Ford Performance Notes and Quotes
NASCAR Cup Series
Quaker State 400 Qualifying
Friday, June 27, 2025

FORD RUNS ATLANTA CUP POLE STREAK TO SIX AS LOGANO CLAIMS TOP SPOT

• Joey Logano put his No. 22 Autotrader Ford Mustang Dark Horse on the pole today at EchoPark Speedway.
• Ford has won the last six NASCAR Cup Series poles at AMS (Joey Logano twice, Aric Almirola, Michael McDowell twice, and Ryan Blaney).
• Blaney won the pole for the race earlier this year at AMS.
• Ford has swept the front row in six straight AMS qualifying sessions – Logano/Berry (2025-2), Blaney/Cindric (2025-1), McDowell/Blaney (2024-2), McDowell/Logano (2024-1), Almirola/Blaney (2023-2), Logano/Cindric (2023-1).
• Team Penske has had at least one driver start on the front row in each of the last six races (Logano, 2025-2; Blaney and Cindric, 2025-1; Blaney, 2024-2; Logano, 2024-1; Blaney, 2023-2; Logano and Cindric, 2023-1)
• Ford swept the top 8 spots in the 2023 spring race.
• Ford swept the top 6 spots in the 2023 summer race.
• Ford swept the top 5 spots in the 2024 summer race.
• Ford swept the top 5 spots and 9 of the top 10 in the 2025 spring race.
• Ford swept the top 8 spots in the 2025 summer race.

Ford Qualifying Results

1st – Joey Logano
2nd – Josh Berry
3rd – Ryan Blaney
4th – Austin Cindric
5th – Ryan Preece
6th – Brad Keselowski
7th – Cole Custer
8th – Zane Smith
13th – Chris Buescher
17th – Todd Gilliland
25th – Corey LaJoie
27th – Noah Gragson
39th – Cody Ware
40th – David Starr

POLE-WINNING PRESS CONFERENCE

JOEY LOGANO, No. 22 Autotrader Ford Mustang Dark Horse – HOW MUCH EASIER IS IT NOW TO CONTROL THE RACE WITH HOW QUALIFYING WENT? “It definitely helps at the start, for sure. Being up front and controlling this race is the name of the game. If you can get up there and solidify the top positions, I feel like you can stay there. The thing is there’s a lot of what-ifs that play out in this race, a lot of cautions that maybe timed in a different way where it can jumble up the field. It’s hard to say you’re gonna be leading every lap of this thing. It’s kind of a hard thing to try to accomplish. The good thing is we controlled what we could today. I’m super proud of Team Penske, Roush Yates, Ford, obviously, to keep our Mustangs up there. It really shows the ability to repeat from car to car. It’s really hard to do. When you see we tied with the 21 and I think all the other cars were all within a couple hundredths of a second, and you think of all the parts and pieces on a race car and how you can put them together, to make them all end up the same like that is pretty impressive. I’m super proud of what Team Penske has been able to do there. It shows the discipline and quality control is definitely there, so I’m proud to see that. That part is cool to show as an example today, but tomorrow is a whole new day.”

HAVE YOU EVER EXPERIENCED OR SEEN A TIE LIKE THAT IN YOUR CAREER? “Not for the pole, no. I’m glad I’m on this end of it (laughing).”

HOW DIFFERENT IS QUALIFYING VERSUS THE RACE IN TERMS OF SETUP? DOES IT TRANSLATE? “You just don’t know, still. It’s by yourself. Everybody has the heights lowered and all that stuff for qualifying, so you don’t know. Tire pressures. Everything is different. I say everything is different, it’s not like you’re slinging springs at the thing because all we can do is pretty much adjust the heights and pressures from here. There’s no way to know.”

