Ford Racing NNS Notes & Quotes:
Dollar General 300 Advance (Charlotte Motor Speedway)
Friday, October 11, 2013
Roush Fenway Racing announced today that Ryan Reed will drive the No. 16 American Diabetes Association Drive to Stop Diabetes Presented by Lilly Diabetes Ford Mustang full-time in 2014 on the NASCAR Nationwide Series circuit. Reed, who will be running for the series championship and rookie of the year honors, was part of a press conference today to talk about the deal.
RYAN REED – No. 16 American Diabetes Association Drive to Stop Diabetes Presented by Lilly Diabetes Ford Mustang – WHAT WAS YOUR REACTION WHEN YOU FOUND OUT THIS DEAL CAME TOGETHER? “We met with them in July about the Drive to Stop Diabetes program and everyone up there was very intrigued. Never in my wildest dreams did I think that two months later it was going to be a done deal. On Monday they told me the deal was done and then I signed my contract on Tuesday, so it all happened so fast. When you have a program like this where it all fits with the American Diabetes Association, Lilly Diabetes, Roush Fenway and Ford – everyone is so passionate. This has all the right parts and to be included in that is unreal for me as a driver and someone living with diabetes. I just want to play a small part in helping stop diabetes and it means a lot to be here.”
FORD PLAYED IN A ROLE IN THIS AT THE BEGINNING, RIGHT? “Ford is actually how we got involved with Roush. We were supporting Ford’s efforts with diabetes research and wanted to drive Fords, so having the Mustang adds an extra element as to how perfect this relationship is. Everyone on board is passionate about this. Everyone supports the cause and it’s an amazing feeling.”
WHAT KIND OF REACTION DO YOU GET THE DAY AFTER A RACE WHEN TELEVISION OR RADIO HAS TOLD YOUR STORY THE DAY BEFORE? “It’s been so cool to see the positive response on Twitter. I get so many supportive tweets and the y just all let me know how much they support what I’m doing. The ones that say I’m an inspiration to them or their family is unreal. It’s probably better than anything I can do on the track, so I just want to be a part of that and continue to be an inspiration. That’s something I never thought I’d be in a million years, so it’s an amazing feeling and I want to keep that going. Now with Lilly Diabetes and American Diabetes Drive to Stop Diabetes on board it makes it that much more powerful.”
HOW DO YOU HANDLE BEING A ROLE MODEL AS SUCH A YOUNG MAN? “I just want to drive race cars. I want to stay healthy as a person, so I can compete at the highest level and that’s what is important to me. I have such a passion for giving back and being that role model that I would never jeopardize it in a million years because it’s something that I’m blessed to have. I thank God every day for my opportunities and it means a lot to me.”
HOW DO YOU FEEL YOUR PROGRESSION ON THE TRACK HAS GONE AND WHAT ARE YOU HOPES IN GETTING READY FOR NEXT YEAR? “I think it’s great. There are challenges and, honestly, I’m gonna go to some tracks and have a bigger learning curve than others. Richmond, I showed up and adapted to the track really well. Bristol, I went there and I struggled, so there are gonna be tracks that I go to that I just take to really well and there are some tracks I’m gonna have to really work at it. I know that I have Jack Roush and all of Roush Fenway supporting me. You can’t ask for a better team to be behind you because they’re with me and I know that. It gives me a lot of freedom to go out there and make mistakes, but also enjoy the successes. In every aspect I have a great team behind me and I’m just excited to go out there and drive that Ford Mustang for Roush Fenway with Lilly Diabetes and Amercian Diabetes Association’s Drive to Stop Diabetes on the hood.”
Ricky Stenhouse Jr., driver of the No. 17 My Best Buy Ford Fusion, qualified 16th for tomorrow’s Bank of America 500. He spoke with members of the media about what it was like making his first NASCAR Sprint Cup Series start at this track in 2011 (Coca-Cola 600: Started 9th; Finished 11th) and the key differences between success on the Nationwide and Cup levels.
