Ford Performance Notes and Quotes
NASCAR Cup Series
Firekeepers Casino 400 Media Availability | Michigan International Speedway
Saturday, August 17, 2024
Chris Buescher, driver of the No. 17 Fifth Third Bank Ford Mustang for RFK Racing, returns to Michigan as the defending winner of the Firekeepers Casino 400. Buescher, still looking to clinch a spot in the 2024 NASCAR Cup Series playoffs, spoke about his team’s prospects and the events of the week with media members ahead of on-track action in the Irish Hills.
CHRIS BUESCHER, No. 17 Fifth Third Bank Ford Mustang
DID YOUR ATTITUDE TOWARDS YOUR PLAYOFF HOPES CHANGE AT ALL WITH NASCAR’S RULING ON AUSTIN DILLON, CONSIDERING THERE SHOULD NOW BE AT LEAST ONE SPOT MORE IN THE PLAYOFFS BASED ON POINTS? AND THEN ALSO, WHAT DID YOU THINK OF THE RULING IN GENERAL?
“Yeah, it’s not going to change anything for myself or our team. We knew at the beginning of the year before we ever got to Daytona that this was the only way to really be comfortable at any point before playoffs was a win. And really, there’s no way to get through the next three weeks and be comfortable without one. So no, this isn’t going to change anything for how we approach these next handful of races. For us, we’re looking at a stretch that has been very good to us. I was just laughing coming in here last time we were at this table was for all the right reasons. So, you know, I was looking forward to that for this go around at Michigan. Came up early to be a part of the Roush open house and having our autograph session there and being around Jack and Brad’s hometown. I got to experience some of Michigan and go check out the Woodward Dream Cruise, which I was pretty excited about the last couple nights. So really, it’s just about us coming up here and trying to do all the normal things and figure out how to repeat what we did last time. It’s obviously the talk of the town, right? But it’s not going to change anything for how we’re approaching these races. It’s not going to approach or change my driving style or how we’re going to look at these things. Ultimately, it’s the same thing we talked about throughout the year. If I was willing to do something different, the ending at Kansas mattered just as much as any of these next three and would have done something crazy there. But that’s not how I grew up in this thing. I want to go to these racetracks and figure out how to go put in victory lane and how to have a good, hard race on the way to the end. We had a blast here with the race last year and are really looking forward to giving that another go.”
SPEAKING OF THE ENDING OF KANSAS, THERE WAS SOME CONTACT THERE. THERE WAS A BIG DIFFERENCE SEEMINGLY BETWEEN THAT KIND OF CONTACT AND RICHMOND. ARE YOU COMFORTABLE AS A DRIVER KNOWING WHAT YOU CAN AND CAN’T DO TO GO FOR A WIN AT THIS POINT?
“Not in my head. I know what I’m here to do, what I’m willing to do, and what I’m comfortable with. Whatever the ruling — there may not be the most clarity there for if you’re trying to put it on paper, but I know. I think that we understand what’s acceptable and what you’re willing to do as a driver. So at the end of that one, we didn’t touch each other until off of four there. So it was one of those where just, you know, good clean racing. Tried to crowd what I could and without straight up trying to block an entire racetrack or crashing and I ended up being on the losing end of it. As much as I’d love to have it back and try something and would, it really wouldn’t change the style of racing that we’re going to do in our camp.”
WITH HOW TIGHT THE BUBBLE IS, HOW MUCH WILL YOU WANT TO KNOW WHERE YOUR COMPETITORS ARE ON THE TRACK ON A GIVEN WEEK?
“I would say similar to the last couple months for us. When we go to the racetrack, we need to control what we can. We need to take these Saturdays and be good in qualifying. Figure out how to have a good race car, get into the race. If we can qualify well, then you can typically grab stage points early. That just comes with running well. It’s not that we’re chasing stage points in stage one, right? It’s a matter of just being good. For us, that’s the same way we’re going to approach these, how do we just have fast race cars and how do we get our Fifth Third Bank Ford Mustang into victory lane. What we have done or paid attention to is we know the cars that are around us in this bubble. We pay attention to if they have a rough day and if we are handed a gift of sorts in how their race plays out, then to make sure that we don’t hurt ourselves somewhere else along the way. Don’t do anything too crazy and put ourselves in a bad spot. I guess it’s not about laying up any, it’s just about doing everything that we know to do and that we can control until somebody else may or may not have issues. We’ve had a couple of issues where cars will race around, blow up, crash out and it’s just that mentality that we don’t need to have a 30th place day now. We need to be really good and if we have a 10th place car don’t wreck going for 8th, but make sure you get 10th.”
