Ford Racing Notes and Quotes
NASCAR Cup Series
Chase Media Day — Charlotte Convention Center
Wednesday, September 2, 2026
RYAN BLANEY, No. 12 Team Penske Ford Mustang Dark Horse – WHAT IS YOUR REACTION TO THE PIT CREW SWAP WITH THE 2 TEAM? “I firstly want to thank the guys who were with me all year. They were with us through thick and thin. We had great times together and was able to win a few races. I appreciate the work they did and to get us where we’re at. And then this decision, Team Penske just looked at it and they figured how can we change things up to where we think it will benefit the whole company and this is what they decided. I’m thankful for what my guys did. I’m looking forward to working with the new team. I feel like they’ve been really solid on pit road all year, and a lot of them are guys I’ve worked with in the past. A couple of them are new guys to me, but I’m looking forward to it. I think it really speaks highly of Team Penske’s depth that they can shift guys around and have them be able to get plugged into other teams pretty seamlessly. I’m looking forward to seeing how that goes.”
WHEN DID YOU LEARN OF THE CHANGE? “I learned on Monday, so only very shortly before you all did.”
DID YOU ASK FOR ANY SORT OF A CHANGE? “I did not ask for a change. That came from above me. I wasn’t in there going into meetings wanting a change. It was just something that Team Penske, higher above me, decided to do.”
HOW VOCAL ARE YOU WHEN THERE ARE ISSUES? “I am not the decision-maker when it comes to pit road, road guys. Really, the only thing I can do is be in those meetings with the people who have those powers – team leaders, crew chiefs, things like that. We all talk. ‘Hey, where can we improve.’ But at the end of the day, it’s not my call to say, ‘Hey, I want a change this guy or these groups of guys out.’ That’s out of my area of expertise. There are pit coaches and everyone who knows those guys better, work with those guys every single day. They are the ones making the calls. All I can do is give my opinions on a couple of things when they are asked of me, so that’s really where it’s at.”
HOW DO YOU WORK ON BRINGING THESE NEW GUYS TOGETHER AND ON THE SAME PAGE? “The last couple of days just spending time with that group. ‘Hey, what do you like? Is there anything specific you like of me?’ Whether it’s a jackman, the gas man on fuel only stops. Tire carriers. Changers. ‘Is there anything specific that you want out of me coming into the stall?’ And a lot of them are the same. ‘Stop on the sign. Make sure the wheel is where it’s supposed to be.’ Stuff like that, but there’s a lot of little things, I feel like. Everyone has their own quirks, so just talking to those guys has been super helpful to me. If there is something that they want differently, then I for sure will adjust to that, but I think that’s the big thing is just communication and what everyone’s likes and dislikes are.”
HOW DOES THIS SET THE 12 TEAM UP FOR THE CHASE WITH HOW HIGHLY YOUR NEW PIT CREW HAS BEEN RANKED THIS YEAR? “I felt very strongly about going into the Chase even before this because I think our team has done a good job of figuring out speed in the race car, figuring out how to get better on pit road, overcoming sometimes where we have adversity. I felt great about it before everything – even Sunday – so I still feel really good about it as well and it’s one of those things that on the personal side you create relationships with a lot of those guys. They go to battle with you every single week, so that side has its own emotions, but, at the end of the day, there’s a business side to it. ‘Hey, this is the best way we have to win Roger Penske a championship,’ so you welcome those guys in with open arms. ‘Hey, welcome to the team. You’re on the 12 group now. How do we all operate as a group?’ I feel great about it. No matter which way it went I felt really good about it.”
DO YOU THINK THIS WILL BE A MOTIVATOR FOR YOU GUYS THAT ARE NOW WITH AUSTIN? “Yeah, for sure and those guys are still racing for a championship. They’re still in it. They’re in the Chase and they have a chance to go win it as well. That 2 team is a great team. Austin has proven himself as a great driver. Brian Wilson is a great crew chief, so I think those guys will plug in very well over there with that group, and, yeah, I think it can be a motivator. When things get moved around, I feel like you can really learn a lot about yourself and just strive to be better in areas that you want to be better. Those guys are gonna do a great job and still really race for a championship.”
IS THIS A RYAN BLANEY VERSUS TOYOTA CHAMPIONSHIP? “I wouldn’t say that. I think there’s a lot of other guys that can go out there and do it. All 16 teams in this thing, I think, are very, very good and can really go on runs, but the Toyotas are incredibly fast. We’ve seen that all year. I think the Fords, for myself and the 22, and the 2, and the 60, and the 17, I feel like we’ve had a really good last two or three months and closed the gap there. I’m curious to see where we’re at on the mile-and-a-halves, where we have those three in a row. That’s gonna be a huge sign of seeing where we’re gonna be and how we stack up with the Toyotas. And then you know the 5 and the 9 are incredibly good, too. So, I don’t think it’s us versus the Toyotas. It’s us versus 15 other people. That’s how I look at it.”