RICKY STENHOUSE JR. – No. 17 My Best Buy Ford Fusion – THERE ARE SOME GUYS MAKING THEIR FIRST CUP START THIS WEEKEND. HOW SIGNIFICANT WAS THAT MOMENT FOR YOU? “I think I enjoyed because I didn’t really think about anything. I just kind of went out there and did it. We were able to qualify ninth our first time here and now we come back after running a full season and the first time here this season we qualified 30th. It’s like you just get out and go do it. I was focused on the Nationwide stuff. We were going for a championship over there and I’d get out and jump in this car and go out and run. It was really fun and it was definitely special. For me, the 600 was our first race so there were a ton of people there. It was actually tough trying to balance the two cars because they’re totally different, but, like I said, I didn’t overthink anything. I just kind of went out and went. I remember I got on pit road really early. I went out late, but came out early and walked down pit road and talked to everybody I could. I was probably asking too many questions, but it paid off. It was just a lot of fun.”
DID YOU KEEP CERTAIN THINGS FROM THAT NIGHT? “I’ve got my suit and helmet. I don’t know about the gloves and shoes, but I’ve got my suit. That’s cool because obviously it’s a Wood Brothers’ suit and that’s pretty special in and of itself, so getting my first start with them was really neat.”
HOW LONG DOES IT TAKE YOU TO GET USED TO THE HORSEPOWER DIFFERENCE IN CUP? “Everything just happens so much faster going down the straightaways and how you have to drive it into the corner. It definitely catches you off guard a little bit and you have to kind of calm yourself down when you go to the other side of the garage that, ‘hey, this car is gonna be a lot slower than the car I just got out of.’ It takes a while to get used to it. I’m still getting used to it. When it comes to an everyday track – like the mile-and-a-halfs are a little bit easier to run double-duty on, I feel like. It’s when you go to a place like Richmond, where you have to back up your corner. You can’t drive it in as far as the Nationwide cars. Here in a Cup car you get a lot of throttle-on time. The Nationwide car is a lot of throttle-on time, so I would say it’s definitely better to do your first Cup start at a mile-and-a-half than it is at a short track doing double-duty.”
CAN YOU RELATE TO WHAT SOMEONE LIKE KYLE LARSON IS GOING THROUGH? “Kyle and I ran sprint cars and we’ve got a lot of horsepower in those, but he’ll be just fine. He obviously adapts to things pretty quick. I never really got to race with him much in sprint cars, but watching him he adapts really quick. We’ve got the same management company that does our stuff and they kind of asked me about him going to Cup next year and what I thought of it, and I think you might as well. You either learn while you’re doing it now or you learn while you’re doing it later. At some point you have to do it, and I think he’s ready to do it.”
RICKY STENHOUSE JR. CONTINUED — IS IT HARDER TO NOT HAVE THE SUCCESS THIS YEAR THAT YOU’VE HAD THE PAST COUPLE IN NATIONWIDE? “Yeah. I don’t think it’s a big transition in the cars, I think it’s more of the transition in the caliber of teams and drivers all across the board. We go to some of these race tracks and guys have more starts at one race track than I do in my whole Sprint Cup Series career, so I think the experience is what’s tough to beat right now for us. I’ve adjusted to the car. I feel comfortable in the car. It is difficult practicing in the middle of the day and then going out and racing at night. It’s like the Cup guys get the worst time to practice for a night race. The Nationwide cars, we would practice early in the morning when the track was cool and you’d race at night when the track was cool. It wasn’t as big of a shift. So now, for us, we’ve gotten good in practice. We’ve qualified decent. My biggest struggle is we’ve been fast the first 100 laps of the race. We ran in the top 10 at Kansas no problem the first 100 laps of the race, but it’s keeping up with the race track as good as those other guys do, whether that’s my feedback to Scott or Scott taking my feedback and making the right adjustments that he needs to do. So we kind of miss it in the center. We’ve taken a look back at our races and we’ve missed it in the middle part of the races, so us talking about it and going over it – because at the end of the race we generally have some better speed than we do in the middle. So we kind of get it back there, but we lose it in that center part. That’s just the experience that those guys have. They’re just really good and they know what they’re doing throughout the whole race. In a Nationwide race, we’d stop two or three times and we’re done. I don’t have time to tell Mike to mess it up last year because we only had three stop
Greg Biffle, driver of the No. 16 3M Ford Fusion, was Ford’s top qualifier last night as he finished third overall. Biffle, who is sixth in the Chase for the NASCAR Sprint Cup point standings, came into the media center this afternoon before practice to talk about his Chase and other topics.