ANOTHER YEAR WHERE MIS HAS LOOMING RAIN IN THE FORECAST HERE. YOU WON THE RACE HERE LAST YEAR ON THE MONDAY. HOW AS A DRIVER DO YOU APPROACH A WEEKEND LIKE THIS WITH SO MUCH UNPREDICTABILITY AND WHEN YOU’RE GOING TO RACE?
“I don’t know what you’re talking about. I haven’t heard anything about that. It’s been a year. It’s been a year for weather. We’re obviously not putting a roof over this place. We are at the mercy of Mother Nature. Last year we joked about it, this week knowing what it’s looking like. Monday wasn’t so bad last year. I don’t want to be here Monday for us, for our fans. The biggest thing I’ve talked about with everybody about the Monday win last season was simply the fact of how many people had to leave, how empty the entire facility felt, and how that can take away from a lot of the excitement. Whether that was a ton of our partners were here for a big event and had to go back to work. Our Victory Lane photos were a lot thinner than they should have been. So many of our of the Ford family and Ford execs had to go back to work as well. So that photo was a lot thinner than it should have been. I mean everything about it, the stands were a lot thinner. I know a ton of people did hang out with us and really appreciated that. But it’s just, it’s not quite as fun when it’s not a packed house, right? And we all remember just a handful of years ago going to empty racetracks and how very strange that felt. And it’s not what you want, right? So that was the biggest part for me was the win was just as important. It meant just as much to us, but the celebration is not as fun when you don’t have all your buddies there right with you. So ultimately, this weekend, we’ll obviously pay attention to it way too much. We’ll have all kinds of conversations about what-ifs, and most of those will never happen. And we’ll just go on with our normal race weekend. Seems like we have been pretty fortunate, been able to just play these things out as scheduled. Everyone keeps telling me, all the locals around here, just said, wait five minutes and it’ll change. We’ll be ready to go. We’ll just go with the locals theory there.”
WHEN YOU LOOK AT WHERE YOU’RE AT ON THE BUBBLE LINE OR ON THE CUT LINE AS FAR AS THE PLAYOFFS HOW IMPORTANT IS THIS QUALIFYING SESSION GOING TO BE TODAY TO GET SOME EARLY STAGE POINTS AND WHAT’S THE AGENDA FOR YOU GUYS IN PRACTICE IN TERMS OF DIALING IN YOUR RACE CAR AND KIND OF CHECKING ALL THE BOXES BEFORE QUALIFYING?
“Yeah, we obviously had a good notebook to go off from last time here. We’ve been excited to come back to Michigan and show the speed that we’ve had at a lot of these bigger racetracks in the last couple of months. We have not executed the races to the best extent and we don’t have the results to show for it, but we’ve been very fast at these places. Not that long ago in Indy, I was really happy with our performance through practice and maybe a little better in qualifying but got going in the first stage really well and then ended up with our issues on the day. It was a similar day at Pocono, really good there just needed to execute a little bit better overall and with that it’s gonna be important just to clean that up when we come to Michigan here, knowing how we’re going to have green flag pit stops here. We’re going to be chasing dirty air. I know that conversation sucks to have, and we’re all sick of saying it too and hearing it, but it matters when you’re running 200 miles an hour — more than anywhere. So you’re going to have those conversations. For us, it’s not changing because of our situation. We are doing the same things every week, but it’s going to become more and more important for us to execute at the highest level.”
FIVE OF THE LAST SEVEN WINNERS AT DAYTONA ARE DRIVERS THAT HAVE YET TO SECURE A PLAYOFF SPOT AT THIS POINT. WHAT ARE THE OPPORTUNITIES AND CHALLENGES OF BEING IN THAT TYPE OF POSITION GOING INTO NEXT WEEK?
