day by myself in my premier jet and it was fun. It was the first time in a year I haven’t had an argument with another pilot in the airplane.”
