David Ragan, driver of the No. 6 AAA Ford Fusion, is 12th in the NASCAR Sprint Cup standings going into this weekend’s Coca-Cola 600. He held a Q&A session Friday morning to discuss the challenges Lowe’s Motor Speedway presents in the longest race of the season.
DAVID RAGAN – No. 6 AAA Ford Fusion – WHAT ARE YOUR THOUGHTS ON THE STRATEGY FOR SUNDAY? “Obviously starting during the day and ending at night, you’re probably gonna see some cars dominate early and not be so good late, and then some cars that are pretty average the first part be really good toward the end, so you’ll see some different people up front, I think. Hopefully, we’ll be able to pass a little better than we did last week. I think we’re constantly working on our race cars and trying to get them to handle better and this is always a fun weekend, getting to do a lot of activities around the Charlotte area that go with the Coca-Cola 600 is a lot of fun – so 600 miles is a long race. We’ll have to be patient in the beginning and, hopefully, be around at the end. I think we’ll have a good enough car that we can contend for another top-10, top-5 finish and that’s all we can ask for, and then hopefully try to win one of these things pretty soon.” HOW DO YOU APPROACH THIS RACE AS FAR AS CAR SETUP AND AS A DRIVER? “Setting up the car, you put a little bit of adjustment availability into the setup of the car for later on in the race, where normally we would know what direction we’re gonna have to go in a 400-mile race or a 300-lap race – something like that. Here, the track is gonna change a lot. The track is gonna rubber up a lot and you’re probably gonna see some guys running on the top, in the middle and on the bottom throughout the 600 miles, so we’ll build some adjustability into the race car where we can make some big adjustments throughout the night. If we’re a 20th-place car the first part of the race, we might be a car that can win the last part, so you just never give up. If something does go wrong, if you get a lap down, you’re gonna have some cautions to get that lap back, so you’re just a little bit more patient and there’s probably a little more give-and-take the first half of the race. I don’t want to say you’re taking it easy because you have to run hard, but probably just more give-and-take.” WOULD IT MEAN MORE TO WIN THIS RACE BEING IN CHARLOTTE? “Oh, definitely. This is one of the toughest tracks to get a hold of. It’s so temperature sensitive and with the new pavement a few years ago, we’ve got the new car and always a pretty difficult tire to get a handle on, so when you can come to a track like Charlotte, setups are real critical, pretty high speeds, 600 miles is the longest race and a lot of factors play in like your pit crew and your decisions all night really mean a lot. So it would mean a lot to win this race, not only being here in Charlotte but just at Lowe’s Motor Speedway. You look at the history of this race and you see a lot of champions and great competitors that have won this race, so it would be great for our team, it would be great for AAA and it would be awesome as a driver to win this race.” HOW DIFFICULT WAS IT TO REPLACE MARK MARTIN? “Going into the 6 car, I never really took the attitude of, ‘Hey, here I am trying to replace Mark Martin.’ Some of the best in the business couldn’t have stepped into the 6 car and totally replaced him. I’ve just tried to do the best job that I can and keep the sponsors happy and try to keep the fans excited about the No. 6 car. Mark is still a big part of my career. We talk as often as we can and I know we’re on kind of different paths now, but he’ll always be known as the driver of the 6 car and he’ll always be related to the No. 6, so I’ve just tried to do what I could with it and certainly encourage everybody to remember Mark in the 6. I don’t want to totally write that off and that is a lot of why I’m here – from what Mark and guys like Jimmy Fennig and Pat Tryson and certainly Jack Roush have done for the 6 car the last 15 or 20 years.” HOW MUCH MORE COMFORTABLE ARE YOU THIS YEAR COMPARED TO LAST? “Anything your second