Ford Performance Notes and Quotes
NASCAR Cup Series
Ford Zoom Media Availability | Tuesday, June 22, 2021
TRAVIS GEISLER, NASCAR Competition Director, Team Penske — WILL YOU BE TOLD WHAT BRAKES YOU’RE GOING TO RUN WITH NEXT GEN, OR WILL YOU HAVE THE OPTION LIKE THIS PAST WEEKEND AT NASHVILLE? “I think there will be like two choices next year. I think the calipers are the same. Pretty much everywhere there will be two rotor options, but all of the rotors and brakes for next year are a lot bigger. There’s a tremendous amount of braking capability in that car from what we’ve seen in testing. Even just coming to pit road at Texas, Ryan was driving and was just kind of amazed at how far he could brake. Larger wheels allow for a lot larger rotor, so you’ve got a lot more stopping power. I think anytime you’re allowed to have decisions people make bad ones at times and that creates some variability and that’s what I like about it is having the option to make a bad choice or a good choice and being able to separate yourself. I think the choices next year will still be there. They’ll be a lot more limited and we’ll have to see how it plays out. I think the braking platform in general is definitely gonna be, it’s so much more performance with that car given the size constraints of the parts involved.”
IS THERE ANY PANIC TO TRY AND CATCH HENDRICK OR WITH THIS SYSTEM DO YOU HAVE UNTIL THE PLAYOFFS TO DO THAT? “Certainly, you get tired of going to the track every weekend not feeling like you have the opportunity to go out and dominate and win a race. That’s what we go there for and that’s not the case right now. It’s not necessarily panic, but the realities of where you are and how much ground you need to cover to close the gap, I think if you look at this past weekend Stewart-Haas had a very good weekend. I think the 9, the 48, the 24 — those guys seem to be a lot more raceable or beatable. The 5 even has a margin on his teammates right now, so that’s all the things you look at and try to figure out what to go work on. The point system definitely allows for the ability to close the gap. Last year, the 4 car was kind of the example. You look at nine wins and really dominated the season and didn’t even have an opportunity to run for it at Phoenix, so anything can happen and it usually does. I don’t think you would have looked at the 9 car as the guy you would have said was gonna go win the championship as the playoffs started to unfold, but he had some heroics and won the last two races and ends up the champion, so not panic but definitely realistic on the ground that needs to get covered here over the next couple months and then you’ve got to be there when it counts at the end.”
DO YOU ONLY FOCUS ON TEAM PENSKE OR DO YOU TRY TO FIGURE OUT WHAT HENDRICK HAS GOT OVER YOU GUYS? “That’s a good question. I think primarily you have to focus internally because that’s what you can control. You can’t control what Hendrick has and what they’re working on, but you certainly compare against the best and the SMT tools that we have to compare the on-track performance, where you’re getting beat, where they’re able to make more speed, whether it’s entry, exit, middle, short, medium, long-term runs — all that stuff you try to break down to focus your efforts a little bit better, focus your resources towards the areas you feel like you’re maybe getting beat worse in, so you definitely have to look at your competition all the time and I think right now that’s obviously kind of them and we’re all chasing them. I think also though you’ve got to look internally at what are your guys saying, what kind of feedback, what are your teams doing, what have you had success with in the past and go to work on your program. The best you can do when you’re trying to copy somebody is be just a little bit worse than them. You’re never gonna be as good as somebody that you try to copy, so the only thing you can do is be the best version of yourself and the way that we go racing with the engine package we have, with the nose, tail, the stuff that the Ford car has, we’ve got to make those the best they can be. You can’t look at that area, but you certainly can’t be naive to the fact of looking at seeing where you can be better.”
