Ford Racing Notes and Quotes
NASCAR Cup Series
FireKeepers Casino 400 Media Availability — Michigan International Speedway
Saturday, June 6, 2026
Chris Buescher, driver of the No. 17 Kroger/Oscar Mayer/Rustik Oven Ford Mustang Dark Horse for RFK Racing, is currently eighth in the NASCAR Cup Series point standings. He stopped by the infield media center at Michigan International Speedway and answered questions about his season to date and what lies ahead in 2026.
CHRIS BUESCHER, No. 17 Kroger/OscarMayer/RustikOven Ford Mustang Dark Horse – HOW MUCH DO YOU LOOK AT POINTS? “We’re certainly aware of it every week. I think we talk about this year when we went back to this Chase format that we were very confident that we’re gonna be in the Chase. If you take our last several seasons and you try to overlay this format on it, then we would have been fine. We would have been almost easily in every one of those years, and with that, I know that’s because we were able to go to a lot of these racetracks and be very competitive and have chances to win races, and I think that our bad tracks have stepped up this year and we haven’t really had to go to the racetrack and have those rough weeks. We’ve had kind of a tough go here in the last couple weeks from a finishing position standpoint, but from a competitive standpoint we’re not lacking there, so on the Chase and the points side of things, I’m not worried about it. I’m aware of it, but certainly we come to Michigan here, this is a huge win opportunity for us. We’ve had this one on our minds for a long time. To be so close here last year and to be able to pick out two or three very minute detail things that we could have done differently that ultimately could have gotten us to Victory Lane, it stung a little bit coming out of here. That being said, it’s been a really good track to us. It’s an important track for all our partners – with Ford, for Jack with it being in his backyard and Brad’s backyard. I joke about it every time I come here. It’s everybody’s home track except mine, and I guess now Ryan’s, so I’ve got somebody in that corner with me, but there’s a lot on the line when we come to this racetrack and, fortunately, we’ve been very fast here. So, we get to come out here and figure out how to win a race and let the points come as they might for it.”
YOU ARE 38 POINTS AWAY FROM FIFTH AND MANY FEEL YOU NEED TO BE IN THE TOP FIVE TO HAVE A SHOT AT WINNING THE CHAMPIONSHIP. HOW DOES THAT COMPARE WITH TRYING TO GET INTO THE CHASE IN PREVIOUS YEARS? “I think you’re accurate there, that if you really want to have a chance to win the championship that, yes, you need to be certainly in the top half and probably the top third of the field that does make that cut. For us, we got there just a couple weeks ago, and, like I said, we’ve had a couple rough weeks that have set us back. Fortunately, we had built up a gap and that doesn’t mean that we’re on the outside looking in and we’re still in the top half of it, but by the skin our teeth. We’ve got to get back on track and I have no doubt we can do that as we look at this weekend, Pocono has been really good for us. We’ve got some road racing coming up. There’s a lot of really solid racetracks that I feel very confident that we’ll be able to put those numbers back up on the board. To start off there, I don’t have any doubts that we’re gonna be able to make the Chase, but we don’t want to just participate, we want to figure out how to make a run at this thing. We’ve got some work to do to truly be in the hunt for that, but the consistency and the competitiveness at all of these different style of racetracks and being able to not have races that we go to and say, ‘Man, this is just not gonna be our weekend.’ Not having that is really helping us just stay consistent across. Our weekends that are just decent are still good enough to keep us in the hunt. We’re still working. We know we need to be a little better yet and we’ve talked about how we’re able to run right there and be close to the hunt for some wins. I feel like we’ve got just a very small step to make to truly be in the hunt week in and week out, and we just haven’t gotten there quite yet this year.”