time around is a lot easier. Anything you can do twice you should learn from your first time and do a little better job, and the bottom line is everything is easier. We’re making less mistakes and we can get there quicker. A year ago, we would eventually be fast and I would be comfortable and I would run good lap times, but it was probably 100 miles to go in the race and it was a little bit too late. So this year we can unload and we’re a little faster. We’ve been qualifying a lot better, so we’ve had better track position, better pit stall selection, so everything has seemed to happen a little easier and a little smoother. I know what’s around the next corner. I know how to prepare for it and ultimately making better decisions and less mistakes.” WERE YOU ABLE TO FIGURE OUT HOW TO MAKE YOUR CAR HANDLE BETTER AFTER LAST WEEK? “Time will tell after we get through some different practices and, yes, we have made a few changes. That’s not the car we tested out here several weeks ago, so hopefully we’re bringing back the car we tested and we’ve got a pretty good notebook on how the car reacted from the five, six o’clock hour to the eight or nine o’clock hour at the test. So we’re going off some good notes and hopefully that will help, and then I’m just gonna have to try some different lines and find some clean air. But I think the bottom line is we’re just gonna have to stand it pretty free at the beginning of the run to have anything. I think we saw last week with the 9 that track position means a lot. It’s really tough to pass. I think some of the fastest guys on the track were just kind of stuck where they were running, so I think we’ve got to keep an eye on that and maybe have some pit strategy. Certainly clean air means a lot, so hopefully we’ll be able to make some good decisions and get us a good qualifying start tonight.” ARE GUYS GIVING YOU MORE SPACE OR RESPECT ON THE TRACK? “I think it shows a little bit as we go. Certainly nothing happens overnight and I think, not only running better, but just wrecking less and being around more. They know your face and who you are and hanging out with them more in the garage and also running the Nationwide Series helps a lot. Anytime you can get experience racing with your fellow competitors and they kind of get a feeling on how you’re gonna race them, and then I get a feeling on how other people are gonna race me. So we treat each other a little different, it certainly goes both ways, but I do get a little more respect out there. I’ve certainly got a long ways to go, but we’re on the right track and we’ve just got to keep doing the right things and eventually we’ll be where we need to be.”
Carl Edwards, driver of the No. 99 Office Depot Ford Fusion, and Greg Biffle, driver of the No. 16 Dish Network Ford Fusion, held Q&A sessions after NASCAR Sprint Cup practice Friday afternoon.
CARL EDWARDS – No. 99 Office Depot Ford Fusion – HOW DO YOU PREPARE FOR 600 MILES HERE? “Six hundred miles is a marathon of a race. The Coke 600, there’s always that extra variable of how grueling it is, so it’s something that I look forward to. This is what I train for and as long as I’m there at the end, our team has been able to be up front, so it’s been a fun race for us. Mentally, it’s a tough race, too. When they say, ‘Alright, there’s halfway.’ You’re halfway done and you’ve already run 200 laps at Lowe’s Motor Speedway, that’s a long night.” DO YOU CONSIDER YOURSELF A FAVORITE WITH HOW GOOD YOU’VE BEEN ON THESE TRACKS? “I think our Office Depot team has obviously been great on the mile-and-a-halfs, but everyone is kind of catching up and the competition is real tight right now. Judging from the all-star race with how Greg and Matt were running in the last segment and how we ran in the middle, I think we can be pretty good in this race.” WHAT ARE YOUR THOUGHTS ON THE AFLAC SPONSORSHIP? “I can’t talk about the specifics of our sponsorship contracts for a couple of reasons. One, I don’t know all the specifics, but I am very, very grateful. Office Depot has been wonderful from the beginning. To have partners like Aflac and