RICKY STENHOUSE JR. POST RACE PRESS CONFERENCE
WHAT ARE YOUR THOUGHTS ON WINNING THE CHAMPIONSHIP? “It is unbelievable. There are a lot of people that have worked really hard for this. My family has sacrificed a lot. Jack Roush and all these guys on our team, they were with us when we were struggling and they never gave up last year. Everybody at Ford Racing, Blackwell Angus Beef and Cargill, everybody has worked really hard and rallied together to be a team effort. Our cars back at the shop are phenomenal and all the guys that work hard there. Everybody at Roush Yates engines. It is a total team effort and it means the world to bring this championship to Jack and be a little bit of the history that he has in this sport. For Ford to get the manufacturers and Jack to get the owners it was for sure a huge team effort. Mike Kelley never let us down. He rallied us, even when we weren’t good and I would get a little mad out there on the race track he straightened me up and helped us keep digging.”
MIKE KELLEY, crew chief No. 6 Ford Mustang – WHAT IS IT LIKE TO BE THE CREW CHIEF OF THE 2011 NATIONWIDE CHAMIPIONS? “Just like Ricky said, it means a lot. I heard Carl say the other day that it isn’t about the trophy that you get but the journey you take to get there. I couldn’t say that anymore for working with Ricky the last 16 or 18 months together. We had tough times last year and it was documented very well. Anyone could have walked away. Jack could have turned his back on him, Ford could have and our guys could have. There were a lot of tough days and grim nights back at the shop. Nobody did though. I am so proud of my guys and Jack and Ford for sticking behind Ricky and seeing it through. To come through what we did all last year and during the off season we really put our heads down and we weren’t picked to be the favorite and that is probably what helped us the most. We were kind of overshadowed by the Elliott Sadler’s and the Allgaier’s and Sorensen’s and that kinda gave us a fight and desire back at the shop to make sure we came out strong. It was a total team effort. It wasn’t me. I have a great engineering staff and we moved our shop. Jack let us move down to the Cup shop in Concord and that was a big plus for us. The cars that we get are second to none out there and the engines are second to none. We never quit. We had bad days at the beginning of the year and we learned as a group on fuel mileage and strategy. I feel like we gave up a couple wins based on that. I am proud of the effort of this team during the hard times. We dug in there and finished off strong.”
JACK ROUSH, owner, No. 6 Ford Mustang – WE MADE HISTORY TONIGHT AS A TEAM WON THE DRIVER AND OWNERS CHAMPIONSHIP WITH TWO DIFFERENT PRIMARY DRIVERS. CONGRATULATIONS JACK. “When Carl won his Nationwide championship in 2007 I didn’t win the owners championship and I didn’t know what I did wrong. I didn’t do anything more wrong than I did right this time. It is an honor given to team owners that is really at the mercy of the efforts of the crew chiefs and drivers and the crew. I am glad to be sharing the honors with Carl and with Ricky and with Mike Beam and Mike Kelley. One thing I want to say, and I have been doing this for my 24th year and this is my third Nationwide championship that I have helped a driver win, but Ricky sits here tonight because of the sacrifice and dedication of a great family. Without his mother and father, I am looking at his mom across the room here, without their sacrifice and dedication and determination to see to it Ricky had everything he needed to develop into the driver he has become it wouldn’t happen. People like myself or Tony Stewart or other owners that have the race cars would never find a Ricky Stenhouse without the family doing all they have to do and the dark days before it really goes public. Mike Kelley did a great job this year, Mike Beam did a great job behind the scenes. Carl Edwards provided great leadership from a driver point of view. Trevor Bayne did a great job challenging Ricky in some ways and supporting him in others. It has been a great team effort that we are celebrating tonight but I am especially thankful and respectful of the sacrifice of the whole Stenhouse family that they made to get Ricky where he is.”
STENHOUSE CONTINUED – IS THE THE BIGGEST THING TO HAPPEN TO OLIVE BRANCH? “I would say so. It is going to be cool. I plan on taking the trophy when I got to the Christmas parade as Grand Marshal December 3rd. It will be a good homecoming for sure. There are a lot of people back there that are really supportive of what we are doing. The whole school system and everybody down there. It is really cool to have a community behind you like that.”
YOU WERE IN THE TOP FIVE IN POINTS ALL YEAR BEFORE MOVING TO FIRST AND STAYING THERE. WAS THERE A MOMENTUM SHIFT AFTER YOU GOT TO FIRST? “We look at it as one whole year. We got the lead a couple times and lost it but that last time we got it we were bound and determined not to give it back. We wanted to seal it up before coming to Homestead. We did the best job we could and it was just a whole year of total team effort and really working to not make mistake on pit road and not making mistakes as a driver and crew chief. I think at the end of the year we really limited our mistakes we made in our first half the year that gave those points leads back to other people. That was the main thing we focused on.”
WHAT WAS THE ONE BIGGEST LESSON YOU LEARNED FROM JACK DURING THE TROUBLES LAST YEAR? “The one biggest thing I think I learned from everything Jack has done for me is that he cares about me as a person and really wanted me to succeed. If he didn’t care he wouldn’t put me in the body shop. That is one thing I learned from my dad. He was tough on my growing up but it was always for a reason. Jack has been an awesome team owner. He has done a lot of great things in NASCAR and I am glad to be a part of this one little thing. He has been doing it a long time. He has his ways of doing things and you have to look at the positives from it. I think that was the biggest thing I learned.”
