Ford Racing NSCS Notes & Quotes: Duck Commander 500 – Texas Motor Speedway
Monday, April 7, 2014
FORD RACING WINS THIRD RACE OF 2014 AS LOGANO TAKES TEXAS CHECKERED FLAG
Joey Logano’s win is his second with Ford Racing and fourth of his NASCAR Sprint Cup Series career.
He extends the season-opening streak of different winners to seven and joins fellow Ford drivers Brad Keselowski and Carl Edwards in that group.
Ford Racing is tied for the most NASCAR Sprint Cup Series wins this season with three (Chevrolet).
This represents Ford Racing’s 12th NSCS win at Texas Motor Speedway, most among manufacturers.
The win is Ford’s 621st all-time series victory and the 31st by Penske Racing with Ford.
Ford Finishing Results:
1st
– Joey Logano
6th
– Greg Biffle
12th
– Aric Almirola
14th
– Carl Edwards
15th
– Brad Keselowski
19th
– Trevor Bayne
20th
– Marcos Ambrose
22nd
– David Gilliland
26th
– Ricky Stenhouse Jr.
35th
– David Ragan
JOEY LOGANO – No. 22 Shell/Pennzoil Ford Fusion – VICTORY LANE INTERVIEW
“It feels good to be back in Victory Lane, the Chase, I’m stoked.”
TRACK CONDITIONS CHANGED A LOT AND YOU STAYED WITH IT.
“I felt very confident about this race. For some reason I told Todd Gordon I said, ‘we’re gonna win this week,’ and I was mad when we didn’t get the pole, but I felt like we had a car that could win this thing today. At the beginning we didn’t, and then Todd and the guys made good adjustments and had good stops all day. And that one longer run I came through and was able to drive up to fifth and get some cautions to be able to get our track position up towards the front. Clean air means everything, so, heck yeah.”
WHAT ABOUT BEING THE SEVENTH DIFFERENT WINNER TO START THE YEAR?
“It’s been a heck of a season so far. I feel like the Shell/Pennzoil could have been to victory lane a couple times so far, and we’re finally here. I feel like we gave away a couple already this season, so this car is fast. We’re here to be a force all year. I’m so excited I can’t even speak right now. I’m stoked. It’s super-cool. Texas Motor Speedway is one of the coolest race tracks. The first time I came here I got my butt handed to me really bad, so to win at this track means a lot.”
BRAD KESELOWSKI – No. 2 Miller Lite Ford Fusion
“Joey was just awesome today. He had a great car and did a great job. It was a very strange start, but this 2 team kept working on the car and got it fixed under that first green/yellow and got us to where we were in pretty raceable shape. We just needed a little bit more for the 22, but had a really good day going all the way until the end. That last caution was a shame. I was just trying to get a little too much on pit road and wanted to get us out front to be able to win the race and tried a little too hard.”
YOU SAID YOU WERE TRYING TO GET SOME BACK ON PIT ROAD?
“Yeah, a normal pit road deal. We’re in it for wins. We’re not in it for finishing second. Second or 15th is the same for us, so you’ve got to go for the win.”
WHAT DID YOU THINK AT THE START? DID YOU SEE THE HOOD POP UP? WERE YOU WONDERING WHAT HAPPENED?
“I was definitely wondering what happened. I knew it was the jet dryer that caused it, but it was one of those freak deals.”
GREG BIFFLE – No. 16 Give Kids a Smile Ford Fusion
“We just have to keep getting our cars better. We’re just not where the other guys are yet, so we’ve got to keep getting better. I feel better, but it seems every week we’ve got one car that is up there. We’ll keep working on it, but this is a step in the right direction from the 16. I think we’re still a little ways off from the rest of the guys.”
ARIC ALMIROLA – No. 43 Eckrich Ford Fusion
“The car was loose all day. Our intermediate track program is still not where we want it to be, but this was a good improvement. We hung in the Top-15 all day, and hopefully, a 12th-place finish will help us in the points.”