WHERE ARE THEY BEATING YOU? “Everywhere. That makes it easy to go work. You don’t have the kind of dominance that those guys have had over the past six weeks without just a pretty incredible combination of things. Everybody is always asking, ‘What is it? What do we need to work on?’ And it’s kind of like anything, it’s a lot of little things, it’s a lot of stuff in all different places. Certainly, their engine program is really strong. It seems like they’re stuff is very well-suited for where we were racing. Some of the RPM ranges at the tracks we’ve been I think they’ve been really strong and the 5 car has been able to put himself in another league from everybody else, so I think we’re all trying to learn off of the specifics of that right now.”
TEAM PENSKE HAS 14 CONSECUTIVE XFINITY STARTS AT ROAD AMERICA WITH TWO WINS, INCLUDING THE LAST RACE. DOES THAT GIVE YOU ANY ADVANTAGE OVER THE COMPETITION? “It’s certainly better than going to COTA. That one was one where nobody knew what the heck was gonna go on. Our only dry lap on that track was qualifying and otherwise it was pouring down rain, so that was about worst-case scenario for a brand new place and nobody had any idea what to expect. At least we know a little bit about the track. We know where you race, where the cars fade, where do you have brake issues, the things to focus on. I think when you look at Sonoma, you focus on very different things than what you focus on when you go to Watkins Glen, so those learnings definitely help. All of our crew chiefs have crew chiefed at Road America, so that’s a nice thing. At least those guys have been there. They know the track. Joey has actually never raced there, so we’re working on trying to get him up to speed with what the facility is, but our other guys have run there in our cars, so I think those are all positives for us and certainly a lot easier transition than going to a brand new racetrack and the way that COTA or even the Daytona Road Course was, which were really sight unseen and good luck. This one we have a little bit better approach.”
DO YOU HAVE ANY EXPERIENCE AT ROAD AMERICA? “Never been there, so this will be a fresh one for me. I’m excited about it. It’s a great area up there. It always seems like it has rabid fans, just a great environment. It’s got kind of a Watkins Glen feel as far as the excitement level from what it looks like, so excited to get up there. I think as a sport we’re doing a great job getting to some venues that are welcoming to us. This past weekend was really cool for that. We had a superb crowd and the people in the area actually knew we were there and cared, and that’s the places we need to be going.”
IS THERE GOING TO BE A POINT THIS SEASON WHERE THE JUICE IS GOING TO BE WORTH THE SQUEEZE TO CLOSE THE GAP ON THESE PARTICULAR TRACKS? “You certainly have to consider that when you look at the races that are in the playoffs and how it unfolds and where you need to focus, but I think it’s human nature to always try to keep racing and always continue to try to close the gap because there are some things that will continue to be there. Mindsets with what you’re doing with your wheel rates and things will apply to new cars or whatever kind of car you’re racing. Eventually, you have to have the same shocks, how they work at different places, ride rates, what you have, I think all those things are still learning, so you’ve got to keep learning. There definitely would come a point where if you’re just kind of hopeless, you’ve got teams that maybe aren’t in the playoffs that those teams individually go and start focusing hard on it. I think as a company, we have a group focusing on that car. It’s a difficult project to focus on right now because we really don’t have anything in hand yet. We don’t have any chassis yet. We don’t have things to go and work on. We have a lot of theoreticals and a lot of things that we’re pushing to try and get some direction on, but, right now, it’s stay focused on what we are. The more we learn here about whatever is going on, a lot of it will probably apply actually because you’re just getting smarter about developing your process to find speed, and that’s really the key to it. It might not be this specific, ‘OK, we needed to do this camber and this wedge setting to be better,’ but the process that our group needs to take to be able to find what you need to be faster, that applies to if we’re racing wheelbarrows or Gen 6 or Next Gen, so that’s kind of what we’re trying to make sure that we’re doing correctly and we’ve got to accelerate that and get better at it right now.”
