Ford Performance Notes and Quotes
NASCAR Cup Series
Ford Zoom Media Availability | Tuesday, March 16, 2021
Aric Almirola, driver of the No. 10 Pit Boss Grills Ford Mustang in the NASCAR Cup Series, is coming off his best finish of the 2021 season after running 11th at Phoenix Raceway. The Stewart-Haas driver was this week’s Ford Zoom guest and spoke about this weekend’s race at Atlanta Motor Speedway.
ARIC ALMIROLA, No. 10 Pit Boss Grills Ford Mustang — HOW DO YOU LOOK AT THE START OF THE SEASON AND DO YOU PAY ANY ATTENTION TO POINTS RIGHT NOW? “Obviously, we got off to a horrendous start, not getting the points and bad finishes. The best thing that’s happened to us all year is we won the Duel and got 10 points. Otherwise, we would have left Daytona with literally no points. It’s been a tough start to the season, but Phoenix was a great way to turn our season around and, at this point, we’ve just got to go race. We’ve got to get on track. We’ve got to get consistent and running in the top 10, get consistent running in the top 5 and then find ourselves in position to win races. I think it’s gonna be tough to point our way in at this point, but it’s possible. It’s certainly possible, especially if we get on a run like we did last summer, where we were running in the top 5 the entire race, scoring a lot of stage points and I think we went eight weeks in a row with top 5 finishes, so if we do that, we’ll climb through the point standings really quickly, but we’ve got to get there first.”
HOW CONFIDENT ARE YOU THAT YOU CAN PUT TOGETHER A RUN LIKE LAST YEAR WITH ALL THE WILDCARD RACES THAT LIE AHEAD? “I am confident. We’ve got a really great race team. Like you said, we did it last year. We went on a run of top 10 and top 5 finishes for a couple of months straight, so it’s possible. We just have to get back on track. We got off to a rough start and sometimes that happens. Life doesn’t always go the way you want it to and you go through some rough patches, but it doesn’t stay that way forever, especially with a great race team like we have. We will start getting the good finishes. Phoenix was a good day for us. We needed that kind of a day where we ran in the top 10. We scored some stage points and we finished 11th, so a solid day, nothing spectacular, but not catastrophic like the weekends we had prior to that as well. We’ll get back on track. We’re a great race team and I have all the confidence in the world that we will start putting the finishes on the board that we need to.”
WHAT IS YOUR COMFORT LEVEL ON DIRT AND DO YOU HAVE ANY PLANS TO RUN ANY PRELIM RACES? “Yeah, I have done a little bit of testing on dirt. My car chief has a dirt modified that his son races, so I’ve been able to go with him and test some and we plan to test the week leading into Bristol as well just to get some laps and some reps, but I don’t think anything is gonna be representative of what we’re gonna have when we get to Bristol. So much of it depends on the track conditions and how much rain we get or don’t get, how dry slick the racetrack is gonna be and then as far as the cars, the cars are so much different than what we’ve had in the past. They’re not anything like a modified. They’re not anything like a late model. They’re not like anything else. They don’t make nearly as much downforce as those cars and the way that our suspension is built, they’re not at all like most dirt cars, so it’s gonna be unique in its own right. I heard from a lot of people that, ‘think more like Richmond and Martinsville than dirt track racing.’”
DO YOU TRY DIFFERENT STRATEGY NOW TO TRY AND GET STAGE POINTS AND/OR DO YOU ROLL THE DICE FOR WINS? “At this point, we’ve got to take the cards that are dealt to us when the race starts. A lot of it depends on how your car is. It’s hard to gamble with a car that’s not as competitive as it needs to be, so you have a lot more options when you have a fast race car, and you can kind of pick and choose your strategy because you can be a little bit more in control of the race, not as worried about going multiple laps down when you do roll down pit road, so often times every once in a while you can squeak something crazy out on strategy, but, for the most part, you don’t really win races on wild strategy anymore, unless you have a fast race car because somebody else is gonna get on that same strategy as well. Somebody else has seen it. We’ve got a lot of smart engineers in the garage area and smart crew chiefs and they see all of the different scenarios and strategies that play out and if a handful of cars get on that strategy that could be the race-winning strategy. you’ve got to have a faster car than all those other guys to be the race-winning car on that strategy. So, a lot of it just depends on when you get to the racetrack and see how your car is competitive relative to the field.”
