Ford Performance Notes and Quotes
NASCAR Cup Series (NCS)
Tuesday, September 8, 2020
The NASCAR Cup Series playoffs continue this week with all three Team Penske teams in the Round of 16, along with its alliance partner, Wood Brothers Racing. Team Penske Competition Director Travis Geisler was this week’s Ford Zoom call guest and spoke about a variety of topics.
TRAVIS GEISLER, Competition Director, Team Penske – WHAT IS TEAM PENSKE’S APPROACH TO THE PLAYOFFS? “It’s a different playoff run than we’ve ever experienced and the entire sport is kind of experiencing this in a way that we’ve never gone through before. Your practice plans, all of the things that you would normally have in the works to try, you would normally get into each team kind of going off and trying certain things and being able to pull back together and compare notes and then figure out what you’re gonna go race that weekend. That’s all happening this way on a computer somewhere talking back and forth trying to figure it out. That in itself is a completely different approach, but everybody has to face it and everybody is gonna deal with it. I think for us the minimizing the weaknesses and maximizing our strengths is kind of the way I look at it. There are some tracks that we’ve just not been great at that we know some other teams are really strong at right now. You look at the Roval being something where it just seems like Hendrick and the Gibbs guys are just awesome there. There’s no question. They’ve really put the numbers on the board for those style of tracks and we haven’t. We’re trying to figure out how to minimize that, how to come out of there with the least amount of damage possible. We’d love to say we’re gonna go there and we’re gonna make changes to our car and we’re gonna go be the fastest thing and win, but that’s just not likely to close that kind of gap with no practice and obviously a lot of parts and pieces that we’re really not able to kind of work on right now. You look at other tracks where we should be really good. You look at Bristol. We’ve been really fast there. Talladega, Vegas, those are tracks we’ve run well at. We’ve won at Vegas this year. Our short track stuff has been pretty good with Phoenix and Loudon being victories for us now, so those are the tracks that we’ve kind of got circled. Richmond is a little different than those tracks are, but we still look at that as a place that’s a potential strong suit, so that’s kind of our approach. You’ve got to take each week as it comes. You never know what’s gonna happen. Crazy stuff evolves and develops during this thing and you’ve just kind of got to keep dealing with the twists and turns. It’s a remote experience and we’re all trying to figure out how to make the most of that. The playoffs are what they are. It’s crazy and you can think you’ve got everything figured out and you’re running one-two, and then, all of a sudden, you’re in the pits at Darlington and that’s just the way it goes.”
HOW DO YOU GO ABOUT BUILDING A BULLETPROOF CAR FROM A MECHANICAL STANDPOINT? “Now more than ever that’s critical. We just unload and we go race. A lot of times you would go practice, you’d work out some little things here and there, you’d have an opportunity to say, ‘Okay, this looks like it’s probably a little on edge. We need to back off a little for this week.’ Now, you’ve got to go 100 percent when you come off the truck. Chassis dynos have come back into play. I think that’s something that a lot of teams had kind of migrated away from because the value just wasn’t there, but now there’s really no opportunity to run the car to make sure at load everything is okay. There’s a lot of times you can break the porcelain on a spark plug when you’re putting it together and it will run just fine at idle or low load, but whenever you’re at full peak load it will start jumping sparks through the boot or something, so those are the things that kind of scare all of us. It’s like, ‘How do we do a full systems check? How do we make sure that we are 100 percent?’ And really it comes down to checklists and having all your mechanics working through everything each week as carefully as possible. It’s a zero mistakes game and that’s a really hard game to play when you think about how many opportunities there are for mistakes during 10 races with every car being put together from the ground up. Those are concerning and we’re trying to figure out how to put some redundancy in our systems that we’ve never had just because we’ve never really needed them. We had plenty of time to sort everything out, even just down to how you want to check all of your fluid levels and everything. Brakes are something that you would normally hot bleed, so you would run around and kind of work them in at the shop the best you can, bleed them out, okay, and then you get on the racetrack and there’d be a small bubble somewhere hung in the caliper or in a brake line – somewhere that you didn’t get bled out. You had plenty of opportunity to do that. Now, it’s not the case. You’ve got to figure out how do you put the car through its paces sitting in the shop somewhere. We try to get creative. We’ve had a lot of different ideas on how to do that. Some OSHA may not approve of, but we’ve been working through it the best we can and it’s been a learning experience from Day 1 of this whole thing. More than anything, it’s been something I’ve been really proud of for really the whole industry, but our group specifically as I know it how much everybody has stepped up and just been willing to throw out ‘this is how we’ve always done it’ and just put that in the trash can because this is not how we’ve ever done it, so reinvent, figure it out and hopefully we’ll be at the top of the pylon here in nine weeks.”