JOEY LOGANO PRESS CONFERENCE
“When you’ve got forty-something laps after the last pit stop and a pretty sizeable lead, really, all you’re thinking is, ‘Where’s the white flag, where’s the white flag.’ Brad was able to catch us a little bit and then you go into turn one and you see the 41 up against the wall and you’re like, ‘Please, no caution. Please, no caution.’ And, of course, boom, it comes out and you’re like, ‘You’ve got to be kidding me.’ So you get so mad that you can barely control yourself, or at least for me. I had to make sure I stayed calm and try to give Todd the information I needed to, and then he had to make the right call. Really, I was just so mad. I didn’t really tell him what the car did until I was coming down pit road and he kind of made a last-minute decision to put fuel in it because I heard, ‘No fuel, no fuel,’ and I was like, ‘No, no, no, I was tight.’ So he made the right change at the last-minute to put some fuel in the car, give me a better balance for what I needed and the guys made the money stop and put us out as the first car out with four tires on and restarted third. At that point, I’ve got Kyle Busch on the outside of me and I know he’s very aggressive on restarts and very good on restarts, so my number one goal at that point was to try to figure out how to make sure he doesn’t get clean air and get to the front because he was the other car with four tires, so I had to make sure he didn’t stick it three-wide and get in the middle or do something like that. And then the 24 was lucky enough to have a good enough restart with his older tires. I was able to follow him through and get to second, and get a good run off of four, cross him over and take the lead and then you get that feeling again and we get the win. It’s just awesome. We’ve been in contention every race this year to win these things and to get this Shell/Pennzoil Ford in victory lane means a lot. It’s such a tough race track and we had plenty of time to think about this for the last couple days, so it’s a really cool place to win. They give you a ring, I’ve got guns, I’ve got a trophy, I’ve got a hat, I’ve got a duck call (laughing). It’s pretty cool.”
TODD GORDON, Crew Chief
“Joey did a good job communicating all day. We had some work to do to get ourselves better the first half of the race, but once we got rolling there the second half of the race knew that we had a lot of speed. We kind of looked at the fuel windows and what was gonna happen and when we made the last stop there around lap 300 we immediately started a conversation of ‘how many laps into a run do we take tires?’ My number was eight and then we also had the conversation of ‘if it comes down how late do we come?’ And we said green, white, checkered, so we kind of made that decision before we got to that point. Really, it takes the emotion out of the decision.”
JOEY INTERJECTS:
“You guys were eating ice cream up there, that’s good.”
TODD CONTINUES
“I didn’t have any ice cream at all today. I do like ice cream. But had that decision made before it came and then it just became when the caution came – you’re watching the 41 and it’s like slow-motion on the TV. He’s coming down. There’s nothing coming off yet. Don’t throw it, don’t throw it. OK, it’s out. All right, come on for four tires. I’d rather have Joey playing aggressive offense than playing defense and that was the call and I think the right call, especially with how much drive we had off the corner. I thought Joey had a really good line and was able to really kind of get himself squirted off the corner and four tires worked. It’s one of those gut-check calls. You kind of have to think a little bit ahead and we did and it worked out for us.”
WHEN YOU RUN AS WELL AS YOU HAVE AND DON’T WIN DOES IT GET FRUSTRATING OR IS THERE CONFIDENCE BECAUSE YOU’RE RUNNING WELL?
JOEY LOGANO CONTINUED:
Both. It’s frustrating when you have winning cars and you don’t capitalize on it. That’s frustrating. On the flip side of that, you have winning cars and it’s a lot better than struggling to finish 10th, so I’m proud of that. So you’re able to ride that momentum of having fast race cars at every race track. You look at Martinsville we had a top-5 car. At California we did, Bristol we did, Phoenix we did – all these tracks we have been in contention and been up there. I’m proud to be a part of that. I’m glad to get to drive this race car and this team has been doing a great job. They’ve been giving me what I need to go out there and win these things. You never know when it will end of having great race cars, so when you have those opportunities like today or like we’ve had this year so far, you need to capitalize on it. Obviously, these wins being so important this year to get into the Chase, to have both Team Penske cars with a win already is big and both of us are up there in points, so we feel good about that. You can kind of start getting your ducks in a row for Chase time, and make sure you get everything ready for then, and you’re not playing on the back side of your foot trying to win a race a couple of races before Richmond. You feel a little bit more comfortable now that what we would have been.”
TODD GORDON CONTINUED
AFTER THE CALIFORNIA ISSUES DO YOU DO ANYTHING SPECIAL SO YOU DON’T WIG OUT ON WHAT THE TIRES ARE GONNA BE?
