Ford Performance Notes and Quotes
NASCAR Cup Series
NASCAR Media Zoom | Tuesday, September 7, 2021
Aric Almirola, driver of the No. 10 Smithfield Ford Mustang, is coming off a 16th-place finish in Sunday’s Southern 500 at Darlington. He goes into this weekend’s second playoff race of Round 1 in 11th place, three points above the cut line for advancement to Round 2. He was a guest earlier today on a media Zoom call and talked about the playoff race.
ARIC ALMIROLA, No. 10 Smithfield Ford Mustang — WHAT DO YOU MAKE OF ALL THE ATTRITION WE SAW AT DARLINGTON AND WHAT DID YOU THINK ABOUT YOUR RACE? “I honestly can’t explain the amount of attrition between the playoff drivers, but it does seem to happen when we get to the playoffs. We see it time and time again where playoff drivers end up with bad races and find themselves in a hole. I guess it’s just the way it works and it creates a lot of excitement for TV and the sport in general seeing guys trying to dig out of holes to make it to the next round of the playoffs. As far as our race goes, we overcame some adversity for sure. We had some things not go our way, late race cautions and a tire going down and several different things just popping up and happening that we had to overcome, so for us, getting out of there with a 16th -place finish and being three points about the cut line, while not ideal, especially with a car that was capable of running anywhere from seventh to 10th most of the night, we didn’t take ourselves out. We kept fighting, kept grinding away the whole night. It’s a long race. Five hundred miles at Darlington is a long long race, but to get out of there with a decent night, scoring some stage points and found ourselves leaving Darlington three points above the cut line is a good spot to go to these next two weeks that are good tracks for us.”
WHAT DO YOU EXPECT AT RICHMOND? “More of the same. It’s gonna be tough. It’s gonna be intense. There’s gonna be a lot of battling and I have no doubt that you will see a playoff car or a couple or a few run into some trouble. It just happens and you just don’t want to be that guy. We’ve been fortunate going to Richmond in year’s past, especially in the playoffs where we’ve always had good cars. We’ve run in the top five, scored a lot of stage points and had good finishes, so that’s been one of our best racetracks and we’re taking the same car we won at Loudon with, so hopefully we can produce a similar result.”
HOW MUCH HAS CHANGED SINCE THE LAST RICHMOND RACE, OR IS IT WHOEVER WAS GOOD THERE THE FIRST TIME WILL BE GOOD THIS TIME? “It’s hard to say because I feel like Richmond doesn’t change, but everybody always seems to find a way to get better, so you can’t rest on your laurels. If you were good at Richmond last time, you can’t automatically assume that you’re going to beat the competition. Everybody is always looking to find ways to make their cars better from the last race and you just look at Darlington. I know the patch was an added difference and something new about Darlington, but you go back and look at the spring race and look at the cars that ran good, and then you look at this race and there were some different cars running up front. So, I think the race teams, the organizations, everybody works hard to find more speed in our cars, more downforce, all those things, so that usually equates to stiffer competition and win the playoffs, so everybody brings their A-game, so I have no doubt that even though we’ve run good at Richmond and we ran good there in the spring, we’re still fine-tuning and tweaking on what we had there in the past to try and make it a race-winning car instead of a top-five car.”
HOW MUCH DO YOU PAY ATTENTION TO WHAT’S GOING ON IN DAYTONA WITH THE NEXT GEN TEST TUESDAY AND WEDNESDAY? “I honestly am paying zero attention. I am not a good multi-tasker, so for me right now, to be the best that I can be, I am just totally focused on the playoffs and really focused on Richmond this week. That’s the approach I’ve always taken. When it comes playoff time I focus on one week at a time and last week I was totally focused on Darlington. This week I’ll be totally focused on Richmond and I’m not even worried about Bristol, so I can’t be worried about Next Gen racing if my focus is right now on Richmond.”