WHAT DO YOU REMEMBER ABOUT THAT FIRST WIN AT POCONO? “Lots of things that were very positive, and then on the negative side of it, I’ll just start with that because when we did get the final OK, that’s it, we’re calling it, it was almost an hour-and-a-half later. I think all the pit boxes on pit road were shut down and sealed up. People were gone. Haulers were missing. It was pretty clear that we were done and we hung out for a long time. The negative side to that is at the end of it, there was nobody to celebrate with. I think there were eight people, mainly our team standing on pit road and the grandstands were empty. Pit road was empty. The garage was all but empty. We couldn’t use the really neat Victory Lane at Pocono that has since been replaced, so we had to go do an alternate one in the garage. There was no celebration on the frontstretch. No burnout to it. It took away some of the most fun parts about winning races in just that raw emotion in the moment. That being said, it was huge for us. I remember how the day went. We had an accident that we narrowly avoided, but we did end up getting, I think we touched fenders with somebody and with a metal body car it ended up cutting a tire down. So, we ended up on pit road off sequence, which set us up to be able to run longer on that fuel run. That put us in a spot to where as cars started pitting, the rain was far enough out, but the fog is unpredictable in Pocono. I’ve had an ARCA win narrowly slip away due to fog at Pocono, ironically. I’ll still trade it for that Cup win at the end of the day, so I’m OK with it now, but it let us stay out there just long enough. Jamie McMurray was ahead of us and when he pitted I think it was the next straightaway they came over the radio and they’re like, ‘Hey, the visibility is getting pretty bad up here. How is it from your standpoint going down the backstretch?’ And I’m like, ‘It’s fine.’ And as soon as I let the words come out of my mouth, I realized, ‘Well, that was the wrong answer. I know what they were fishing for.’ They were very quick to ask me again the next straightaway and I was like, ‘Yeah, yeah, it’s really bad. I can’t see a thing. I’m sure you can’t see me either. This feels unsafe.’ I was a little bit of a slow learner back then, but it was a really big moment for us and everybody at Front Row Motorsports. To be able to put ourselves in the playoffs that season was huge in our rookie year, so I definitely have a lot of things that come back to me from that race and it was certainly a fun one. It was unfortunate not to get to celebrate the proper way because wins in this sport are so hard to come by no matter how they arrive and you certainly want to have that ability to celebrate with all the people who work so hard to create those moments and it didn’t quite feel the same as any of the wins since.”
YOU WERE SORT OF INVOLVED IN THE ISSUE LAST WEEK WITH AUSTIN AND BRAD. DID YOU INTERJECT YOURSELF INTO THAT CONVERSATION? “I reached out to Austin when I got to the airport. I just wanted him to know that I didn’t know what happened ahead of us at the time, and I didn’t know what happened between him and Brad later, either, at the moment. I just told him, ‘Look, that was not intentional.’ I said, ‘I don’t know exactly what happened and why there was a check up, but it was a wild moment.’ I don’t know who hit pit road and caused all the stack up. I shouldn’t say caused because it was just a racing deal, but when it got to be that way I had a run under Austin because he was one that had to move up the hill and I just told him that once I realized my run wasn’t going anywhere, because I had to pull down low too, got a little sideways and I said I was just literally trying to get back in line to get back in the draft. We’re good. I’m just gonna let my position be known and let him know that there was nothing intentional or anything in that moment, that we were just racing and sorry I got caught up in it. That’s the only thing I’ve had with him and we were fine at the end of it, but I didn’t realize what went down in the moment. It was a chaotic corner I know that and it led to a chaotic straightaway.”