“Yeah, we had a couple of issues at California and we had two in practice, but the biggest part as a whole organization, I think we make a lot of decisions at Team Penske based off of facts and looking and analyzing what we’ve got. We understood the issues that were there. I talked to Goodyear a lot about where I make decisions to jeopardize our longevity and where I can change that. I think we did a lot of investigation to know what the issues were and what we could do to help alleviate them. We didn’t overreact. I think as you look, there were issues at California, but, really, I think the issues here were limited to one. When you get to that, usually that doesn’t fall on anybody other than that particular situation, so I think we were cognizant of where we were versus the limit and I thought we played that smart.”
JOEY LOGANO CONTINUED
“I don’t really have much to add to that. He kind of knew what we had to do to make sure our car made it. It’s always a balancing act because you want to have all the speed in your car you can, but you’ve got to have that longevity and that reliability in your car. That means you have to take a little bit of performance out of the car. I felt like this week was obviously way smoother than California. You look at green flag stops and very limited tire issues today at all, so Goodyear
brought us something that I feel like was reliable. Yes, we were worried about it, but, at the same time, we were able to run hard the whole run. As a driver, I ran hard the whole run and really didn’t have an issue.”
TODD GORDON CONTINUED
“I’d like to add to that and thank Goodyear for the information that they’re willing to give to everybody. They identified that this would be another place that they could be up against the limit and they made sure that there was enough information disseminated to everybody to make good decisions. I talked to Rick Campbell myself. I think they’ve done an awesome job of trying to handle making sure we have the best show out there.”
JOEY LOGANO CONTINUED
CAN YOU TALK ABOUT BRAD AND YOUR REACTION WHEN YOU HEARD HE GOT THE SPEEDING PENALTY BECAUSE HE WAS ON YOUR BUMPER MOST OF THE RACE? HOW CONCERNED WERE YOU?
“I feel like he was the second-best car, so he was gonna be our main competition there, I thought, on that last restart. You don’t have much time to think about other people’s stuff that’s going on, especially when you’re coming to a green-white-checkered and you have a shot at winning this thing. You hear about it and say, ‘OK, I know I’m lining up against someone else’ but really we didn’t even discuss it. He just told me, ‘Hey, Brad got a speeding penalty.’ I don’t think I even said anything. I was like, ‘OK, that means I’m lining up against Kyle,’ and started running all kind of scenarios in my mind and figuring out what I have to do to get the best restart because that’s what the race comes down to. We talk about it all the time, you need to be able to restart to win races and we feel like we’ve been one of the strongest cars on restarts and we were able to capitalize on it today.”
TODD GORDON CONTINUED
HAVE YOU WANTED JOEY ON OFFENSE FROM THE FIRST DAY HE ARRIVED OR IS THAT REFLECTIVE OF THE CHASE THIS YEAR?
“Joey is really, really good when he can be aggressive. Like he talked about, when you get your restarts, when we put him in a position to be aggressive he can be aggressive. He knows what he needs to do with his race car to capitalize. He gets after it and I didn’t want to put him out there with a situation where he didn’t have a left-rear to drive off of turn two. Two tires, I watched it last year. Brad did it in last year’s race and cycled himself forward, but I feel like you give your driver the best opportunity to capitalize, especially with Joey. Joey is really good at capitalizing on restarts. He’s one of the best. I don’t know that I can put anybody beyond him, so I didn’t want to handicap him with where he’s most talented.”
JOEY LOGANO CONTINUED
WHAT’S YOUR PERSONALITY LIKE AS A FRONT-RUNNER?
“When my car is good I’m not talking much, and I feel like my car is pretty good. I had plenty to say when the caution came out, but nothing real productive (laughing). I tried to stay as calm as I could. Like you said, I’m young and I’ve got a lot of fire in me. I get mad as I feel like I should and as any competitive person would, but I also stayed calm enough to keep my eyes on the prize and do what I had to do to get back in the situation to be sitting here right now.”
TODD GORDON CONTINUED
HOW DO YOU MANAGE HIS EMOTIONS?
“My job is pretty easy because I think Joey and I both kind of share a passive attitude. Neither one of us gets very fired up. We don’t get emotional and tied into that, and I think that’s part of what makes us successful because even when our car is junk we’re always communicating. We always talk. There’s never ‘me against you.’ I think we do that well. The only thing I could there through the last run was, ‘I’m just gonna make sure there’s something rhythmic to him. I’m gonna give him lap times off of turn two,’ and then we got to a point where I quit giving him lap times, I just gave him the separation so that he had something that was in his ear so he didn’t feel alone – just what your separation to P2 is and how you maintain it because at that point lap times don’t matter, it doesn’t. We’re not looking to make our car better, we’re looking to make sure that we win the race, so just try to give him that consistent off turn two separation to second and let him focus on what he was doing because he does an awesome job of finishing these things.”