WHAT WENT SO RIGHT IN THE FIRST RICHMOND RACE FOR YOU THIS YEAR? “I do feel like going to Richmond this time around I have so much confidence because I didn’t feel like our cars were where they needed to be earlier this year, and yet we still went to Richmond and ran in the top 10 and finished seventh. So, to go there and run like we did in the spring, where I felt like our cars were still off, especially the 750 stuff that we’ve made significant gains on, it gives me a lot of confidence knowing that we ran well there in the spring and that we’re going back with a lot better race car and it’s a place that we just, for whatever reason, I don’t know way, but I always run good there. It doesn’t matter the team or the crew chief or whatever, I always show up to Richmond and tend to run well there — very similar to Loudon. I’m excited about it. It’s a great place for us. It’s Smithfield’s backyard, so it always feels good to go up there and run good, and then this weekend in particular we’re running a really cool, special paint scheme to honor and remember 20 years ago 9/11, so I’m pretty excited about this weekend on all fronts.”
CAN YOU GO BACK TO YOUR FIRST CUP START WITH GIBBS. WHAT DO YOU REMEMBER ABOUT THAT EXPERIENCE? “I remember it being an extremely nerve-wracking weekend. We were going there with an R&D car, kind of experimenting for Gibbs at the time. I remember that back then you had to qualify your way in. When you came as a non-top 35 in points car, and back then they used to get 48-50 cars trying to qualify for 43 spots, and Vegas was one that everybody wanted to go run because the purse was big. If you made it at Vegas, it was a good payday and it was a great place for Gibbs to go and try and experiment and work on some new technology and new setups, so I remember being a nervous wreck. I remember qualifying in and feeling like the weight of the world was lifted off of me, and then I remember waking up race day morning and feeling like the weight of the world was right back on me. I just remember being really nervous, just wanting to go and perform and run well to just kind of prove that I belong and I remember being really devastated that we wrecked and the race didn’t go really how I envisioned or hoped it would.”
DO YOU SEE THE TROUBLE THE PLAYOFF DRIVERS ENCOUNTERED WAS DUE TO TOO MUCH AGGRESSION OR JUST SOME BAD LUCK? IS IT BETTER TO GO FOR THE WIN AT ALL COST OR AVOID SOME OF THAT TROUBLE AND JUST TRY TO POINT YOUR WIN INTO THE NEXT ROUND? “That’s certainly a balance, but if you look historically over the last several years the first round is definitely a round that you’ve got to survive. Winning obviously makes it way easier, but surviving is key because on any given year you look back and at least two or three cars end up taking themselves out just from one or two bad races, wrecks, blown engines, whatever it is, so when you look at the first round it is about surviving, but you have to be aggressive. It’s such a balancing act between not making mistakes and don’t wreck, don’t take yourself out, but at the same time you’ve got to race for every point. Every single stage point matters. Every single point in position on the racetrack at the end of the race matters, so it really is a tough challenge and a balancing act between being aggressive to go get the spots that you need to go get, and making sure that you don’t put yourself in a bad position to get tore up and have a DNF.”
WHERE WERE YOU ON 9/11 AND WHAT DO YOU REMEMBER FROM THAT DAY? “I remember exactly where I was that day. I was a senior in high school and I was in drafting class. I was in an architectural engineering class and I was drawing on graph paper and I remember our teacher got a phone call or got notified, I don’t remember exactly how he got notified, but he got notified and he turned on the little tube TV that was mounted up on a wall bracket in the classroom and put the news on and we all put our pencils down and just sat there in shock. We couldn’t believe what we were witnessing. I remember it being very somber in the classroom and just a lot of emotion and everybody was very quiet and glued to the TV, trying to figure out what was going on. Shortly after that, we all got dismissed from school. If you drove to school, you could leave. Otherwise, you had to wait for the buses to come or for your parents to come pick you up. I was a senior in high school. I drove, so I was able to hop in my truck and drive home. I just remember getting home as fast as I could and turning the news back on trying to understand and wrap my head around the tragic events that had happened that day.”