HOW HAS FIVE DIFFERENT WINNERS PLAYED INTO THE PRESSURE YOU FEEL OR THE STRATEGY YOU RUN GOING FORWARD? “I don’t know that we feel more pressure because of that. We feel pressure just because we’re not performing like we know we should, or we’re not getting the results we know we should, so we feel pressure to turn our season around and start running the way that we know we’re capable of. I’m on my fourth season at Stewart-Haas Racing and have never gotten off to a start like this. We’ve always found ourselves in the top 10 or 12 in points by this time in the season and usually comfortably in on points and thinking about just being consistent and trying to win races when we have cars capable. Never have I been in a situation like we are in now to where you’re way on the outside trying to claw your way back into contention, so the old saying holds true, though. The only way to eat an elephant is one bite at a time. That’s kind of our focus going forward is we’ve got to take it one race at a time and in every race we’ve got to focus on just trying to score as many stage points as we can and trying to get the best finish we can. If that means running fifth with a fifth-place car, then we need to do that. And if we have a car capable of winning, then we need to do everything in our power to try and get the W.”
WHAT WILL IT TAKE TO GET A TOP 10 OR TOP 5 THIS WEEKEND? “Atlanta is just a tricky place. It’s really worn out and the cars slip and slide around there a lot, and now with this new package that we’ve had with the rules package, it’s constantly a balance of drag out of your race car to make your car go fast versus downforce in your car, which makes it go a little bit slower on new tires, but usually takes care of the tires better throughout the long run and when the tires do give up and the pace slows way down on older tires, more downforce is helpful, so there’s definitely a balancing act between figuring that out, and I think last year we had a couple cars out of SHR that were competitive and good — the 14 and the 4 were good. We started off the race good and then had some things go wrong throughout the race. We had a loose wheel and some other stuff that got us behind, but I feel like we have good notes. The 4 was competitive. The 4, I think, was a top 5 car throughout the entire race and then got their car really good at the end of the race and went on to win the race. Atlanta is certainly a track that is a possibility for us to go there and run up front and challenge to win.”
DO YOU FIND YOUR COMFORT LEVEL ON LAYOUTS LIKE ATLANTA ARE MORE COMFORTABLE FOR YOU? IS THAT YOUR SWEET SPOT? “I don’t know. I mean, I’ve been around this sport long enough to where I feel comfortable everywhere. Pocono used to be the one place that I went to that I was like, ‘Oh, not this place,’ because I was unsuccessful there for so long, but then last year we go there and I led a bunch of laps and finished in the top 5 in both races. Honestly, we were chasing stage points and got off on a little bit different strategy, otherwise I felt like we had a car that should have won the first race there at Pocono last year and we finished third with a car that led the most laps and was really in contention to win all day, so I don’t go to any racetrack anymore and feel uncomfortable. I feel good everywhere we go, other than the fact that you just never know what you’re gonna have for a car. Things change so much. The rules change. The tire changes that Goodyear brings. There are so many variables that you never really know until you show up. It used to be we would show up for practice and have a chance to fix it or work on it and now we show up and you don’t know until the green flag waves, so that’s the biggest challenge.”
HOW MUCH OF WHAT HAS HAPPENED IS BAD LUCK AS COMPARED TO PERFORMANCE? “I think a lot of it is just luck and circumstances, and then mistakes, honestly, on my part for a couple of them. Daytona 500 was just bad luck. There’s nothing I could have done different. I was running second and got an aggressive push from behind from Christopher Bell and got turned and wrecked, so I don’t know what I could have done different, so circumstances out of our control. We go the very next week to the Daytona Road Course and I was running inside the top 10 and spun out in the infield section of the road course and made a mistake and got us way behind on track position late in the race and clawed our way back from 30th place back up to 16th or 17th-place finish. Then we went to Homestead and I made a mistake again, two weeks in a row. We had a decent car, not great. We worked on it really hard to get it better and I wrecked with Ryan Blaney. That resulted in a poor finish and then we went to Vegas and we were just off. We were not good and then bad luck, something, a piece of debris got inside the left-front wheel and knocked the valve stem off the left-front during the run and we got a flat left-front tire and wrecked and finished last, so I think a lot of it has been bad luck and circumstances, but there’s also been mistakes on my part as well, so we just have to clean everything up. We’ve got to have better cars. The driver has to do his job and not make mistakes and we’ve got to have luck turn and start going our way, instead of against us.”