JOEY LOGANO CONTINUED
“I feel like Todd and I talk to each other as a driver/crew chief relationship probably more than anyone else in this garage. I might annoy him because I come in the shop and I basically sit in his office. He fills me in on everything that’s going on and the more I can feel like I know about our race car the better race car driver I can be. We go to lunch. We just hang out and, really, a lot of it is about race cars but I consider him a friend of mine. We talk about everything and work things out. Anytime there’s an issue between us or whatever happened in the race, we talk it out. You don’t let anything go too far. I feel like our attitudes are very similar and the way we handle certain situations and stuff like that.”
TODD GORDON CONTINUED
HOW DO THINGS CHANGE NOW WITH A WIN? CAN YOU BE MORE AGGRESSIVE?
“Yes. The short answer to that question is yes within reason. You can’t be stupid about it, but it does open up your box to be a little more aggressive on how you call a race. You can be a little more aggressive on how you tune a race. It allows you to be a little more explorative. NASCAR has given us this huge open box for us to work in this year with more downforce and no ride height – the new shock/spring rules and the new spring rules – so the box is big and I think we’ve had speed with the path we’ve picked down that box they give us, but that doesn’t mean that path is the ultimate speed. That might only be 90 percent. We may be at 90 versus somebody else being the 88, but there’s another path that might be 95, so I think it does allow you to look at some more of those things, but we can’t get too far out of that box of what’s been successful for us. You’ll find a balance between that, but it allows us to be a little more aggressive and maybe try a few things, but you look at it and we’re seven races in with seven winners. We’ve got 26 races before we race in the Chase. If we continue this path, there will be 10 cars that win that don’t make it and you can’t lose sight of that as well. History hasn’t said that that will happen, but you can’t write that off as not happening, so you don’t want to throw everything away and be reckless with it, but it does allow you to be a little more aggressive?
JOEY LOGANO CONTINUED
BRAD SAID THIS WAS BIG BECAUSE NOW YOU CAN PLAN YOUR ORGANIZATIONAL TESTS AROUND THE CHASE AND HOMESTEAD. HOW BIG OF A DEAL IS THIS?
“We were concerned enough to talk about it Saturday after practice for a while, so that’s definitely a concern. I was trying to plan out how we were gonna use these tests and now that we’re in the Chase we can use our tests a little differently than what we were thinking. It’s big and the way you strategize to build the race cars and what you need to do for when it comes Chase time, like I said earlier, it allows you to give the right direction and be able to really focus on later in the season at this point. I’m not saying we’re not gonna work hard to win more races throughout the rest of the year. Like Todd said, we need to still run well and keep ourselves up in points and win some more races because you want to go into the Chase with momentum, but as far as updating specs and stuff like that, we can start focusing on Chase stuff.”
KYLE SAID HE THOUGHT YOU LEARNED A LOT A JGR. WHAT WORKS SO WELL FOR YOU RIGHT NOW IN YOUR CAREER AT PENSKE?
“There’s a lot. I talked a little bit earlier about the first time I came here, I think it was the 02 car, and I ran absolutely terrible. I think I finished 38th and I didn’t hit anything. I didn’t have an excuse for finishing 38th, I just ran that bad. I didn’t know what I was doing. You’re 18 years old with less than half a season of Nationwide under your belt and you get thrown into a tough situation, but I didn’t realize that at the time, and then over the years I’ve been able to kind of hone in on who I am as a driver, who I am as a person because you’re 18 years old and you’ve got to grow up. You’re not quite done growing up at that point, and I may not be now, but I feel like I’m getting closer. When I was able to go to Team Penske, kind of get that fresh start and be able to take everything you’ve learned there, but you’re not taken as the 18-year-old kid anymore. I came over there and I was 22 and you’re looked a little bit more as a man, instead of an 18-year-old kid. I was still in high school, so I’m in a completely different situation now and I’ve been able to take advantage of that and kind of walk in the doors of Penske the first time and say, ‘Here’s who I want to be. Here’s what I want to do. And here’s how I feel we can win races and do it together.’ Todd and I have many discussions about all of that and how I feel like I needed to be because on the Nationwide side at JGR I felt like I had that, but I didn’t have it on the Cup side yet. I knew I had to have that same attitude that I had in Nationwide and that same relationship and confidence on the Cup side for me to run well, and we’ve been able to do that and you see the results show for that. I used to race a lot more confident and aggressive in a Nationwide car than I did in a Cup car, and now it’s the same. I’m here to win and I feel like the competitors see that now. When you run up front enough they don’t look at you as the guy that’s gonna run up there once every 10 races. It’s every single week right now and we’ve got to keep that going. It’s a lot of hard work to keep that going, but to come here the first time and finish 38th to victory lane five or six years later is pretty awesome. I used to dread coming here and now it’s one of my favorite race tracks. I told Todd before we came here I was like, ‘Man, I just feel like we’re gonna win this week.’ I felt really confident and now I’ve got a cool ring. You know what’s cool about this, my fiancé got a ring then we got engaged and now I’ve got something too (laughing).”