HOW DOES THE 12 GET IN THE SITUATION IT GOT INTO ON SUNDAY WITH INSPECTION AND HOW DO YOU COME BACK FROM THAT? “That’s the other side of it. Like I said, it’s a zero mistakes game and a big mistake was made and the timing was probably about as bad as possible, but it’s the way it goes. It’s something everybody has to take a look at the whole program and see what happens. I think the cars get built without race engines in them. That’s part of the work flow because the engines don’t come until kind of right before the race team, RYE is making sure they’re getting everything they can out of them, so the car is kind of set up using ballast bags because you don’t have fluids in the car, you don’t have water and fluid and all those sorts of things, so you ballast the car up. During that process one bag, usually we have kind of a tray on top of the radiator, which is a normal place to put that ballast because you need the water weight that you don’t have in there and during that process, somewhere along the way, one of the five-pound bags slid down the carbon duct work in front of it and kind of just was laying on top of the carbon duct work. It’s a black bag with black duct work and that’s it. That’s what it takes. A pretty unfortunate situation, but you go back and you look at it and you say, ‘Okay, what do we have to do different here? How do we prevent this going forward? What do we do?’ We’re moving towards a ballast bag count. Normally, guys would just add ballast bags until the car was at weight. Now there needs to be a count. It’s just the same as when doctors go into surgery they know what they have, they know what tools they have so they don’t leave any in or behind. That’s the same thing we need to be doing. That’s a piece of our process that has to get tightened up. It’s one that has definitely changed through this process because we are really trying to compartmentalize our people at the shop so the guys who are setting the cars up, the guys who are going to the racetrack with them, the guys in the assembly shop, we’re trying to keep all that as separate as possible, so that if somebody does have an issue we don’t wipe out our entire team. The worst-cast scenario is somebody gets sick and you have to look at, ‘Okay, what’s the contact trace on that person?’ And you can very quickly wipe out a majority of your group if you let all these things pass between you, which is how we all worked in the past. So, now when cars are getting passed from one group to the next group to the next group that kind of chain of custody or however you want to look at is how we’re trying to evolve. We obviously found a hole in the system and something we need to improve. I promise you there will be some bright orange on some lead shop bags that used to be black, and there will be some other things in place. From there, we just have to dig out. Unfortunately, the race was actually going fairly well. We had gotten back up to 13th and it seemed like the car was pretty good. It was responding well to changes and Ryan was generally happy with it. We had a pit stop where we knocked the valve stem out, so we had a flat and had to pit coming to the green and got ourselves in the back of the pack. And then one of the restarts stacked really hard and got some heavy nose damage and pushed the splitter up and that was kind of the end of the day. It’s unfortunate when issues compound like that, but they happen and you’ve got to look at it and say Bristol has been a great track for Ryan. He’s been really fast there. We know we’ve got that one circled and you look at Richmond is one where maybe we haven’t been so great, so we’ve our work cut out for us. That’s one we were hoping to not have to go and run right up in the top five with him, but that’s’ what we’ve got to go do. He knows what he has to do and the team does, so sometimes most championship runs or people who make it deep in, at some point in that process they’ve had a bad race, they needed a mulligan, they had a disaster. It’s just one you’ve got to overcome.”
WERE YOU INVOLVED IN THE NEXT GEN TEST WITH AUSTIN CINDRIC? “We were very peripherally involved. I wasn’t there. We were involved from a safety standpoint. We had people there to put the seat in, make sure Austin was comfortable, make sure he was in the car right, make sure that what was going on at the test was safe, but from an actual, functional, what they were doing on the car or what was going on, we were pretty much on the bystander. Our crew chiefs didn’t even really know what was happening until right before. That was kind of how that one went. It was a great opportunity for Austin. It was cool to get him in a car to go around there. I feel like he’s probably as adaptable and flexible right now as any driver just because he’s driven so many different styles of things and everything is new to him, so he’s still really in the learning mode. I think it was great to have Nasr there as well, someone who is just a world-class road racer to compare with Austin. So I think it all went pretty well. I’m happy they did it. The more we can get that car on track, the better it’s gonna be for all of us.”