GREG BIFFLE – No. 16 3M Ford Fusion – “I really like this race track. It’s a lot of fun racing here. Like everybody, I would love to get a win. We’ve been so close so many times in both the 600, the All-Star Race, and this event here, so it would definitely feel good to be able to do that. I think after this afternoon’s practice we’ll see, but I feel like we have a car right now capable of running up front and challenging for the win, so if everything works out – pit stops and everything goes our way, which it hasn’t at this particular race track, I remember leading and the caution came out with three to go – but we’ll look for a good run tomorrow night.”
HOW BIG OF A ROLE DOES MOMENTUM PLAY IN THE CHASE COMPARED TO THE FIRST 26 RACES? “I think it is. I think momentum has a lot to do with it and I think the teams get excited, you get pumped up. Last week was really, really tough for our team. It was a big disappointment going to Kansas. We really felt like that was a track we stood a great chance of winning and running up front, but, quite honestly, we were a 32nd, 35th-place car the entire weekend, but we kept our head in the game and ended up 13th. After that it kind of felt like a victory to me because we knew that we could get hurt in the points if we finished up where we were running, so we got our car running better in the race and got up there. But momentum plays a lot in this game. Coming here and qualifying third certainly righted the ship for our team right away, so that’s gonna help us today and this weekend – to have a little sigh of relief, so to speak, that last week was just an isolated whatever it might have been, and go on. But I feel like it plays a big role.”
DARLINGTON AND KANSAS SWAPPED SPRING DATES. DARLINGTON WILL BE MID-APRIL AND KANSAS ON MOTHER’S DAY WEEKEND. DO YOU ANTICIPATE ANYTHING BEING DIFFERENT AT EITHER PLACE? “To be perfectly honest with you, I enjoy night racing. I think it’s a little bit more racy, it’s a little more fun. It seems like a better atmosphere if I was a fan in the evening for a night race. Some fans don’t make it to watch the night race, but I don’t think it’s gonna play that big of a role honestly. It’s only a month difference. I wasn’t aware of the change, so I’ll have to think about it some more and see if I feel like there’s anything significant about it, but it doesn’t sound like it’s gonna be that big of a change for us at this point.”
HOW WHITE-KNUCKLE OF AN EXPERIENCE IS TALLADEGA FOR YOU? “It is. I think you have to go there and approach those restrictor plate races and once you get in the race you have to approach it with the mindset that it’s like any other race, we’re gonna race the race as best we can – make the right moves, be smart, do everything we normally do, and whatever comes out of it comes out of it. That’s kind of all you can really do. I’ve explained restrictor plate racing as it’s either white-knuckle, very intense, or you’re sitting there waiting for somebody to pull out of line or something to get happening. There’s no in-between. It’s either a dull moment or it’s high-energy, white-knuckle. We know what to expect. It’s kind of the same thing every race, so this won’t be any different.”