WHAT DOES AUSTIN CINDRIC BRING TO THE TEAM AND WHAT HAVE YOU SEEN OUT OF HIM IN HIS LIMITED CUP STARTS? “Let’s be totally honest, I’ve told him this and his dad this. He could be pretty miserable for us to work with and we would all deal with it, but I think we’ve been very fortunate that he has been great to work with and actually does have a good bit of talent, and that’s nice for all of us because we were gonna work through it probably for a little while regardless, but he’s made it here because of what he has — because of his work ethic and his talent, and I think that’s probably the first thing that everybody noticed was the work ethic side of it and I think when you bring somebody that is fresh out of school he’s a student and he’s remained a student, and I think that he’s pushing everybody at all angles on how you prep better for the races, how do you learn more because he knows he doesn’t know anything, so he’s in a full-on learn mode and I think as you get more comfortable and you get more races and you’re around this thing for a decade, it’s just human nature to start to fall out of that learn mode a little bit. I think we’re all victims of it as we get older. We watch our kids be able to learn something in minutes that we just don’t learn as quickly, and I think when he’s around he’s pushing us all to be in that learning mentality, so that’s probably the first most important thing he’s brought to me. I think from a talent set his road course abilities are obviously very good and being able to go test at some of these places, even if they’re not in the kind of cars you’re gonna race, but having him there or having his experience. He’s raced at all these places in different cars, so I think it’s been a good advantage for us to have somebody with a different perspective, a different walk of life. He’s raced cars with diffusers. He’s raced cars with all this underbody stuff that the Next Gen car has, so he’s actually got kind of a leg up in experience on some of those things that we’re able to kind of dig into and pry some knowledge out of, and then as far as his development goes, I think if you look at Atlanta it was a struggle. His first Cup race, Atlanta is one of the toughest places to go. I applaud him for not shying away from the hard ones and kind of getting them out of the way a little bit, and that one was like, ‘OK, we’ve got a little ways to go,’ and then Richmond was like, ‘Whoa, this is pretty impressive.’ The finishing position didn’t end up that way because of the way that the strategy played out in that race, but he drove from last up into the top 20, passed some really good cars and was moving forward, and I think that’s the kind of progression that’s pretty awesome to see. Richmond is not an easy place, either, so I think that being able to go and lead laps at Daytona, he led laps at COTA, he raced hard with the 18 there. Those are the things that are great to see out of somebody that’s kind of making a name for themselves and it’s been fun to be a part of.”
WHERE IS PENSKE AT IN TERMS OF KEEPING AN XFINITY PROGRAM AND WHAT WOULD IT LOOK LIKE? “Those are good questions that probably don’t have firm answers yet that I know of. That’s all being discussed, the way that the new car comes in and what all it requires from basically our facility to be able to do, how we handle that program going forward, I would say, is probably a better question for people a little higher up than me. The nice thing about my position is that they tell me what we’re gonna go do and then I figure how to go do it the best we can and I’ll wait until they tell me what that’s gonna be.”
DO YOU HAVE ANY IDEA WHEN TEAM WILL START TAKING INVENTORY OF NEXT GEN PARTS AND PIECES, AND ARE THERE ANY CONCERNS OVER A STEEL SHORTAGE? “I think there are a lot of chassis that are completed. They’re going through their certification process, going through kind of getting all that part of it taken care of. I think there’s some small things NASCAR is waiting on to release all of those to us, so I think they’re there. The capability of building them quickly is there, so I’m not super concerned yet because I think the inventory is there. The parts and pieces, the steel, some of those things — I’m sure somewhere down the line here we’re gonna fight some sort of a supply chain hiccup just because the whole world seems to be fighting a supply chain hiccup, whether it’s lumber, toilet paper, chips for cars, it’s something. So far, our vendors have been delivering parts on time as they’ve been scheduled to. Certainly it would be nice to have a car here or have them here a couple months ago, but racing is what it is — it’s a just-in-time business and I feel like the beginning of July that stuff will start rolling out to us, probably quicker than what we’ll be able to digest at the beginning, but hopefully everything keeps rolling along and we get some of that stuff in hand and we can start working through it, but it’s certainly in the back of your mind every day of when we’re actually gonna be able to kind of get going. You talk so much about it. We’ve heard so much about it. It’s time to just kind of rip the band-aid off and dig into it.”