HAVE YOU GUYS TWEAKED YOUR GAME PLAN FOR TOMORROW OR JUST KEEP DOING WHAT YOU HAVE ALWAYS DONE? “I’d say for stages it works really well. I’d say as the race continues, at times, we, A, get separated or, B, the intensity ratchets up and we get wrecked. Unfortunately, the wrecks nine times out of 10 start right in the front and that happens to be where we are most of the time, which is great, but with these speedway races recently the best cars, the cars that lead all the laps most of the time don’t win these days just because of the wrecks. I feel like here in Atlanta it’s a little bit different, especially tomorrow, handling is gonna come into play. It’s gonna look like the old 550 days a little bit, I think. The draft is still gonna be there, don’t get me wrong, but I think the field will definitely have a little bit of separation. Some lifting will definitely come into play, those type of things. It’s a speedway race, but it’s almost a 550 race – like right on the edge – kind of like Michigan used to be years ago.”

WHAT WOULD YOU LIKE TO ACCOMPLISH BEFORE THE END OF YOUR CAREER THAT YOU HAVEN’T ACHIEVED YET? “My goals are very short-term goals all the time. I know some people like having some goals that sit out there a long ways, but mine are simple. It’s, win the championship and win the next race. What else does it have to be? And where the stats end up, they’ll end up from there. I’ve never had a number that I was trying to reach or anything like that. I just want to win what I can win today and I’ll focus on tomorrow when that happens. I’m not saying the way he (Denny Hamlin) does it is wrong, I like the long-term plan on a lot of things, but on this one I’m looking at the hood pins.”

Ford Performance Notes and Quotes
NASCAR Cup Series
Atlanta 2 Media Availability
Friday, June 27, 2025

Brad Keselowski, driver of the No. 6 Consumer Cellular Ford Mustang Dark Horse, got the first win for Mustang in the NASCAR Cup Series when he won here at EchoPark Speedway on Feb. 24, 2019. Keselowski stopped by the infield media center before qualifying to talk about tomorrow night’s race.

BRAD KESELOWSKI, No. 6 Consumer Cellular Ford Mustang Dark Horse – YOU’VE HAD ALL THREE RFK DRIVERS FINISH IN THE TOP 10 A COUPLE OF TIMES IN THE LAST MONTH. ARE YOU GUYS GONNA JET FROM HERE? “It’s a good thing. We’ve had some really strong races where you don’t get the results and it’s kind of frustrating, but we’re on a good path. We want wins. Strong showings like that are great and you’d like to think that we’re paying some dues in order to get the wins that we really need, but they’re not wins. I’m very optimistic that we can turn that into something with the weeks we have in front of us, but until then it doesn’t matter. With the way this format is we don’t get any bonus for top 10s. It’s all about the wins, but still it’s not a bad problem to have. A lot of reasons for optimism. All three teams have shown some bright spots. I think that the 17 car, Chris Buescher, qualifying really well, racing really well. That team is very mature. It’s got mature people across the board, pit crew and crew chiefs and drivers and they’re clicking off really strong runs, but just a tiny bit short of getting that win. The 60 car has really grown well together. Last year, we put that team together and ran a partial schedule with Derrick Finley and we had a handful of different drivers and matured a lot of that team and a partial schedule, whether it be pit crew as well, and that team has fired off with putting Ryan in as the driver full-time and shown a lot of strength. We’re probably not where we want to be with my car, the 6 team. I had a slow start to the season, but starting to find a rhythm of our own here over the last month with good runs in the Coke 600, good run at Michigan, good run at Pocono, so I think three of the last five races we’ve been a contender to run up front and compete for the win, but ultimately we haven’t punched through with any of the three cars and I’m eager to do just that.”

DO YOU PUT ANY NEW PROCEDURES IN PLACE TO AVOID THE PENALTY YOU GOT FOR PITTING TOO SOON LAST WEEK? “No, probably just better communication and working through how we missed it. It was kind of a system of redundancy errors, which is not fun, but it happened. We’ll try to be better for it and move on. I don’t know if there’s any glorified procedure to fix to it. That might be a better question for Jeremy Bullins and my spotter, TJ, but it certainly wasn’t an ideal situation.”