ARE YOU SURPRISED HOW MUCH MATT’S PERFORMANCE HAS STEPPED UP THIS YEAR? “No, I don’t think so. I know Matt’s a really, really good driver and we all know what it’s like to get a fast race car — at one time or another you run really good. He just went over there and got in the right situation. They’ve obviously got good cars. It’s been well documented with the 11 making a run at the championship and Kyle winning eight or nine races in one season, so that doesn’t necessarily surprise me with him going over there and having the success he’s had. I knew he was capable of that as a driver, for sure. Matt’s always the quiet guy and finishes fourth or fifth, and this opportunity has afforded him the opportunity that instead of fourth or fifth, it’s first or second and a lot of those have been wins.”
HOW IMPORTANT WILL TODAY’S PRACTICE BE AND WILL YOU BE VERY DIFFERENT FROM QUALIFYING? “It seems pretty warm out right now, so I think the track probably won’t have a lot of speed in it, but I think the second practice session – that last half-hour of the second practice session – is really where we look for the car to be driving good and have good balance and good speed. That’s as close as we get from 6:30-6:50. That’s gonna be pretty close to the race, but I think this first one is kind of get the groove, get your balance, try a few things that may not be bigger items that you might just want to try, and then that second practice session is probably where we’ll fine-tune our car in for the race.”
THREE DRIVERS ARE MAKING THEIR CUP DEBUT THIS WEEKEND. WHAT DO YOU REMEMBER ABOUT YOUR FIRST CUP START? “It’s neat to be able to make your Cup debut. It seems like a different time when I was doing that. I remember being so close to making my first Daytona 500. We were in the qualifying race and the engine failed and didn’t make the Daytona 500 that year because of the engine. Your first race in every division is a memorable one, and I think those guys have a lot of experience. They’ll learn a tremendous amount. This place is fast and demanding and this is a tough race – the 600 and this event are both pretty tough places to race at, so it’ll be neat for them to be able to get their first start here.”
ARE WE PUTTING TOO MUCH STOCK IN TALLADEGA AS A PLACE WHERE THE LEADERS COULD COME BACK TO THE PACK? “You can sit and think about what all can happen and, to be perfectly honest with you, it could go the other way too. They could all make it through and we don’t, and there may not be anything happen at all. It may just be a normal race, but I remember last year the 14 car was upside-down, tumbling across cars, so it can change – points can change in a hurry and that’s one race track that we all know can go one way or the other in a hurry. A lot of guys got their fingers crossed that maybe they get a little bit of a break in the points there, but you certainly can’t count on anything happening. We just look forward to trying to make it through and have a good top-five run and see what happens, but we all know that Daytona and Talladega are race tracks that can catch up multiple cars in one incident, so we’ll wait and see what happens.”
CAN YOU ADDRESS COMING BACK IN THIS CHASE WITH SIX RACES TO GO? “It was a three-man race after the second race they said, and the three men have changed now to three different guys, but, anyway, like I said we’re 44 points out and that’s a long ways for us. We’ll just keep running as hard as we can and see if we can close in. I don’t think we’ve gained on them all four races yet. We’ve gone the other way, unfortunately, to everybody in front of us. Of course, we gained at Loudon, but didn’t gain on the leader. All we can do is just keep trying and see where it goes, but the deeper you get into the Chase, obviously, the more of a long shot it becomes to try and get up there, especially when you’re sixth. There are five guys you have to pass. There are a few right close to me, but there are multiple guys who have a fairly substantial gap there.”
WOULD YOU BE IN FAVOR OF NASCAR CHANGING THE POINTS TO WHERE THE ONLY GUYS YOU’RE RACING AGAINST ARE THE ONES IN THE CHASE? “That’s way over my head for a question. Ask Matt Kenseth that question when he comes up. I don’t know. In some instances that sort of makes sense, but under what we do every week and what we do all season is it rewards consistency and good finishes at the same time, and it rewards the guys building the equipment back at the shop for having durable parts and pieces and engines and things like that. I think the point system is probably fair the way it is, compared to if you blow up and finish dead last your get 10th. I don’t know. I like it the way it is, but maybe there can always be an improvement, I guess.”