I WOULD GUESS AUSTIN IS ON THE SHORT LIST IF YOU HAVE A COVID EMERGENCY? “I would say he is the list (laughing). We’re pretty prepared there in case something happens. He would definitely be the first guy I would look to. Obviously, that goes through the whole chain of command there, but he’s done a great job this year. He’s really stepped up. It’s bene fun to watch him and that whole XFINITY team kind of come into their own again. They kind of hit a stage there where it was like, ‘Man, we’ve got to make this next step.’ You watch drivers and they kind of hit these plateaus in their career and teams do, and you just hope that there’s enough left in the tank that once a little experience smooths it out that you can get where you need to and he really lit on fire there for a while and is still just consistently one of the best cars in that deal. It’s fun to watch and watch him grow.”
HOW DO CAR BUILDS CHANGE DURING THIS NEW ERA? “I would say from that standpoint we’ve been able to maintain really well. Our fab shop is actually doing excellent. I think the requirement of backup cars was a whole lot more of a drain on our system than I think we ever realized. Now, we’re not taking backup cars to any events and you start looking at paring half of the cars and it’s like, ‘This isn’t that bad. We can keep up with this.’ We can go at a high level with our cars because we’re not spread so thin trying to build all of these cars and it’s been the same with the assembly shop, the same with the race team guys where you look at it and there are just a lot of resources saved there. So, as inefficient as we are right now with kind of keeping limited number of people per plate, we’re limiting their hours still, we’re doing a lot of those things, we’re pretty efficient because we’re just not being asked to do as much work to prepare stuff, but it’s not impacting the show, it’s not impacting the way we go about business. I think we’ve been able to approach it the same way. The big difference to me is not being able to spend as much time with the cars in process, where we’re trying to limit our exposure to the fab shop guys because the race team guys, if you’re gonna say there’s a high-risk group in the shop, we probably are just because we’re out and about, we’re traveling a lot more and exposed to a lot more, so we’ve been trying to kind of stay in our own little world and let those guys do their thing and not create an issue. That’s probably been something I’ve noticed – just less hands-on time with the cars, which is hard for me. I enjoy that part. I think that’s what we all kind of grew up doing. That racer thing that’s not there right now, but pace of development I’d say has slowed only in that you can’t test as much stuff. When I say test, it’s not necessarily going to the racetrack and doing a full day test because those have kind of gone away as well, but you can’t test as much just during practice. We would have three practices in a race weekend over two days in our traditional three-day model, and you had a lot of time to try different things, talk about it, talk with your other teammates and see what they’ve tried and that stuff is zero. Now, all we really have is, ‘What did you change during the race?’ It’s changed the race of driver debriefs, it’s changed all of that stuff because there’s not as much material to cover. I guess that’s probably what I’ve seen more of an impact than anything as far as functionally having pretty fresh stuff every week still.”
THERE IS ONE TEAM WITH EIGHT WINS AND ANOTHER WITH SIX. NOBODY HAS WON 10 RACES OR MORE IN A DECADE. IS THERE SOMETHING DIFFERENT GOING ON BASED ON THE LIMITS IMPOSED OR HOW DO YOU VIEW THE LEVEL OF DOMINATION? “I hate it because we’re not the ones doing it. It’s a very good question. I think that we’re gonna continue to see kind of dominant people, whether it’s two or three cars or whatever it is. I think that’s a trend that is maybe here for a little while because when you do get onto something you get kind of a path it’s so hard for somebody to gain on it because they don’t have as much time as they used to to gain on it. The resources to change car stuff, to change all the different parts and pieces, to track time, to whatever it is it’s harder to close that gap. Some people would argue, and I can see their point for sure, that the people who are good you’d give them more time and they’d just get better. There is some reality to that, and I think there’s probably a little bit to do with some of our races have probably been pretty good because we didn’t have any practice and you didn’t give the good teams a chance to really shine, where you didn’t have the ability for a really good driver with good feedback and a crew chief who is able to really understand what his driver is saying and make it better, those guys don’t really have the same value in that skill set now because it’s just not there. So, I think this maybe has made the dominant thing a little bit worse because you just really strip the time out of the program. You’re not only taking out testing at track, but you’ve really taken out testing on a broad scale both from wind tunnel time and the practice time we get. I think those guys have definitely hit on a good combination and they’re great race teams. Those guys have great momentum right now and great companies around them, so we’re gonna see that. I think you’re gonna see the same teams kind of running roughly together. I can’t tell you how many times I look up in a race and there’s a cluster of Gibbs cars, here’s a cluster of Hendrick cars, here’s a couple Penske cars. The other guys, okay the RCR guys are good this weekend here are there two cars up here. It just kind of seems more company-specific than I think I remember it being. Stewart-Haas has a unique situation there a little bit with Kevin and Rodney. They seem to be able to kind of put themselves on an elevated playing field. Certainly the 11 has been able to do that versus the 18 and really the 19, who he’s overshadowed this year, which has been kind of unique, but that’s kind of that last little couple percent that the companies seem to be pretty clustered together.”