WHAT HAVE YOU LEARNED ABOUT THE SAN DIEGO COURSE? “I think it will be the hardest road race that anybody in this garage has ever run, just from the standpoint there are so many corners. I think we have labeled 16, but if we labeled like some other tracks, it would probably come out to 30. It’s gonna be very difficult. It’s very narrow in places. It’s extremely wide in others, to the point where you’re almost trying to figure out where in the world you should be in that 100-feet of racetrack to set up for a corner. Trying to figure out what our spotters are gonna be able to see and what we’re gonna be left on our own to do. Everybody in this room knows that’s dangerous if you leave it up to the steering wheel holders to decide if we’re clear or not, but it’s gonna be rough in a lot of places. I’ve laughed about it. It’s fitting to be near aircraft carriers. We’re gonna be in the air quite a bit, and I think that it’s rough in a lot of ways. It’s gonna be tricky. It’s gonna be very difficult to go in there and figure out how to get that thing right from the get-go. All of the sim that we’re gonna continue to run and have run already, it’s not gonna be the real thing until you get there. I remember Chicago for the first time. All of the things you were able to do in the sim and knowing there was no penalty. The turn four entry speed that we carried in the simulator and then you get to the racetrack and you’re like, ‘Yeah, I can wreck a race car here if I drive like the sim,’ but I’m telling you right now that’s exactly where we’re gonna be. We’re gonna have places like that, where we get comfortable in the simulator and we’re gonna say, ‘Oh, those bumps aren’t bad. I can drive through it,’ and you’re gonna get to the racetrack and that’s not going to be the case. It’s all we have and it is a very important tool, but it’s not reality at the end of the day and we’re gonna have a lot of learning to do when we do get there.”
YOU AREN’T GOING TO LAND IN THE BAY ARE YOU? “That is not my plan either. I heard you ask Erik (Jones) earlier, so I’ll have a swimming buddy if we do, I guess, but that’s not our gameplan whatsoever. I feel like it’s a bad plan going into it and we’re gonna avoid that at all costs.”
WHAT IS THE ACHILLES HEEL FOR RFK GOING INTO THE SUMMER STRETCH? “We’re really close to truly being in the hunt to win a lot of races right now, but we’re not there. We can run in that fifth to seventh window at almost anywhere I feel like, but we have to figure out how to break through and pierce that bubble and it’s hard. It’s always that last step that’s the most difficult and there are a few teams that have hit on it so strongly this year that we’re trying to catch up, essentially. I look at what we have through the summer. We’ve talked about it a lot with our own team that the first eight or 10 races of the year have been important for us to get better and we’ve done that this year, but the summer stretch really has all of the racetracks that we can’t wait to get to, whether that’s here, Pocono, Indy, Sonoma. It’s a lot of races that we’ve run really well at and racetracks that we’ve won at, that we know are gonna be in a good spot. I think that the summer stretch is very good for us. We feel very good that this is kind of the time of year where we seem to hit our momentum. If we can keep pushing and be able to turn this into that six or seven week stretch where we’re able to pierce through that bubble a time or two, then we’re in a great spot as we head towards the cut off and into the Chase for the end.”
HOW MUCH GROWTH HAVE YOU SEEN IN RYAN PREECE FROM THE TIME AT JTG TO NOW AT RFK? “The first time I met Ryan was before we actually got to the racetrack. We were doing a little skit for, ironically, Kroger at the time then as well and I remember reading the script. We came in the shop and starting reading through the script and I was just basically laying it on this guy, like new guy here and just belittling him in so many different ways. I’m sitting there saying, ‘I don’t know him well enough to know if this is gonna be OK or not.’ And it didn’t feel quite right in the moment, but it dawned on me pretty quickly that he was gonna give it back, and now here we are getting cars hidden in parking lots and having a good time away from the racetrack. But also, more importantly, to answer your question, I think I’ve seen Ryan come over to RFK and dive into the third race car here. It’s helped our entire organization be able to pick up in pretty key areas. Short track racing has been a huge part of that, and I know that’s his background and, really, that’s where we’ve all come from to some extent, but he’s really strong in that regard and his knowledge has helped us dive into things that have made us a lot stronger when we look at places like a Martinsvilles or a Loudon, places that haven’t been as good for me through the years, it’s helped me be able to elevate. That’s been really neat to see him be able to come in and not from a rookie standpoint at this time by any means, but be able to come in and elevate a program as he dove off into the third car at RFK. It’s hard to fire up a third team and it not be a drag on an organization. I think it’s probably not talked about enough how difficult it is, and Erik was up here talking about it, to hire that many people to get it going and those people on the third team not pull back others. To be able to dial off in and say we all know what we’re doing, we can help one another and it’s not going to take resources away from anybody that is going to only elevate, and that has happened. We’ve been able just to elevate, and I think a lot that is owed to Ryan and equally as much to his team also in the way they’ve handled this and been able to jump in the fire and make it competitive. It’s continuing to grow. We’re continuing to get better at all the different styles of racetracks, and I think that’s because we’re all able to lean on each other for our strengths, whether that’s going road racing and trying to pass on what I’ve been able to figure out through the years to Brad when we go intermediate racing or speedway racing and try and pass that knowledge along. We’ve got our bases covered on about any style of racetrack right now and it’s helping to elevate all of RFK.”