HOW DO YOU KEEP SPONSORS HAPPY WHEN THINGS AREN’T GOING WELL? WHAT’S THE SECRET? “So much of what we do is performance driven. The sponsors love when we run up front because we’re more relevant on TV and part of the broadcast and it just makes everything better. Winning makes everything better, but at the same time there is a lot of stuff that goes on behind the scenes on the business side of things that is equally important to the partners as far as driving consumers to their product and the business to business relationships and even just the personal relationships that I’ve made with these people at these companies, so, for me, that’s one of the things that I have strived really hard at over the course of my career, and I feel like I’ve done a really good job in the last decade of getting partners and holding onto them and making sure that I over deliver on every aspect that I’m in control of. You can’t always control on-track performance as much as we wish we could, but the things that I can control away from the racetrack I feel like I work extremely hard at that and it’s created great partnerships and great relationships for me over the years that we’ve been able to keep partners around for a long time.”
DOES STARTING FROM THE BACK MAKE IT MORE CHALLENGING GOING TO THE FRONT AND WILL THIS WEEKEND BE DIFFERENT STARTING MORE TOWARD THE FRONT? “Yeah, so starting in the back is a dagger every week. That’s the hard part about the situation that we’re in now, not only the fact that we don’t get practice, but when you have a bad weekend it doesn’t end with that weekend, it carries over into the next week. It used to be if you have a bad weekend, you could put it behind you. You go to the racetrack the next weekend and it’s a fresh start. You practice, you qualify, you have an opportunity to qualify up front and get a good pit selection and a good starting spot and really start completely over with that brand new weekend. Now, when you have a bad weekend, it really carries over to the next weekend because you have a bad starting spot, you have a bad pit selection. A bad pit selection usually means that you’re gonna be pitting around other cars that are competitive and on the lead lap, so you’re constantly going to be battling with them getting in and out of your pit box. It just makes everything more difficult and harder to dig out of these holes, so it is a challenge with starting in the back, not scoring stage points usually in the first stage. When you start deep in the field it’s hard to come through the field and score stage points in stage one when you start in the back, so it’s really just a different approach in a different set of circumstances now with starting the race based on how you finish last time and your pit selection and everything being geared off of that. It definitely makes the momentum harder to swing and turn it around.”
WHAT DO THEY MEAN IN REGARDS TO THINK MARTINSVILLE OR RICHMOND WHEN IT COMES TO THE BRISTOL DIRT RACE? “From what I’ve heard from a lot of people it’s not like typical dirt car racing. You don’t have the car really hung out sideways, standing in the gas and just slinging mud. The cars drive a lot straighter on the dirt. These big heavy stock cars do. They’re not running super sideways. You’re not driving them like you would a typical dirt car, so I think that’s what everybody has really referenced is that the cars are not way up on the left side and dug in with the right side tires. There’s just a lot of differences in the way that the dirt cars drive and the way that they race versus how I’m expecting it from what I hear and what I gather our Cup cars to drive on dirt.”
HAS THERE BEEN ANY TALK WITHIN NASCAR ABOUT RETURNING TO PRE-COVID DAYS OF PRACTICE AND QUALIFYING WHEN THINGS GET BETTER? “I’m optimistic for sure. I’m ready for this pandemic to go away and life to return back to normal, but if there’s been any of those talks I’ve not been a part of them. I do not know any sort of forecast on when things may return back to what we considered normal pre-pandemic.”
IT SOUNDS LIKE YOU WOULD WELCOME THAT OPPORTUNITY, UNLESS YOU BECOME THE SIXTH DIFFERENT WINNER THIS WEEKEND? “Yeah, but even still I would for sure welcome getting back to some sort of normal. I miss having the fans around at the racetrack. I miss having my family at the racetrack. I miss traveling with the team and being around in the garage area — that human to human interaction is something that I really enjoy, so not having that is tough, but then on top of that not having practice, not being able to qualify, all of those things are challenges, especially when you have a bad week. It’s hard to rebound the next week because that bad finish does carry over into the next week.”