Claritin, in light of the economy right now and how tight every dollar is to every person, it means a lot for our team to have the support that we have. It’s crucial right now.” WHAT DO YOU THINK OF HUMPY MOVING ON? “It’s good for everyone but Bruton probably because it makes him available to do stuff for other people. He’s a guy that anyone in this garage would benefit from his advice – any team and any sponsor. I’m sure him retiring from this job, he’ll never be able to retire because he’s too good.” BRUTON BOUGHT KENTUCKY SPEEDWAY. WHAT WOULD YOU THINK OF RACING CUP THERE? “I don’t care if we go race Cup at Pevely, Missouri. That would be awesome. I love racing. I love the different race tracks, so if it’s possible for us to get a Cup race at Kentucky, that’s great. It’s just another different race track that we go to. The fans in the Cincinnati area and northern Kentucky are awesome. I love racing there myself, so that would be great.” WILL NASCAR’S NEW RULE ABOUT THE REAR OF THE CARS AFFECT YOU? “I don’t know exactly what NASCAR is doing to restrict it, but I think, from what I understand, this really doesn’t change much of what we’re doing. I’ve seen some of these cars are pretty wild – extremely crazy on that rear end steer, but I don’t think it’ll affect us much. It’s fine with me whatever they want to do.” WHAT KIND OF RACE TO YOU EXPECT SUNDAY? “There will be a lot of patience on Sunday. I think it was amazing to me that in the all-star race we didn’t have a caution and we didn’t have any wrecks. I think that the 25-lap runs kind of made it hard to see a lot of passing and racing because for 25 laps you can drive these things white-knuckle and clean air meant a lot. You didn’t see guys really searching for other lines. I think in the 600 you’ll see a different race because the long runs will get guys running the top and bottom.” WERE NO CAUTIONS A PART OF THE 25-LAP SEGMENTS? “The reason we didn’t have any wrecks is not because these cars are real easy to drive because they’re as hard to drive as ever. I think it was just one of those nights where everybody did a great job and we had really good racers out there. That was cool.” DOES IT EVER GET BORING IN THE CAR WHEN YOU HAVE TO BE SO PATIENT? “It’s never boring in a race car at one of these places – never. Just because it’s hard to pass, it almost makes it tougher because you have to drive really aggressively to get anything done and that makes it more tense and there’s a lot more anxiety when you do get around someone because you know, ‘Hey, I’ve got to make this work’ because it’s really tough to do. For me, some of the hardest driving I’ve ever done was last Saturday night. We probably just need longer runs to get a good race going.” IS THIS A BIG POLE TO WIN? “Oh yeah. This would be a great pole. That’s what we’re working on right now is how to get it. This race has the potential to go green for a long time and that leader is gonna be really fast in clean air, so you do not want to start in the back. I’ve started in the back a lot here and I don’t like it. I’d like to start up front. That would be key.” WHAT’S IT GOING TO BE LIKE AS FAR AS ADJUSTMENTS? “It’ll be really tough to keep up with the car in this race. It was tough for us the other night in the all-star event, so it’s a crew chiefs race, that’s for sure.” WHAT’S BEEN THE KEY TO YOUR SUCCESS ON THESE TRACKS? “It’s been engineering and hard work. We were way behind at the beginning of last year and picked it up. We got a couple of wins last year and won some races this year. Right now, David Ragan is up on top of the board and he’s having a great year. It’s just been a lot of hard work and as long as we can keep up that hard work, we won’t fall behind like we did.” FORDS HAVE HAD A LOT OF SUCCESS HERE. WHY? “I don’t know. I hope I can put a Ford in Victory Lane. Ford has been really good to me and I’d like to be a part of their resurgence in the marketplace. I’m sure a victory here would help with that, I’m sure.” HOW IS AFLAC GOING TO MARKET YOU? “I don’t know. Right now, I’m focused on winning the championship for Office Depot.”