THREE PART QUESTION. THE FORD IS PRETTY MUCH MAXED OUT IS WHAT WE’VE BEEN TOLD UNTIL YOU GET A NEW CAR NEXT YEAR. HOW MUCH IS CAR? HOW MUCH IS EXECUTION? HOW MUCH IS THE FACT YOU’RE GOING AGAINST AN ORGANIZATION THAT IS A SEVEN-CAR FACTORY-BACKED TEAM IN TOYOTA AND A SEVEN-CAR FACTORY-BACKED TEAM IN THE HENDRICK-SPIRE ALLIANCE? “We realize that we’ve worked really hard on this race car and we’ve been able to get a lot out of it, and it is our turn for an update. I think that’s very important to us and we know that nobody submits a new race car and doesn’t make it better, so we know that we’re in line to make ours better at this point. I wouldn’t say that it’s natural at this point to be the one feeling like you need more, but it’s kind of just the cycle of how we do our submissions. We are really excited to get in the Dark Horse SC, but also we’re able to capitalize on what we have right now. We still have been very fast. It’s very close for us to be able to break through. I keep saying that it’s right there in front of us, we just have to execute at an incredibly high level to be able to use it right. I think that we have a lot of potential. We’re very close, but to dive into the second part of your question, we have to execute basically 100 percent to be able to make that speed that we do have turn into wins or opportunities for wins. We can’t afford to have a pit road penalty and think you’re gonna come blasting right back from that. We have to be near perfect and we’re capable of that. We know it and we know it requires a lot of discipline right now and a lot of studying. Like I said, we’re up for the challenge and we’re not sitting here right now saying, ‘Oh, we’ll just wait until 2027.’ We have a lot of stuff still in the works. If you use the term maxed out, it may be the consensus through the room, but I promise you, we don’t believe it. We’re still working to find everything we can and to improve on everything. Are those opportunities smaller now? Maybe. Maybe we’re missing something big that could be huge for us. I don’t have all those answers. It’s a little above me, but we’re not sitting still ultimately and we know that. We’re gonna keep getting after it and we have our three-car team and we have the different Ford teams that you share certain amounts of information with, but it’s not like an in-house program that’s just in the building next to you. It’s a way to bounce stuff off and try to create that high tide that can raise all ships, but we’re also all competing at the same time. I’d imagine it’s the same way for any of the other organizations. Yes, you have the numbers, but ultimately you’re still competing against each other, so you’ve got to do all you can to maximize what you have and do the best with the information you have and that’s what we’re trying to do just maybe on a smaller number scale.”
WILL SAN DIEGO TAKE AWAY FROM SONOMA PREP TIME, AND WILL THERE BE A SENSE OF RELIEF GOING TO SONOMA WHERE YOU’VE DONE SO WELL? “I think there probably will be a sense of relief if you come out of there and everything goes well and as we dive into Sonoma. Typically, you would spend the week prior planning for that race and running simulation and all those things. We won’t do that this go-around because we will be out in California already, so does it take away from it in the immediate week leading up to it? Yes. But it is still being worked on as we lead up to it. It’s just starting earlier than typical. We’ve run Sonoma so much through the years. We don’t have the massive changes going into it. There’s no fresh repave or anything. We’re a couple years into that now, so we feel like we have a pretty good handle on it. We have a pretty good idea of the new package of what that’s done for these other road races, so all of that being said, it doesn’t require the prep work that San Diego is going to and because of that, we don’t feel like we’re going to be leaving anything on the table. When we get to Sonoma, we just know that the prep has been done over the course of the four or five years at this point.”