WHAT WAS IT LIKE FILLING IN AS CREW CHIEF FOR THE FIRST TIME SINCE 2010? HOW WAS THAT PROCESS? “A lot of it really is kind of just there. I think you just get used to kind of what drivers want to hear. It’s not like I haven’t been at the track since 2010. Fortunately, I’ve been listening to three of them since then, so I’ve got a lot of crew chief calls in my head and understanding kind of how they’re trying to do things. I’ve listened to Todd call I can’t tell you how many races, so I know how he likes to run that program, so I tried to be as consistent as I could to the way he would do it just to be less disruptive to Ryan and his spotter. To me, that was the biggest thing that was my goal was to try and fill in as not my own self, but as the way he would want to do it and make sure his team was as prepared for it as they could be. I think we’ve gotten very good at the remote thing, to be honest with you. That side of it since a lot of our race engineers are not traveling to the racetrack they’ve been supporting the crew chiefs remotely from their own war room setup, so Darlington was obviously close enough to where he got to experience the shop side war room thing. Obviously, there’s still a lot of communication there that can happen through different forms, so that helps support the person who is in that role, whether that’s me, Todd or whoever is there. It was fun. I enjoy it. It’s a fun part of this job that I’m in now that I miss. I really do enjoy kind of being integrally involved in one team and really being on the details of it and it’s fun when you get the opportunity, but you never want to get the opportunity anymore because it’s usually something pretty bad. I’d love to get the shot at it for somebody having a baby or something like that, but, unfortunately, this situation was a little worse. I enjoyed it. It was fun to work with Ryan and Josh and that whole team. It was nice to get a chance at it and I tried to do the best job I could for them.”
DO YOU HAVE ANY INSIGHT ON PLANS FOR AUSTIN IN 2021? IS HE READY FOR CUP POTENTIALLY NEXT YEAR? “I’m kind of in a fortunate position in that I don’t really get involved in that mess a whole lot. They let me just kind of worry about the car stuff and the people around them as far as the crew chiefs and mechanics. We haven’t really sat down and had a lot of those meetings like we used to have, where I was kind of a fly on the wall for those conversations, so I don’t know specifically where they intend for him to be next year and how that’s gonna play out. I know everybody is happy with the steps he’s made. I know this time last year there was probably a lot more concern in my mind on where his path was, what his talent levels were gonna be. I felt like he had the raw talent it was just a matter of if he could get the learnings that he needed to race in traffic and do the things that you have to to NASCAR race. Personally, I think he’s probably ready. I look at the way the Next Gen roll in with one more year of this car and all that works out and whoever the new driver was, name any name, if I was that person, I’d probably say, ‘You know what? Give me one more year here and let me ride this one out and I’ll come be a rookie when everybody else is a rookie on this car and I’ll give myself a little bit better chance.’ Versus, ‘Put me in next year. I’m gonna have to learn all this stuff that everybody already knows about this car, and then we’re gonna do it again the following year.’ So, you get so much rope as a rookie. You get so much opportunity to kind of show that you can catch up and be up to speed, and the tough part of doing it two years in a row, I think, is you’re asking for a whole lot of time out of the rookie because you know getting started with no practice or limited practice potentially next year, really no testing. Man, that’s like the hardest time ever to be a rookie, so the following year with new cars that nobody knows and hasn’t had a lot of seat time with, personally, that’s what I feel like I would rather do and if I had my king hat on for the day, that’s what I would choose.”