“Well it’s not the last one this year so there’s that and Darlington is obviously very good to us the first go-around as an organization, so you know there’s always one more. It’s always like that right? There’s always that level of unpredictability. Speedway racing, I’ve had an adapting relationship with through the years and really didn’t like it for a long time and ended up on the end of a lot of the big ones with some bad luck along the way and just got to a point where I really did not look forward to heading those tracks. What I’ll say is RFK builds extremely fast Mustangs to go to those tracks. That has certainly made it a lot more enjoyable, but there is a higher luck factor when we go to those. We talk about that quite a bit. You can’t make all your own luck there. There is a matter of being in the right place at the right time simply by circumstance. Mistakes get made. Everyone is a little bit more desperate as it comes down to it. That race definitely has the ability to get a lot more wild, especially as we get into the closing laps. We’ve had these conversations there through the years of how do you run hard, be smart in the stages, try and capture stage points, but ultimately know that with 10, 15 to go, it’s going to get wild. There’s probably going to be a big accident statistically, and it seems like that just keeps getting pushed farther and farther towards the finish, to the point where all the people like us in the past have said, okay, maybe we’ll just wait until we get to that wreck and then we’ll really make that big push. Well, it’s kind of the common mindset. So it just gets later and later at the end of that race. And then it turns into just pure chaos. So it produces very wild, unpredictable finishes with new winners. We’re going to do our best to not let that happen. Myself and Brad have worked really hard to work together and be able to help each other be in the best possible spot at that style of racetrack so that we can try and cover any of the chaos. But ultimately, there’s a level of unknown there. I’m glad it’s not the last one. Let’s put it that way. I’m excited that we get to go to Darlington after that and go to our cutoff race there.”
A WEEK AFTER RICHMOND. LOOKING BACK, HOW DID, FROM YOUR PERSPECTIVE, THE DIFFERENT TIRE OPTIONS IMPACT WHAT YOU DID OR HOW YOU DID THINGS? AND ARE YOU FINE IF THEY DO SOMETHING IN THE PLAYOFFS?
“I like the reds. I thought the fall-off was very significant. I think that was, I’d be good with running that all the time. I think that would be a lot of fun for our racing. As far as an option when we go to racetracks, I don’t know if I like that part as much, but being on the red tires there, I think that’s a lot of what we’ve been thinking we would like as drivers and as a sport too, it was not something you had to make a decision. You had to be good on fire off, but you had to try and control how hard you pushed it, or you would certainly pay a massive penalty on the backside of it. So I thought that was fun to race. I think Richmond was the right place with track surface the way it is. North Wilkesboro being new asphalt there, we all just stayed on it, right? And that’s not out of the ordinary for new paved racetracks. We go a lot and whatever tire we’re on, we just won’t change them, but it just didn’t give us the best read, whereas Richmond gave us a pretty good idea that a different compound that has some fire-off speed and fell off hard has a lot of potential. For us, through that race, we ended up on a different strategy. After the green flag stop mishap there and had to try and make some headway back, we ended up putting our reds on earlier and trying to get our laps back. Ultimately, we’ve talked about it a little bit afterward and I think if that’s something that stays around, then the teams all kind of converge on a common strategy and it ends up becoming the same old same once everybody gets it figured out. A lot was learned in that race. If we go to the racetrack and we do this several times, then I think you really will just see most of the field on the exact same strategy again. I think it takes away what the big discrepancy between people all over the map, once we have more knowledge.”
THE AUSTIN DILLON DECISION, DID NASCAR MAKE THE RIGHT DECISION, AND WERE YOU SURPRISED AT THE DECISION?
“I’m in a position to where, no matter what I say on this one, you can come across as being biased. And for my sake, for our team’s sake, it’s probably best for me to not go down that road. I got asked about it during the week and the thing I said was, you know what, I know how we’re racing. The way that race played out before anything was talked about, any penalties were assessed, I said no, it’s not going to change what we do. Yes, I see that we’re going to be desperate to come into of these races and it’s going to produce some wild finishes, but it’s not going to change how we’re going to do this. I know what I want to do when I go to the racetrack, I know how I want to race, and ultimately for our team, we know what we’re capable of from a speed standpoint and how we’re going to approach them. So without diving into any of the details of all of that, again, there’s no way for me to have an opinion on it without having a bias. There’s about three of us that there’s no answer that’s the right one in this scenario, right? So we’ll just let it play out the next couple of weeks and then you can ask again. No comment.”