TODD GORDON CONTINUED
HOW LONG HAVE YOU KNOWN YOU HAD REALLY GOOD CARS?
“I guess when you go back to the Charlotte test when we did all the aero development we had talked about the fact we had speed in our race cars. Joey and I had talked about that. Did you know? No, you don’t know. I mean, the 4 car was stupid fast at that point and I attributed that, I think Rodney Childers; I worked with him at Waltrip’s so he’s pretty sharp and he had four months off to focus on this. I felt like they made a jump and that was enlightening to all of us of how much we needed to dig in because they were that far ahead, but it’s a testament to everyone at Team Penske – from every facet of the organization that dug in and they’ve kept head down going forward. They’re not looking back. As Joey said, we’ve been in the Top 5 every race this year, but nobody is sitting back on their laurels and saying, ‘We’re good enough.’ That’s something I think at Charlotte we had glimmers of it, but we kept focused on, ‘how do we make our stuff better?’ And the guys have done a phenomenal job. It’s been a lot of non-traditional track testing. We’ve been to a couple different places that aren’t on our schedule and trying to understand what happens with the packages we have and where within this big box what path we want to go down. I feel like Paul and I are on the same page. I feel like Brad and Joey are on the same page and when you do that we have a unified effort of where our race cars are going and I think that shows every week.”
JOEY LOGANO CONTINUED
HOW CLOSE WERE YOU TO THE WHITE FLAG WHEN YOU REALIZED THE CAUTION WAS OUT?
“Into three. Into three my heart dropped and I got really angry instantly (laughing). I saw what happened off of two. As slow as he was going I didn’t see anything come off his car, so initially when I saw the caution I was like, ‘What’s that for? I didn’t see anything that was for.’ And then when I came back around I saw there was some door foam on the race track, which is whatever, that’s door foam. But the caution was out and it was what it was at that point and you’ve got to go out there and win at that point and figure out how to do it.”
TODD INTERJECTS:
“And he did it.”
DO YOU CALL 811 NOW AFTER DIGGING OUT A WIN TODAY?
“That was good. Yes. You always call 811 before you dig. Know what’s below, man (laughing).”
WHO ARE THE TEAMS PUSHING YOU RIGHT NOW?
“I don’t think you can write off anybody, for one, because you never know what’s gonna happen. You never underestimate your competition. I was gonna say a lot of the Stewart Haas cars are really fast right now. The 4 team was fast today. The 41 won last week. The 4 car is fast week in and week out, so they’re quick. You never count out Hendrick cars. Roush cars have shown a lot of speed here recently and even the Petty cars have shown a lot of speed here recently. You look at the way they’ve been qualifying and they ran really well at Martinsville last week. You can’t count anybody out. You’ve got to go into the weekend thinking, ‘Hey, I’m racing 43 cars out here.’ I think when you start getting a little overconfident or a little full of yourself, that’s when you’re gonna get caught off-guard. To answer your question, I think everybody but I’ll let Todd go with that.”
TODD GORDON CONTINUED
“I think it’s hit or miss every week, but you look at the guys that have won races it’s about every organization, and as we talked about the box is big enough that people can recover. Even if they’re off a little bit, they’re gonna recover and every week there are 15 cars out there that can win, and coming into the weekend you don’t just focus on one. I’ll say it; I wouldn’t have picked Kurt to win Martinsville. It’s not his favorite track. I think he’s professed that himself, but they’ve had speed and it’s just a matter of time before anybody that’s struggled at all is gonna figure it out. We’ve all got great organizations behind us that are pushing every day to make our race cars better, so you almost have to keep looking forward and not looking back.”