WITH T.J. PUCHYR SAYING HE IS GOING TO BUY RICK WARE RACING AND KEEP BOTH CHARTERS AFTER 2026, DOES THAT MAKE YOUR ABILITY TO BE A THREE-CHARTER TEAM MORE DIFFICULT AFTER 2026? “To be determined. As a company, we have to sit down and go through our strategy and what we want to do there. I think it’s pretty well publicly known that we have the first right of refusal on all those deals, so we have to decide where we want to go.”

YOU’RE RACING AT NIGHT, SO IS IT HARDER TO QUALIFY DURING THE DAY? IS A DIFFERENT SETUP REQUIRED? “This track is just super hard to predict. I think here yesterday it was almost 100 degrees and pretty slick. It cools off a little in the night as the sun sets, but it’s still pretty hot. Today, it’s cooled off a bunch. You can stand outside and feel like you could live out there for an hour or two at least, whereas yesterday not so much. So a lot goes into it. When the sun will set during the race, probably halfway-ish I’m guessing from the information I have, but when it does set, the track should gain a lot of grip. It’ll be interesting to me to see the track has sat through another half of a summer. You can really see it turning gray. I had to remind myself on the track walk today that it’s been three years since it’s been repaved because if you actually walk it, it looks like it’s been 10-15 years. It’s seen a lot of degradation. It’s got a lot of different character spots in it that it didn’t have before. It reminds me a little bit of the old Daytona and it’s kind of turning into that type of racetrack. The dynamics of that race are gonna change a lot, just from the track, but when you throw the weather and then the sunset in it, you’re basically running two or three different races as one.”

DOES ANYTHING CHANGE IN THE DYNAMIC AT RFK WHEN EACH OF THE TEAM’S FATE IS MORE ADVERSARIAL TO ONE ANOTHER THAN NORMAL? “No, I think we entered the season – I don’t want to say protecting against that mindset, but having the foresight that it could be realistic and saying, ‘Hey, we just need to get all three cars to win.’ That’s our goal. That’s our focus and then we’re not thinking that way, but if we get so caught up in racing each other, none of them will make it in, so we’ll try to get all three of them to win.”

YOU CAN BE AGGRESSIVE WITH STRATEGY AT A LOT OF THE RACES LEFT IN THE REGULAR SEASON. WILL YOU BE EVEN MORE AGGRESSIVE WITH WHERE YOU ARE IN THE STANDINGS? “To some degree. The road courses, but even Pocono is that way and I suspect Indy will be that way. I feel like that’s probably my mentality regardless, but it’s interesting because I don’t necessarily think it’s all of our team’s mentality. I think the 17 team has a very good shot of just pointing their way in. They’re very well positioned, but certainly when you look at our season it looks that way with the 6 car, yes.”

HAVE YOU HAD ANY INTERACTION WITH T.J. PUCHYR? “Yeah, I know T.J. T.J. has been in the garage for a while and he called me and gave me a briefing of what was going on there.”

WHEN YOU SAY RIGHT OF FIRST REFUSAL DOES THAT MEAN YOU COULD HAVE AN OPPORTUNITY TO GET ONE OF THE CHARTERS AFTER THE PURCHASE OF RWR? “There’s always an opportunity. The juice and the squeeze have to line up.”

WHAT DO YOU REMEMBER ABOUT THE FOURTH OF JULY DURING YOUR CHILDHOOD DAYS? DID THAT MEAN DAYTONA? “No. Actually, it being kind of a Truck Series/ARCA brat, it was Milwaukee. We would usually race the Milwaukee Mile around the Fourth of July weekend. I can remember driving back through Chicago because we lived in Michigan and the fireworks would be going off. I have a lot of great riding in the motorhome stories and the July Fourth race weekends were always some of the best.”

HAS THERE BEEN ANY FURTHER CONVERSATION ABOUT THE OTHER DECISION TO STAY OUT ONE LAP LATER AND THEN THE CAUTION CAME OUT? “No. We’ve been really busy, a lot of focus. We were testing at Gateway the last two days and I would say all of our energy has been consumed by just trying to be fast. The opportunities and the different things that happen through the year, particularly around pit strategy, are very lotteryesque and your best way to take advantage of those situations is just to be fast, so I think our energy and time is focused on what do we need to do to show the pace that we’ve shown, whether that be at Michigan or Pocono or a handful of other races like Charlotte. How do we get that pace at more races that will put us in a position to where some of those things when they fall your way you’re able to capitalize.”

