Ford Performance NSCS Notes and Quotes
Coca-Cola 600 Qualifying – Charlotte Motor Speedway
Thursday, May 21, 2015
Joey Logano, driver of the No. 22 Shell/Pennzoil Ford Fusion, met with the media after a press announcement for the Bojangles’ Summer Shootout at Charlotte Motor Speedway and discussed a number of topics.
JOEY LOGANO – No. 22 Shell/Pennzoil Ford Fusion – DID IT SHOCK YOU TO SEE HOW LONG YOUR FIRST 600 WAS? “It still shocks me every year. About every year it’s usually about 160 laps into the race I go, ‘How many more do we have to go?’ And they’ll tell me how many more and we’re not even halfway yet and I’m like, ‘Holy cow. This is forever long.’ But that’s why it means so much to win the Coca-Cola 600. It’s the longest race of the year. It takes a lot out of the car, it takes a lot out of the driver and the team to build a car that can go that fast for that long, and be able to keep up with the transitions of the track throughout the night. I remember the first time I wore the brakes off the car pretty early in the race and I was like, ‘I don’t think I’m gonna make 600 miles,’ and it rained. It was rain-shortened that year. It was the year Reutimann won it and I was pretty happy it was rain-shortened because I wasn’t gonna have the brakes to make it.”
ARE YOU EXCITED ABOUT YOUR CHANCES THIS WEEKEND? “I am. I feel like I’ve got a pretty good car. Our car should be a little bit better than what we ran last week. We’ll see in a little bit here when we get on the race track and what it’s going to be like.”
CAN YOU ADDRESS WHAT IT MEANS TO BE INVOLVED WITH SHELL? “It’s a great program that Shell has done and it’s cool to always have partners that are willing to give back and what they do for the kids around here and help teach them about what our sport is and bring them out and give them these experiences and for us to be involved with that is something pretty cool that they would involve Team Penske and myself in what they do, so it’s a pretty neat little program that they do.”
HOW HAS YOUR SEASON GONE TO THIS POINT? “It’s been OK. We obviously started off on a great note. We’ve had a lot of top-five finishes since then, but we don’t have another win on the Cup side, so we want to get some more wins. We feel like we’re a little bit off on speed. We’re not far off. We’re consistently a top-five car, but we need to consistently be a first-place car and that’s our goal. That’s what we try to do and we need to make a step to make that happen, but I think we kind of understand where it’s at. We’re making some gains. We’re catching up to where we need to be. We’ve got a few weeks until the Chase start still, so we can definitely keep trying things and figure out what we have to do to have speed when the Chase starts, which is something Team Penske has done great over the last couple of years is find that little bit more when they need it, so I’m excited for when that comes around. On the XFINITY side, obviously it’s been a great season over there so far and getting a Truck win has been cool too, so overall the year has been going good, don’t get me wrong, but I’m always looking for more. I want to win every single race. That might be kind of greedy, but that’s my goal.”
JOEY LOGANO CONTINUED — HOW MUCH FUN WAS YOUR FORT BRAGG VISIT EARLIER THIS WEEK? “I had a good time. We flew in and I didn’t get to see as much as I wanted to. I didn’t have as much time as much time as I thought we were gonna have down there, but we drove around a little bit and did an autograph session for the troops. I got to meet quite a few of them and hear a couple stories and meet a lot of families. It’s amazing to me how big it is. I’ve never been to Fort Bragg before and it’s massive. It’s huge. You don’t feel like you’re on a base at all. I’ve been a couple USO Tours and it feels different when you’re on a base, but it’s so big and open and it feels like you’re on public streets a lot of time and you’re like, ‘This is a different feeling,’ but it’s definitely a nice facility down there and we appreciate everything they do so the least we can do is go down there and say ‘hey.'”
DID YOU GET TO DRIVE A TANK OR ANYTHING LIKE THAT? “No, I didn’t get to drive anything. I just did an autograph session.”
HOW DO YOU VIEW THE ISSUE OF A DEDICATED SAFETY TEAM LIKE THEY HAVE IN INDY CAR VERSUS HOW IT’S DONE HERE IN NASCAR WITH LOCAL EMERGENCY PERSONNEL? DOES IT MATTER WHO IS TAKING CARE OF YOU AS LONG AS THEY’RE TRAINED? “I think it matters, for sure. And in that situation all it takes is just one time for that to be worth it. All it takes is one time for something like that to be worth it, and with Hinchcliffe they basically saved his life. I know we have a good group and we’ve done the best that we know how to so far on how to make sure us drivers are safe when situations like that happen. Do I think that having a crew that goes to every race track and there’s some consistency there and understand what these race cars look like and maybe know the history of the drivers a little bit more and what’s going on? I think we can maybe do a little better job there, but we do have a traveling crew of nurses that help us along with that and help the doctors when they’re at the race track and help some of the safety crews with that. Is it an area we can improve on? Yes, an area you can always improve on is safety. I think it’s something that hopefully we can look at what happened there and learn from what Indy Car did and try to improve our sport with it.”
CAN YOU TALK ABOUT DOVER NEXT WEEK? “I like Dover. Dover is one of my favorite race tracks. Really, the next two race tracks are some of my favorites. I look at Charlotte and Dover and they’re probably my two best race tracks as far as what my results have been in the past. I enjoy both of them. We did the tire test in Dover, so I’m looking forward to going up there, plus it’s a northeastern track so it’s fun.”
THERE’S BEEN TALK OF THE 21 CAR GOING FULL-TIME NEXT YEAR. HOW WOULD THAT HELP YOU? “It would be a good thing. We work with them very closely and it’s almost a third car for us. We’re really able to communicate with what they’re doing and what we’re doing and work together and make Team Penske stronger and make the Wood Brothers stronger and hopefully just have more race wins altogether.”
JOEY LOGANO CONTINUED — DO YOU EVER THINK ABOUT ROLLING THE 20 CAR AT DOVER YEARS AGO? “No, but thanks for reminding me. I laugh because that’s a question I get a lot when I go up there and I honestly don’t think about it until someone brings it up. It’s been a while ago now, but it is always funny because I remember the next year I went there the front of the program had one of those things that when you move the cover it changes the picture. Well, they had the Monster with my car in its hand and when you moved it they had the Monster slamming my car in the race track. I was like, ‘Wow, that’s a heck of a welcome back here. Thanks, Dover. Appreciate it.’ They haven’t had that one on the front page for that long, but it’s something that every time you go there they’ll put it on the highlight reel and they’ll replay before it the race, but it’s just a crash. It’s not a big deal.”
HOW HAS THE TECHNOLOGY CHANGED AS FAR AS HELPING YOU GET ON AND OFF PIT ROAD? “As it becomes tougher to pass on the race track that’s when other areas become more and more important. When you look at pit road, obviously driver time on pit road is important, as much as the pit crew’s time also, so we get the data every week of what we’ve had in the past, what our pit road segment times were, what our on and off pit road times were, and it’s something that Todd and I have a pretty in-depth conversation about every week and say, ‘OK, where can we be better? What can we do to make this section better?’ Because if you come down pit road second and the difference was the way we came on and off pit road or something like that — there’s only so much we can do as a pit crew. There’s not a whole bunch I can do as far as helping them. As a leader I can help them. Where I park in the pit box and stuff like that I can help them, but after that, where can I make up the rest of it on pit road and try to do some different things to try and maybe pass one car. You can pass one car and that can be the difference, or position yourself in a better line or get in that clean air. That’s what it’s all about, so we study that a lot and make sure we understand where the timing lines are what we’re doing before the race starts.”