YOU’VE HAD LOVE-HATE RELATIONSHIP WITH HOMESTEAD. HOW DO YOU FEEL ABOUT THAT BEING THE CHAMPIONSHIP RACE? “Sometimes we’ve had some rough goes of it there. I love it. I love the place. We’ve run really good there. We blew up running really good there a year or two ago, whatever it was. I gave a race away there to Tyler a couple of years ago, but I like that it’s back in Miami. I really enjoyed Phoenix for the handful of years we had it at Phoenix. We brought it to a new area of the country, which is good, but Homestead is championship weekend to me. Growing up, I mean, that was always championship weekend, so pair it with a really unique racetrack, a lot of fun, every driver likes it, a great area of the country as well. I don’t want to call it nostalgia, but for me it kind of is because we went there every year with my dad because it was championship weekend. It’s nice that it’s back there.”
WHAT NEW PIT CREW MEMBERS HAVE YOU WORKED WITH BEFORE? “Andrew Lackey is the gasman. He was with me in Trucks and he was with me all the way up to 2019 when Penske switched all the crews around. Jesse Mills. I was with him on that 12 car the first couple of years for a little bit. Jourdan Osinsie, the jackman, he was my jackman when we won the championship. He got moved to the 2 car this year, so back working with him. And then the final two I haven’t worked with a ton through the years, but you get to know all those guys. You go back and watch pit practice. You get to learn about them and things like that, so the few of them I have a decent amount of experience with throughout my years and a couple of them it’s nice to get to learn new guys, just hear their personalities, where they came from, how they got here, stuff like that, the great job they do. It’s a nice group.”
HOW DO YOU FEEL THESE TRACKS IN THE CHASE LINE UP FOR YOU GUYS? “I think we have the opportunity to go perform well at every track. I said earlier the mile-and-a-halves are a place to where we know we have to continue to improve, and I feel like we’ve made steps from Chicago. Indianapolis isn’t a mile-and-a-half, but it’s a bigger track and the 22 had a heck of a run there, so that really shows me that we’ve made a step in the right direction. I’m just curious to see when we do get those – Charlotte, Vegas and Kansas – but then I think all of the other places we’ve had really good runs, but you can’t rely on that. You have to continue to try to improve, no matter if it’s your best racetracks or forms of tracks or tracks maybe you’ve struggled at. It’s all week to week type stuff, but I think we feel good about it. It’s just a matter of who can put the best 10 together and someone is gonna do that. Hopefully, we’re one of them that can do it.”
JOEY LOGANO, No. 22 Team Penske Ford Mustang Dark Horse – HOW DO YOU FEEL ABOUT THE FIRST THREE RACES IN THE CHASE BECAUSE THEY ARE ALL DIFFERENT TYPE OF TRACKS? “Every race is equally important. They all score the same amount of points and it averages out over 10, so it’s pretty simple at this point. It’s not like there’s a cut off race or a Round of 8 or whatever that may be. Every race means the same.”
HOW IS THIS CHASE DIFFERENT FROM THE ORIGINAL CHASE YEARS AGO? “I don’t know if it really changes a whole bunch. Even though they call it the Chase, it’s still way different than what the Chase was then – the way the seeding is and the separation through the field. It’s pretty different and we have stages now too, so it’s quite a bit different than the old way too. It just has the same name.”
A LOT OF PEOPLE SEE THIS RUN YOU’VE BEEN ON AND ARE LIKE, ‘HERE WE GO AGAIN.’ DO YOU ENJOY THAT TYPE OF FEELING? “Absolutely. Yeah. And that’s a reputation that we’ve earned over the years is that, unfortunately, during the regular season we seem to just be OK, and then it gets to game time and the 22 starts to show up, so I feel confident in our team that we can do it. People think that way because we have done it and we’ve done it multiple times, so I feel like we can show up again when it matters and do it in a different format.”
ON DEALING WITH THE CHASE PRESSURE: “Maybe. At the same time, you’ve just got to focus on you. We are a tough team because we focus on ourselves and we don’t get caught up in a lot of the other garbage that’s around us. A team that just focuses on the job at hand and we don’t let pressure and outside noises get in the way of it, so I say it all the time – the more pressure you put on, the better they’re gonna be. Whether that’s myself as a driver, Paul as the crew chief, the pit crew themselves, they’re the type of team that wants the pressure and this time of year we’ve got it on us and we have it on us to start. Every team does in their own way, but for us to make up where we are in points right now, the pressure is on. We can’t have bad ones.”
