FORD RACING POLE STREAK CONTINUES
· Ford Racing’s recent hot streak continued on Saturday with Ricky Stenhouse Jr. winning the NASCAR Nationwide Series pole in his No. 6 Black Angus Ford Mustang. That gave Ford a sweep of the weekend pole awards at Bristol after Carl Edwards put his No. 99 Scotts Ford Fusion in the top spot during yesterday’s NASCAR Sprint Cup Series qualifying.
· This marks the second straight weekend Ford has won the pole in both the NASCAR Sprint Cup and NASCAR Nationwide Series. Matt Kenseth won the Cup pole and Carl Edwards the Nationwide pole at Las Vegas.
· Ford has three straight Sprint Cup Series poles with Edwards winning the top spot at Phoenix and Bristol, and Kenseth at Las Vegas.
NASCAR and Goodyear announced yesterday that a new tire will be used in tomorrow’s Jeff Byrd 500 than originally planned and all teams were allowed one set for today’s practice. Ford Racing talked with pole-sitter Carl Edwards and Greg Erwin, crew chief for Greg Biffle, on how the new tire reacted and how he thinks it will affect Sunday’s race.
CARL EDWARDS – No. 99 Scotts EZ Seed Ford Fusion – “The tire is a lot slower and it’s gonna be a little more difficult to drive. We’re still working on trying to get the car set up best for it, but it’s a challenge for everybody. We’re gonna do everything we can. We had one set of tires to practice on and one set of tires to figure things out, so I just hope we’ll be able to get it right with the amount of practice we got.” THE SPEED CHART SHOWS YOU 33RD. DOES THAT MEAN ANYTHING? “We never put the faster tires on, so that’s why we were slow. We could have run a faster lap if we would have ran those tires, but we just didn’t see a reason to do that. I feel good about tomorrow. We were fast compared to other people on the newer tire, so we’re good.”
GREG ERWIN, Crew Chief – No. 16 3M Ford Fusion – IS THIS THE ULTIMATE CURVEBALL? “Yeah, the car doesn’t drive anything like it did most of the day yesterday or even in the first session this morning. That new tire, at very best, is probably three or four-tenths a lap slower. Most of the Roush Fenway cars started with the new tire in this happy hour session, so none of them were really able to post a fast lap that’s gonna put them at the top of the board, but we ran that set of tires we had over 60 laps. We felt that was our best opportunity to get a good read on the tire wear and make the most adjustments to our race car. With the other tire there was just so much grip that there wasn’t a whole lot we could learn from it.” WHAT GOES ON BETWEEN NOW AND TOMORROW? “A lot of reading and a little bit of guessing. Truthfully, I think the cars that were good on the other tire are gonna be good on this tire. We’re lucky enough with our starting spot, and all of the Roush Fenway cars have good starting spots, so that will play to our advantage. We’re not into making big changes on our cars based off of things that we can’t run in practice, so we use our simulations to try and help steer us in certain directions. For the most part, what we’re gonna race tomorrow is gonna be one of the combinations that we ran today.”