ONE QUESTION THAT HASN’T BEEN ADDRESSED IS THE SAFETY ASPECT. FROM A TEAM PERSPECTIVE HAVE YOU HEARD ANYTHING ABOUT SAFETY TESTING WITH THE CAR? “There’s been some communication on the partial testing that’s been done. I think they’ve done all the kind of, I guess I’ll call it smaller scale testing. I think the full scale, full car testing, the results of that I haven’t heard a whole lot about it. I think it’s upcoming very shortly here, so I think that’s part of the process and timing of why everything is maybe a little bit delayed on that, but I wouldn’t say that I’ve heard a ton of information there. The best we can do is trust the guys that are involved over there. The guys and girls they have working on that project are the ones that are responsible for the safety in the vehicle that we have right now, so I would assume that all of the learnings over the years of crashes that we’ve all had have been poured into that thing and have made improvements in it. I’ve always felt like working on the NASCAR side of racing has put me in a spot where the guys and girls that I go to the racetrack with every week, I feel like are as safe as anybody racing anything in the world right now, and I would expect that to continue.”
DO YOU HAVE ENOUGH PARTS AND PIECES THAT IF YOU WANT TO MAKE ADJUSTMENTS YOU HAVE ENOUGH TO GO AROUND? “Yeah, I think the interesting part of where we are right now maybe as opposed to a couple years back and how we raced, there are a lot of parts that have been frozen since last year. We haven’t been able to kind of bring out new parts and pieces in a lot of areas that used to be open and a lot of that was in preparation of the Next Gen car coming and knowing that we were gonna have this whole flood of new parts and pieces coming in, so to continue to develop new stuff for what was supposed to be the last year of it, obviously the COVID scenario pushed everything back and put us into a two-year freeze on a lot of these parts and pieces now. It is tough. It’s not how we used to race. It’s not how most of us are accustomed to it, so there are a lot of things where you kind of go to work somewhere and you run into a little bit of a roadblock and you’ve kind of got to go in a different direction and try to figure out how to close the gap with the parts and pieces that you have. I think the engine companies are probably pretty similar to that with the way that a lot of their parts and pieces were kind of frozen on the development perspective for this season. We have what we need here of what we can make. What we can work on we definitely have everything. That’s a great part of working at Team Penske is you have what you need, it’s just trying to figure out the direction that’s open to you to go and use those resources.”
WHEN WAS THE LAST TIME NASCAR HAD ALL THE CARS ON THE ENGINE DYNO TOGETHER TO GIVE YOU AN IDEA OF WHERE YOU STAND AGAINST THE NEW ECR/HENDRICK MOTORSPORTS COLLABORATION? “I want to say that was probably Darlington last year. I think that was the most recent.”
LAST YEAR? “Yeah. I don’t believe we’ve done anything this season as far as the engine dyno compare.”