WHEN YOU GET BIT BY A CAUTION LIKE THAT CAN IT MAKE THE TEAM GUN SHY ABOUT THOSE DECISIONS TO RUN LONG? “It’s like the age old blackjack story where you sit down at the table and you don’t hit on 16 and the next card that comes up was a 4 and you lose and you’re like, ‘Wow, that was pretty dumb.’ And so your tendency the next time is, ‘let’s hit,’ and then you get a face card and you bust. It’s kind of like you pick a path and you stick to the path. When you flip-flop back and forth on the path, I’ve always believed that’s when you make a mistake because a lot of those shots are 50/50 shots and they come back and that’s what I meant. You’ve just got to make sure that when it does go your way you’re fast enough to make it count and it didn’t go our way at Pocono. We were good enough to make it count if it did and that’s just the breaks.”

AS A DRIVER, HOW MUCH EMPHASIS AND FOCUS ARE YOU PUTTING IN THE CHALLENGE AND DO YOU FEEL YOUR MENTALITY TOMORROW MAY CHANGE LATE IN THE RACE. AS A TEAM OWNER, HAVE YOU TOLD CHRIS AND RYAN TO PUT MORE OR LESS EMPHASIS ON IT? “The only thing I told them as a team owner is to make sure we all shared if we won, and they said yes, but we didn’t say exactly what that meant. I agreed to share if I won with the team and they at least nodded that they would do the same. I probably should have outlined that a little better. We have a few more weeks to figure that out, but I think as a whole some of the drivers have been kind of dismissive over the bracket challenge, which always feels like the ‘don’t take a picture with the trophy’ type of thing where you’re like, ‘I don’t want to talk about it because I don’t want to be thinking about it.’ But I think it will become a lot more real, whether it be for the drivers or for the media or for the fans as it progresses into the later rounds of the next few weeks. I look at the races ahead of us, for example this weekend, and it’s like the field is so big right now that it’s like, ‘I don’t really know what to say.’ It’s too much, but I’m hopeful that all three of our cars will make it through the next couple rounds and then it will certainly become more of a focal point for us.”

DID YOU TALK TO KYLE BUSCH AT ALL ABOUT YOUR MATCHUP? “No, I haven’t talked to him at all. I don’t know if he’s here. He’s not here. He didn’t show up. Showing up is half the battle. I’m sure there will be some great matchups along the way and some shocking losses.”

Toyota GAZOO Racing – Denny Hamlin
NASCAR Cup Series Quotes

HAMPTON, Ga. (June 27, 2025) – Joe Gibbs Racing driver Denny Hamlin was made available to the media on Friday prior to qualifying for the NASCAR Cup Series race at EchoPark Speedway.

DENNY HAMLIN, No. 11 King’s Hawaiian Toyota Camry XSE, Joe Gibbs Racing

Have you had any discussions with your 23XI drivers about the in-season tournament or the Playoff push?

“No discussions about the in-season stuff. Obviously, the motivation is pretty straight forward. You’ve got a million-dollar prize if you can make it through the rounds, and certainly, I think they have a legitimate opportunity there, but mostly, trying to get this last playoff push. We’ve got multiple cars that are in. We’ve got one car that is out, overall, you just have to shake the bad luck. You have to shake the stuff we’ve done that hasn’t helped our drivers finish races, just have to be a little bit cleaner with our days and this is the time that you have to make the push because you can’t count on that cutline not moving.”

Do you approach this race differently when you run at night versus during the day?

“A little bit. Mainly it is about track temperature, whether that is day or night, the track will have a certain amount of grip based on the temperature of it. If we were racing in conditions like this during the day, not only having the ambient temperature outside, but the sun radiating off of it, it would have a lot less grip than it would have at night. The teams just weigh that balance and they try to give you a car that is going to be as fast as it possibly can be while also having the handling that it needs. Certainly, I believe that our philosophy this weekend will be qualify bad, race good. That is what we are probably going to do.”