AS A THIRD PARTY OBSERVER, WHAT DID YOU THINK OF THE CREW SWAP BETWEEN THE 2 AND 12? “That’s out of my jurisdiction, if you will. It didn’t involve the 22 car. I think everybody is looking for ways to be better and sometimes you make changes without reason, it just needs to have change to change sometimes and that’s really hard to explain and hard to understand, but sometimes fresh blood, fresh ideas, fresh looks does something mentally to people. I can’t speak directly to exactly why it all happened, but I do think sometimes that stuff happens.”
DO YOU FEEL YOU HAVE MADE GAINS ON THE MILE-AND-A-HALF TRACKS? “I think we’ve made some gains, no doubt. Chicago, we ran well. Indy, we had a car that could win. So I look at the mile-and-a-halves and I don’t see that much of a weakness anymore. I think we can actually compete at those now, so I think we just made some good changes to our cars and a multiple of other things that have played into our hands, so I feel just as good at the Vegas, Charlotte, Kansas swing there as I do at any other track at the moment.”
WHAT DO YOU ENJOY MOST ABOUT BEING A CUP DRIVER? “Honestly, I just like competing against the best. That’s why I wanted to race in NASCAR. I wanted to compete against, at the time, my childhood heroes. Now I’ve been here longer than a majority of them, but I’ve just enjoyed the way these cars have raced. I enjoy the culture of what NASCAR is. It’s American. It’s the most American sport in our country, I believe, and you can see that every pre-race when everyone says the prayer and stands for the anthem and there’s a badass flyover. That’s what I’m talking about. Of course I want to be involved in that.”
HOW DO YOU VIEW THESE NEXT 10 RACES? “It’s 10 weeks of hell. I heard Jimmie Johnson say that one time and it’s pretty true. It’s a grueling 10 weeks, but it’s a pretty cool trophy at the end of it. The feeling of winning the whole thing is worth the grind all day long, and so with that in mind, it’s not that hard to do. It’s not hard to motivate yourself when you know the prize and how awesome it is. You keep grinding it. Now, the agony of defeat hurts. I can tell you it hurts more, but it’s worth the price.”
HOW DOES THE PRESSURE OF THE POSTSEASON CHANGE? “It’s the same every year. The playoffs are just as hard. It’s not like they were any easier, in my opinion. Sometimes you would say it was even harder because you had these do-or-die moments, where it wasn’t about average. It was about perform today or you’re out. We don’t have that now. Now the Chase is about consistency, so it’s about how do I score 40-plus points today? It’s not, ‘I have to win or I’m gonna be out of this whole thing.’ That pressure is much different, so, sure, maybe if you won one, you’d get to take a week off. Cool. But then pressure in the weekends when you have to win? That’s a different level.”
EVERY YEAR YOU TALK ABOUT ENJOYING THE PRESSURE OF THE PLAYOFFS. “I just know nothing big happens in your life if you don’t put the pressure on it. If it’s easy to do, you’re probably not accomplishing anything that matters in life – most likely. The hard things are the things that move the needle in your life. It could be something to do with your job. It could be with your family. It could be having kids. It could be whatever. All of those things are hard to do, but they move the needle one way or another. I’ve yet to have pressure sitting on a couch watching at TV show, and I don’t want to do that personally. I don’t want to sit down on a couch and watch a TV show. I hate it. I don’t ever want to do that because then what am I doing with my life? I don’t know if that’s a psychopath or not. It sounds like it a little bit, but I want to do something and I have the platform to make a big move here right now and who knows how many more opportunities I have at it, so, yeah, all of those are real pressure moments because maybe I won’t have another shot at it. I don’t know, so you’ve got to make the most of it when you’ve got it because the biggest thing with pressure is you just don’t want to go to sleep at the end of the day saying you didn’t do the right things or didn’t try hard enough or didn’t see something coming. Those are the things that I don’t want to sleep with those regrets.”
WOULD YOU LIKE TO BE IN THE NEW DAYS OF THUNDER MOVIE? “I would love to. I mean, it’s a cool movie. Are you kidding me? It would be some wicked cool dad points to be in Days of Thunder, yeah. Hopefully, that happens.”
WHERE DO YOU FEEL YOU GUYS ARE IN COMPARISON TO THE REST OF THE FIELD? “Ninth (laughing). But I do feel like we’re much better than ninth at the moment. We’ve come from a ways back and so now if I look at the last seven, eight races, we’re the best car, so I do feel like we’re in contention to do this. Now, we haven’t completely climbed out of the hole that we’ve dug ourselves, but we’re the team that can do it and we’ve got that momentum on our side, so I feel strong about that.”
ON COMING BACK FROM A HUGE DEFICIT – “It proves to me that you can come back from a long ways in a pretty quick time, and that’s one thing with this points format that we haven’t really explored yet. There’s been two cars that have done that. The 19 has done it and we’ve done it from a pretty long ways back and climbed their way up to where they’re in contention pretty quickly, so with that in mind, I feel optimistic about where we are in points, but there’s no reward until we get to Miami.”