JACK ROUSH CONTINUED – WHAT WAS IT YOU SAW IN RICKY THAT MADE YOU INSIST ON PUSHING HIM TO THE POINT TO SEE IF HE HAD WHAT IT TOOK? “Ricky was extraordinarily talented. Every challenge we gave him with a new race track or problem with a car as we changed the car Ricky was bright and quick and talented in meeting those challenges. The thing that was always there when you would reach a situation when it was clear that you could go down this or that path and Mike Beam or Mike Kelley or myself decided to go down a certain path Ricky always went along with it. He never called his dad for support and said we were being to hard on him, he just went along with the program. That is what a rookie needs to do. He needs to go with the program with the people looking after him and our group had his interests in mind. The other thing was that he was just driven to be competitive to the extent of self destruction to start with. It is much easier to temper that and deal with that that it is for someone that doesn’t want it as bad as those next to them. They couldn’t realize the ultimate prize. Ricky wanted it bad and he raised himself to be a race car driver. This was his opportunity and he tried to hang on to it too tight to start with and couldn’t realize the success there for him but very quickly we got over that.”
RICKY STENHOUSE CONTINUED – THIS IS THE FIRST CHAMPIONSHIP UNDER THE NEW FORMAT. YOU ARE THE CHAMPION WITH TWO WINS. CAN YOU TALK ABOUT HOW YOU FEEL ABOUT BEING THE FIRST CHAMPION IN THIS NEW FORMAT? “It means just as much. We race week in and week out with those guys. We gave them a run for their money here tonight. Ultimately my goal is to go out there and win the drivers and owners championship. We finished third in the owners championship so we ran really strong all year. We beat Carl, we beat Brad, we passed those guys and raced Kyle Busch. I think as a race team and me as a driver I felt like we are just as good as those guys. I think that racing up there and beating them definitely makes this championship worth it.”
YOU FINISHED STRONG. “This race track is one of my favorites. I wish we came here twice at least. Last year was the first year here. I had a lot of fun and this is just my style of race track. You can drive it in hard, let it slide up to the wall and get back in the gas and really hang it out, it just reminds me a lot of sprint car racing. Last year, we finished fourth and ran really strong and this year we just came up one spot short and maybe one corner short, but, man, it was fun racing those guys. We were sideways, turning right, trying to keep it off the fence, getting into the fence every now and then, and to race up there with Carl, Brad, Denny, Clint Bowyer, Elliott Sadler, they’re some of the best in the business and to be up there racing with them is fun.”
AT WHAT POINT DID YOU KNOW THE TITLE WAS YOURS AND DID IT CHANGE YOUR PHILOSOPHY? “We were going 100 percent there from the start. It’s tough to get me to back down any. I’m not good at riding around, so I’m not sure what lap it was, Mike Kelley came over and told me we were good to go, that we had won the championship, but we still stayed focused and I think I drove 110 percent after that, so that was the only thing that really changed.”
WAS THERE A TURNING POINT FOR YOU AND YOUR TEAM THIS SEASON? “I can think of two. Early in the year when we led laps at Bristol, ran up there with Kyle and I was kind of playing around with him the whole time. Talking to Kyle after he was like, ‘Man, you had the best car.’ We made a mistake on fuel mileage and we made a mistake as a race team getting lined up and we got caught two laps down, so I think we rallied together and we worked on our fuel mileage with Ford and everybody at Roush Fenway and Roush Yates, worked on our fuel mileage, and we kind of got a direction there and that really helped us. And then Indy when we led 190 laps and we came up a couple spots short. That was pretty tough for us, but we were bound and determined to win some more races and really run up front and dig hard, and Mike was the one that kind of rallied everybody together and kept everybody digging.”
MIKE KELLEY CONTINUED – “I kind of agree with him. Early on in the year we kind of made a few mistakes and left a lot of points on the table, a lot more than we ever thought, and I really feel if we would have been a little smarter, a little better earlier in the year, we’d have been right in the middle of that owner’s championship, and that was our goal from the beginning. But the thing that meant a lot to me is we sat down in January and we circled a bunch of dates on the calendar for Ricky’s experience level on the road course races, we kind of had a goal, we said we’d have to be 25 points in the lead coming into the last two road course race swing knowing that Elliott had a lot of experience and Ricky had never been to Watkins Glen. We knew we’d take our lumps there, but if we could get out of there, we didn’t care if it was a one-point lead or a two-point lead, we would tell ourselves on the way home that we came out of there with the lead and now it was ours to hold on to the last 10 races of the year, kind of really laid into Ricky’s schedule – a bunch of short tracks thrown in there with some mile-and-a-halfs that the cars have been good on. When we made it through those two road course races, I don’t know if it was six, seven, eight points or something, we came out of there with the lead and I remember looking at him on the plane and I told him, ‘Picture that we came in here five points behind and we actually came out six points ahead and we’ll look at it that way, instead of saying we lost 10 today.’ We got the guys rallied back at the shop and said, ‘We’ve only got to turn left from here on in and Ricky can do that as good as anybody out there.’ Lack of experience or not, he’s as talented as anyone I’ve ever seen behind the wheel.”
RICKY STENHOUSE JR. CONTINUED – AT THE START OF THE YEAR MANY PEOPLE DIDN’T HAVE YOU IN THEIR TOP FIVE. DID YOU USE THAT AS MOTIVATION? “We definitely used that as motivation. We felt like at the end of last year, Mike Kelley and I were sitting down at the banquet watching Brad get the trophy, we told each other right there that as strong as we were running at the end of the year, running up in the top five with the Cup guys, that we were going for that championship and that was before they ever changed the point system. Obviously, they changed the point system and we still weren’t in sight to do that from the media’s perspective, but we felt like as a race team we could do that, I felt like as a driver I was just as good as anybody else out there, and if we put everything together, then we knew we had a shot at this championship. But it was just fun. You all have been doing this a long time and I’m just getting started, so it was good to come out here and get this championship.”