HAVE YOU BEEN DOING MOST OF YOUR WORK FROM HOME AND WILL THAT CHANGE AFTER THE ISSUE WITH THE 12? “We’ve been at the shop. We’re doing a split shift, so I’m on the 6-12 shift, so I get the morning run at it and I got home in time for this. We have two of our Cup teams on that shift and two of them on the afternoon shift, which is 1-7, so that’s in an effort to keep our people split up, again, just trying to compartmentalize as much as we can and limit exposure. If we do have a problem with somebody on A and we had to knock out a chunk of people in A, then we can grab some B shift people and try to make do in the meantime, so that’s kind of our redundancy. I’ve been at the shop and probably try to spend more time with the cars and stuff, but you’ve got to have faith in your people and we know the guys on that team are excellent, very experienced people. The biggest thing for me is just getting the process in place around it. That’s always got to be the fix. When you have a problem, address it, move on, but figure out why in the process it happened and how you change your process so it doesn’t happen again. Some people call that dummy-proofing or whatever they want to say and it kind of gets down to like, ‘Man, how many checklists do we need?’ But it’s a reality. I watch our pilots land. I know some of the pilots have been there longer than I have and I can’t imagine how many hundreds of times they’ve landed the plane, and I always sit kind of in the front and I watch them pull this card out and they go through the same checklist every single time and it seems like it’s got to be the most aggravating thing to go through because it’s the ultimate basics they start at and work all the way through, but that’s really what we’re doing. They’re in a zero mistakes game and so are we, so you’ve got to have those things in place and that’s how I’ll try to address this is just fixing the process.”
HOW WAS THIS WEIGHT FOUND AND REALIZED ON SUNDAY? “A NASCAR official was doing their normal inspection and they found it. It was before we had scaled the car or done anything else and we had a conversation about it. Obviously, there’s a lot of sensitivity around that right now. I think that the way we’re going and some of the games that have been played out there, people pulling weight out of the cars and stuff because there’s some different processes within the inspection program. There’s a lot of sensitivity. There’s not a lot of patience for it. The important thing to us was making sure that NASCAR knew it wasn’t a malicious intent. We weren’t trying to get five pounds out of them on the car in that area. It was just an oversight and that was kind of the conversation it was important for us to get across. I think they understood that and I think they realized it. It’s also their job to do something to react to it and that’s fine. We accept that. When you make mistakes, you’ve got to make up for them. That’s part of that, but it was just normal course of NASCAR inspection.”
IT LOOKED LIKE SOME THINGS DIDN’T GO SMOOTHLY IN THE PITS. ANY AREAS OF CONCERN? “That was probably my fault. I’ll take that one between Todd and I. We were coming down and obviously it was a rushed situation and we decided we wanted to take the opportunity to make an adjustment to the car at that time because we knew we wanted to get an adjustment. We didn’t get it earlier. We wanted to go ahead and get it in and when we called it, it was too late for them to adjust. The front carrier, who carries two tires, he goes to the opposite end. He goes to the back whenever he has to do an adjustment, so the tires go in a different order. Everything kind of flows differently with that pit stop, whenever you call an adjustment, and we didn’t give him enough time to get reshuffled on the wall based on the adjustment that we called. So that was just a situation where we thought we had a little bit more time for those guys to be able to adjust. Some of them knew they didn’t have time to adjust and didn’t adjust and some of them were trying to get the adjustment made and that’s where it kind of looks like a mess out there. I’ll call that one a leadership failure on understanding the timing and when you can do that and how much time they need to adjust for that, so that was definitely on our shoulders.”
WE USUALLY GET NASCAR RULES ON OCTOBER 1 FOR THE UPCOMING YEAR. HAS THERE BEEN TALK ABOUT THAT YET WITH EVERYTHING GOING ON AND DO YOU EXPECT ANY MAJOR CHANGES? “I wouldn’t expect anything major. I don’t know the exact timing of it. I would assume based off of what I’ve seen discussed I don’t see any delays to that date. There’s nothing that’s big enough that I would see holding that process up. There’s been a lot of focus still on Next Gen. There’s still a lot of things there to get sorted out and worked through, so I think that’s probably taken up a little bit of the time, but mainly because there’s not a lot that are like pressing for next season. I think it’s more understanding what are race weekend schedules gonna be? What are rosters gonna look like? What’s our testing gonna look like, if any? Those are kind of the key things that we’re really waiting on. Obviously, the schedule itself is important to have, but that’s actually less impactful to us than what the weekend schedule is. That’s where we’ll adjust and figure out where the plane loads and unloads is kind of immaterial as much as understanding how many people you’re taking on the plane and what are we doing for practice and stuff. That’s the one I’m more anxious about and they’re certainly working hard on it. I would hope by the end of the month to have that information at least relatively nailed down.”