How do you feel about paying the drivers directly for the in-season tournament?

“I think that the interest should align. I think the conversations that I’ve had with my team – I can only speak where I’m at as a driver. If I can make it through this round, make it to a road course, I’m going to want our strategy to revolve around beating whoever I’m up against, where typically, we are going to get a couple road course stage points and we’re trying to surive the rest of the day and get a decent finish. I think I’m going to do whatever I can to beat the other person. Everyone’s motivation is a little bit different there, but I would think the interest would somewhat align, again I think it becomes tougher if you are a bubble team, because you have to chase points, and maybe not chase one person, but I’m in a different position where I’m locked in, we have points – likely not going to win the road courses anyway, so flip it and get the best finishes that we can.”

What did you have to do in the past to keep Bubba’s attitude in place versus how he handled last week’s disappointment?

“Well, a lot of it is just, it’s not like, it’s not giving 23XI a free pass, right? I think it is just so much easier, if you have issues and you want to kick and scream, like, do it to us. When you do it outwardly in the public and in the media, it creates a lot of other distractions that you have to deal with. He’s made it easier – a third of the races he has DNF’d, right, and is still in the Playoffs. He hasn’t even existed for a third of the races when it comes to finishes. I think it just shows how strong that they are, and what they are capable of doing, and I think truthfully, the biggest change has just come from him within, more so than anything I’ve done with him or the team has done with him, and I think certainly, we look at the biggest change coming in his personal life midway last year, and what not, and I think that has changed the most.”

How much does he need to win the regular season or is there any pressure on him?

“I just know the resources that we’ve put in at 23XI, and all of our driver should win. That is the expectation that I have of them. Obviously, it is a result-based business, and if you don’t over time, you consider your options. Overall, I’ve seen enough progression, specifically, from the the 23 standpoint, that I can see where this can go. Obviously, putting himself in a Playoff position year after year is good, but winning makes it better. It makes it good for the team; it makes it good for your sponsorships. The progression is smaller, but it is still happening with Riley (Herbst) as well. We started at the bottom of the cellar, and it is slowly but surely getting a little bit better. That is what I’m looking at as an owner, but certainly, I need all my cars winning at some point. There are just too many resources, too many good people over there not to win more races, and certainly, I think we’ve underperformed as far as actual winning this year. We expect more, but a lot of it – I think we carry that burden.”

If the sun stays out during stage one tomorrow, how much will this track change?

“A lot. I believe that handling will be a big factor. We keep waiting for this place to kind of turn the corner and when is going to separate itself a little bit with car handling, the field size. Is it going to start to stretch out where handling really matters? It hasn’t got to that point yet, but certainly, if it ever will, it will come during these type of conditions. There is a balance to be had. Can you hang on – if you build a car that is going to be fast in qualifying today, can you build a car that can do that and can also survive the day part of the race tomorrow to get to get to the night so you can use your all out speed. I personally want a car that I can turn left and right in, in the middle of the corner and not have any second thoughts, but everyone has a different style on what they want out of their car. I think we are still a few years from it being a true handling type race track.”

How much of your focus is going towards the regular season championship?
“A little bit. Certainly, I don’t know how good our opportunity is to win the regular season championship. I think we are going to have to have some things go our way that – (William) Bryon has obviously had speed. He’s executed extremely well. It’s just been the last couple of weeks that he has had a little chink in the armor, but still, we are still a race and a half behind when it comes to the actual standings. Happy that last week we able to get ourselves back to third after missing Mexico, but a goal of mine, truthfully, would be to be second or third. I think if I can be there, that is enough bonus points that will translate into the Playoffs. If I get one or two more wins, that should be enough that I would feel comfortable going into the Playoffs.”

Did you get to the bottom of the brake rotors from last week?

“The team did, yes.”

Was it the brake rotors or a team decision?

“Without getting too in depth with it, it was a team oversight. If that’s – just too aggressive. I don’t know how else to say it. They knew what they had, but they didn’t think about the implications of what they were doing set-up wise.”

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