HENDRICK WON’T TELL US WHY THEY’RE DOING SO WELL. THEY’LL SAY IT’S GOOD PEOPLE AND IT’S ALSO WAY TO EARLY TO BE SO OPTIMISTIC ABOUT HOW IT MIGHT BE. EVERYBODY WANTS TO RUSH AHEAD TO THE PLAYOFFS, SO WHEN DO WE START THINKING ABOUT THAT. YOU HAVE GOOD PEOPLE IN YOUR PLACE TOO AND I KNOW THEY’RE NOT GOING TO TELL US WHAT THEY’VE FOUND BUT IT’S GOT TO BE MORE THAN PEOPLE GETTING ALONG. “Yeah, I think there are periods in this thing where you hit on a few things in a row. Everybody’s got development projects that are in the que and usually you hit on maybe one out of four or one of out five, and sometimes you get on a run and you hit three out of four and it all adds up and you really get yourself a margin. The cars have gotten closer than they’ve ever been. I think the competition is closer than it’s ever been. The problem with that though is that a very small amount sets you way apart, so I think that we’re sitting here looking for these huge, big gains that we used to have to find to close gaps, but I don’t think the gap — even though it looks and feels tremendous every weekend — it’s probably not as big as it used to be, it’s just now that the margins are so much smaller you’re not looking for hundreds of pounds of downforce you’re looking for smaller numbers. Certainly, their program has changed a lot. They have changed how they operate internally and I think they’ve gone to probably a model that’s probably a little more similar to how some of the other teams have operated over the years versus kind of the team to team program. It’s a little more of a company approach from what I can see from the outside and certainly the Chevy program has continued to kind of evolve and try to figure out how to make themselves more competitive against the other groups that have certainly, if you look over the past few years, have had the lion’s share of the wins. The other part of that is I think the driver lineup has matured over there. They put some guys in that needed some seat time. They’re great talents and have certainly proven themselves to be capable, but it took a little time to get there and that’s always a hard thing as a company when you’re trying to develop and evolve and you’re trying to develop and evolve a driver. You’re always kind of in this middle ground of what is it — it’s the chicken and the egg thing comes to mind. Now, they’ve got obviously a world-class driver and the other guys are pretty darn close, too. I think it’s kind of all rolled together and the timing has hit for them at the right opportunity.”
WHEN DO WE START THINKING ABOUT WHO MIGHT DOMINATE IN THE PLAYOFFS? “I think we still have kind of an oddball set of tracks coming up. When you look at the schedule you’ve got Pocono, Michigan, Indy Road Course, Road America — those are all kind of pretty unique places still and they don’t have a lot of representation in the playoffs. I think once you get past that stretch, obviously you hope to be building some momentum, but once you get to the playoffs is where you really start the stretch. Even within that time frame you can see teams kind of start to trade places a little bit, I think, when it comes to competition level, but right now it’s 110 percent I can promise you that. We’re not sitting here saying, ‘Well, it’s just the tracks. These tracks aren’t really in the playoffs.’ The amount of speed that they have had week in and week out, it’s obvious that it doesn’t matter if we’re in the rain, if we’re at Sonoma, if we’re at Texas, if we’re at wherever you want to go race, their package is really fast right now and you’ve got to close the gap at any of these tracks would feel like progress and that’s what we’ve got to do.”
YOU’VE HAD PRACTICE AT COTA, CHARLOTTE AND NASHVILLE. DO YOU FEEL ANYTHING FROM HAVING EXTRA TRACK TIME WILL SHOW UP LATER OR THESE TRACKS ARE SO DIFFERENT IT WON’T MATTER? “I think the COTA practice was off the rails a little bit. It was pretty weird, but certainly we tried some things that help give you some direction. I wouldn’t say that sometimes when you only have 50 minutes and then you’ve got a couple hours, you’ve got to get in line for tech, there’s not a lot that you can apply for that weekend sometimes, but there are things that you can work through as far as your packages and just say, ‘OK, let’s get a direction on this. We’ve all been thinking about this, why don’t you guys try that one,’ and you divvy it up amongst your teams and try and get a little smarter faster because 50 minutes is still, that’s a pretty short practice to really go out, get a run or two to get acclimated. Obviously, nobody has ever been to Nashville with a Cup car of this sort. It’s been a long time since we’ve been there with the previous car, so it takes you just a little bit to figure it out. The track moved around a whole lot because of the way that the resin was applied. We went from the bottom to the top and that makes it hard to learn because the track is changing very quickly in that kind of setup, so you get what you can out of it. I wouldn’t say that it was the same as being able to go and test for a day somewhere where you can kind of methodically work through everything. It’s kind of a thrash, but we’ll take any time that we can get and figure it out.”
