Ford Racing NSCS Notes & Quotes:
Sylvania 300 Qualifying (New Hampshire Motor Speedway)
Friday, September 20, 2013
Ford Qualifying Results:
6th – Joey Logano
10th – Greg Biffle
13th – Aric Almirola
19th – David Ragan
20th – Brad Keselowski
22nd – Marcos Ambrose
24th – David Gilliland
26th – Carl Edwards
31st – Ricky Stenhouse Jr.
34th – Casey Mears
JOEY LOGANO – No. 22 Shell/Pennzoil Ford Fusion – “That was faster than I thought it felt, that’s for sure. It didn’t feel great, but Todd’s given me a really fast car, so that made up for a lot of the handling there. We’ll see where it hangs in there, but going out this early is definitely a disadvantage when you come here to Loudon, so we’ll have to wait and see. There are a lot of cars left still, so we’ll ride it out and hopefully it’s in the top five or seven and go from there.”
YOU WON A RAIN-SHORTENED RACE ONCE. WHAT ARE YOUR THOUGHTS ON THE POTENTIAL FOR RAIN ON SUNDAY? “Maybe we’ll do it again, I don’t know. You have to prepare for whatever the race throws at you and that includes the weather. We fought the weather last week, so we’ll just have to wait and see. Something always happens here in Loudon because it seems like you have the opportunity for rain when you come up here, but we’ll just have to wait and see what happens.”
YOU STARTED ON THE POLE LAST WEEK. WHAT ARE YOUR THOUGHTS ON THE NEW RESTART RULE? “I only had the opportunity to start on the front row that one time, so it didn’t really come into play because I had a really good start, but watching the race over again I think it was Kyle and somebody else on the outside and he beat the leader to the line barely. If the old rule was in place, he would have had to lift a little bit or else they would have called it, so it’ll be interesting as we go through and learn what we can and cannot do. There’s gonna be a learning curve for sure and I’m trying to find out where that line is because we’re gonna push it to the edge like we did before with the other rule. All of us try to find that advantage, so we’ll just keep pushing.”
HOW LONG DID IT TAKE TO GET OVER LAST WEEK? “It’s unfortunate when something like that happens because we had a really fast race car last week, one that I felt like could have won the race, and instead we came home with a thirty-something place finish and that part is just really hard, but it happens. That’s what our sport is – you have to rely on a lot of things and sometimes you have a mechanical issue like that and the guy who wins the championship usually doesn’t have that, but that’s not to say we can’t come back. This team is strong. We’ve been digging out of a hole all year and every time we get our head just above water, we get pulled back under again and we keep fighting to get back up. We’ll be fine. I’m not worried about it. I feel like we still could win this thing, but if there was a mulligan, that took it away.”
HOW DOES IT CHANGE THINGS WHEN YOU NEED HELP FROM OTHERS AND YOU DON’T NECESSARILY CONTROL YOUR OWN DESTINY? “It changes the way you look at the race now because before we had a lot to lose and a lot to gain. Now we still have a little bit to lose, but we have a lot more to gain than we have to lose right now, so we can be a little bit more aggressive. After every race we have to take a step back and look at what our point situation is and how we’re gonna attack the next race. That’s what we’ve been doing all year to get ourselves into the Chase. We had to fight like that and fight from behind all year and we’ll just have to keep doing that.”
ARIC ALMIROLA – No. 43 Smithfield Ford Fusion – “That was OK. We missed it just a little bit, but we picked up from practice so that was good. Anytime you do that, it’s encouraging, so at least we’ve got a little bit better direction on where we need to be going into the weekend. It’s gonna be hard to pass on Sunday. That’s typical Loudon, so we’ll just have to deal with it and hopefully we can deal with it better than most. There’s no doubt we’re gonna have to start a little deeper in the field than we want to, but, hopefully, that will hold up to be maybe top 15. Either way, we’re gonna have to pass cars to go to the front.”
MARCOS AMBROSE – No. 9 DeWalt Ford Fusion – “We haven’t been qualifying that well lately and that makes for a hard race, but we’re gonna qualify better here than what we did in the first race so that’s a good thing. We’ll just work on our race package tomorrow and hopefully get something that we can race to the front and hold on.”
CARL EDWARDS – No. 99 Aflac Ford Fusion – “That didn’t go very well. At least we’re looking at the good side of my race car, the clean side because I hit the fence with the other side. That was a pretty tough lap, but Jimmie Johnson showed us you can come from the back here. He had an engine change in the earlier race and did a great job, so we’re gonna have to fight for this one.”
HOW DIFFERENT IS IT FROM JULY HERE? “This track changes a lot with temperature and the biggest thing is not whether it’s overall cooler or hotter, it’s that as this qualifying session goes on it gets cooler and as the race goes on it gets cooler, so it changes a lot. That’s the same whether it starts out hot or cold.”
DO YOU LIKE COMING HERE? “Yeah, I like coming here. We’ve got John Henry and all the folks at Fenway Sports Group that back us up – the Red Sox Nation – everybody is so great to us up here that we’d love to get a win for them.”
THOUGHTS ON THE NEW RESTART RULE? “I think NASCAR did a good job by simplifying the restart rules. I think it makes it easier because the leader gets to start and after that it’s a race. That’s probably the simplest way to do it with the double-file restart. For me, I’ll have to get to the front row to worry about it. We’ve got a long ways to go here.”
HOW DO YOU FEEL YOU’RE PROGRESSING THIS WEEKEND? “This weekend is not good because we’re struggling. We thought we’d be a lot better, but we’ve still got all day tomorrow. If there’s one thing Jimmy Fennig and my crew can do they can make up a lot of ground through strategy and pit stops, so we’ve got our work cut out for us, but we’ll just go do it.”
DAVID RAGAN – No. 34 Taco Bell Ford Fusion – “The sun was in my eyes and it was gonna be awful lap because I just about spun out coming out of turn two on my first lap. It was just incredible though because I made it back around with the white flag flying and I knew this was my chance to get a good lap in qualifying. I buried it off into turn one and my Taco Bell Ford just rotated right through the center. I picked up the throttle and it was a better lap than the first, but not as good as I hoped for, so I’m proud of my team. We worked hard, but it was a very tough lap here at the Magic Mile.”
JOSH WISE – No. 35 ThePeteStore.com Ford Fusion – “I don’t really know what happened. I think either something broke on the right-front or the right-front tire blew, one or the other, and I just went straight into the wall.”
GREG BIFFLE – No. 16 3M Ford Fusion – “I had a great second lap, but down in three and four I just couldn’t get it to go. I should have just stayed with it a little bit harder there, but I was in and out of the gas too many times because I wasn’t sure it was gonna stick. I probably had a flat lap going, so it was a pretty good lap.”
DO YOU FEEL GOOD ABOUT YOUR STARTING SPOT? “Yeah, I do. We’ve got about a top-15 car and we need to be better than that. I think we can work on it and make it better tomorrow to narrow it down into the top 10, but we want to win. We’re not quite there yet, but we’re gonna keep working on it.”
DAVID GILLILAND – No. 38 Long John Silver’s Ford Fusion – “That’s better than we’ve qualified here in probably the last four years, so, overall, that’s not terrible. We were hoping for more than that ,but it wasn’t terrible. I think we’ve got a good car in race trim. In the first race here this year we started something like 36th and finished 18th, so we don’t have so far to go this time and that will definitely be better for us.”