WHAT DOES POCONO PROVIDE WITH A SATURDAY RACE? THAT’S YOUR ONE TEST DAY TO DO ANYTHING THIS YEAR. “Yeah, it’s tough because Pocono is one of those tracks it’s just way off the map as far as the bell curve of distribution of tracks. It’s kind of out there on the tail, but it’s still a very good opportunity to go and try some things. We’re very fortunate that we’ve got our wins with each of our cars, so you are in a position where you can try some different things and get outside the box a little bit. I think we need to do that and try some different directions and see that even if it doesn’t work for that race, can you check something off the list or can you put something over that says this was a positive and we just need to figure out how to work around that? So, this weekend definitely is a unique one. It provides that opportunity. It’s kind of a racer’s dream in a way because you always leave the racetrack and you’re driving home and you’re like, ‘Man, if we raced tomorrow I would just change this and this.’ And you actually get that opportunity to do it and get to see who does it best. The way that the format of where you start and stuff is a challenge for this one, but that’s OK. You use it as an opportunity and try to learn what we can.”
RYAN SAID IF HE HAD A CHANCE TO DO EXTRA CURRICULAR RACING HE WOULD, BUT HE CAN’T REALLY DO IT. WHAT IS THE PHILOSOPHY AT TEAM PENSKE ABOUT THAT? “Again, that one goes way up to the top, so I’m gonna tread lightly on my response because that’s certainly well outside of my purvey, but I think you can go all the way back to Bettenhausen for Roger, whenever that whole thing went on at Syracuse where he got hurt and got taken out of Indy Car, and I think watching different series, the level of safety that is involved at different levels is very different. I think as you look at risk level for your driver, who is an asset for your company. It’s somebody that represents all of your sponsors. You have your whole program built around your drivers, and I think when you see them in situations where you don’t really have control over, I think that become uncomfortable for people. When you look at going and jumping in other people’s cars, different things, you don’t necessarily have the same kind of oversight to their safety equipment that you have when it’s one of our cars and we’ve prepared it, we know everything about it. We know all the safety stuff that NASCAR puts into their races, so I would say that’s probably what I see as being the biggest limiter to it. Does it keep you from developing and does it keep you from being a better racer across other things? I think when the opportunity is there and it really applies, I think it happens and that’s why you saw Brad Keslelowski go race a dirt late model. You saw Joey Logano go race at Volusia and Bristol in a modified. We were going to race dirt and nobody knew how to do that, so, OK, we have a performance advantage here let’s go do it, and everybody was on board. That was something everybody supported and I think that applied to our series, so it made sense. Going and racing otherwise, I think that’s evaluated on probably a case-by-case basis.”
DO YOU THINK ROGER COULD CHANGE HIS TUNE WITH THE SUCCESS KYLE LARSON IS HAVING NOW OR IS THE NON-NEGOTIABLE FOR HIM? “Anything is negotiable. I think he makes decisions based off the information he has at hand, and I think that’s why it was very easy for us to get the approval to go race some dirt stuff at the beginning of the year, so the guys could get some experience because we needed to. To say that Kyle’s other racing is what’s led to this? That’s all up to people’s opinions and what it is or isn’t. I think that Kyle’s a pretty fantastic driver. He’s been a pretty fantastic driver and I think now he’s in pretty fantastic cars. I think that’s a pretty dangerous combination. He’s certainly one of the best there is. I think we’ve known he’s one of the best there is for a long time. I think now he’s just paired with the right team and the right situation and you put a dominant driver with a team that is peaking and has been one of the dominant teams over the course of NASCAR history, it’s a pretty lethal combination. I think Jimmie Johnson, to me, is a pretty good example of somebody who, I hated to go to the racetrack every week because I knew where he was gonna be. He won five championships in a row and he couldn’t race an Xfinity car worth a darn. I don’t know how many races he ever won or ran in Xfinity, but it was pretty slim. I think you look at that and it’s like, I don’t know, maybe if the driver’s need that, that’s something that would be negotiable if they came and said, ‘Hey, I need to be in the seat more to get my craft better.’ Then I think he would take that and look at it and see how we’d go do it.”