GREG BIFFLE – No. 16 Dish Network Ford Fusion – YOU HAD A GOOD ALL-STAR RACE. DOES THAT GIVE YOU SOME CONFIDENCE FOR THE 600? “It really does. We were just extremely happy with our car right when we unloaded it. Just like I said last week after the all-star race, our test didn’t go as good as we wanted it to. We were about a 15th-place car, maybe a 20th-place car in the test, and then we unloaded for the all-star event and the car was really fast. We’re extremely happy with that. We don’t really know where we picked up the speed. The guys made a few adjustments and learned a little bit with the data as they crunched the numbers back at the shop over our two-day test and they came up with something slightly different, not much, and boy that was really it. It made the difference. Again, today off the truck it’s an extremely good race car, extremely fast, not the same car we obviously ran here Saturday night, but it’s the car we tested here. It’s just fast. It’s fast in race trim, fast in qualifying trim. I just wish that Saturday night race was a points race. That would give me a second-place finish and get me headed back up in the right direction.” IS THIS CAR JUST HIT-AND-MISS? KASEY WENT FROM DEPRESSED TO WINNING. “Yes. These cars are very, very temperamental – very temperamental. Never before have we been putting in 1/32nd shims in and out and adjusting on the cars ever so slightly. It’s so easy to get off just a tiny, tiny bit. It is so easy. And a perfect example of that was Sunday night at California Speedway. We were dominating the race, just driving away. We put two tires on and everybody else put four on, and just driving off, three-tenths faster than the field. Carl Edwards was struggling to get grip, or whatever his problem was, then it rains out. Monday, the sun comes out and we were terrible. I think we finished 15th and just struggling to keep our head above water, or somewhere around there, and Carl just drove off and embarrassed us. So the same thing with Kasey. Just the change in temperature of the race track, I’m sure they made adjustments on it. But you’re not allowed to change a lot of stuff. I don’t even know if you’re able to change anything from the showdown to the all-star race, but it could have just been the temperature drop. It got nighttime and he got out in front in clean air. He had four segments to adjust on it and they got it right. We just made a mistake between the third and fourth segment. We had an issue with the tires we put on. I’m not gonna sit here and say we would have beat him no matter what, but we had a little issue and we weren’t able to capitalize on it. We could right at the beginning. I was a lot faster, but then our car started getting tight quick and couldn’t get him. Track position is a lot. That meant a lot and they had three or four times to adjust on it – short, short runs and Kasey probably kept tweaking on that thing. And then the temperature probably played into his hand. Their car accelerated in the nighttime.” WILL YOU HAVE TO TAKE MORE CHANCES IN THE 600 TO MAINTAIN TRACK POSITION? “Yeah, definitely keeping track position is gonna be the key. The other thing you’ve got to remember is we’re gonna have 43 cars out there, so you’re constantly going to be in traffic, probably. Once we get, say 20 to 30 laps into a run, you’re gonna constantly be in traffic. The same thing happened in Darlington. Kyle Busch drove off a little bit and then when he got in traffic, he couldn’t pass them and I ran him down. I was right on his bumper. Then I was leading and I’d catch lap traffic and I couldn’t get around them, they’d run me down right away. So I see that same situation happening on Sunday night, although this race track is much, much bigger. But what will enhance the racing is more cars on the race track to where everybody is in traffic. Right now, you put one car out in clean air, yeah, he has an advantage. But you put 43 cars on that race track and you get more than a 30-lap run, you’re gonna be in traffic the whole night and that’s gonna kind of be the equaling factor for all the cars to try and see some racing.” YOU FELT LIKE YOU HAD A LOOSE WHEEL IN THE LAST SEGMENT LAST WEEK. HAS THAT BEEN LOOKED AT IN HOUSE? “Yeah. It’s been tough for us. We’ve had some problems and we think we have a parts issue. We’ve changed all of our wheel studs and lugnuts out for the 600, but we did get back to the shop and we’re finding issues with all the cars, not just my car. So we think that possibly the speed, the vibration, the loading – you know this place is really, really fast and so is Darlington. These are probably two of the highest loads we see on the right side tires are these two race tracks because of the speeds, especially Darlington. Darlington was over the top on cornering speed on those right side tires, so that is gonna pry on those wheel studs and lugnuts and put a tremendous amount of force on them. It’s gonna make them come loose if the hardware is not mating properly. There’s probably a whole science to this – thread-pitch and lugnut and the amount of slop on the stud it has and there’s probably just a whole thing to that we certainly don’t understand and everybody else, but we think there is a hardware issue with what we were using, possibly, so we’ve switched out to what we’ve used in the past for the 600, and we’re switching all of our cars back out. We switched four of our cars over a while back to some different hardware that seemed to be on and off. The tire changers liked the equipment better and, possibly, that might be some of our issues, we think. But that was my question, ‘How many other teams in the garage are using this equipment?’ And that question we can’t answer. We know there are other teams using it because we see the name on the boxes, on their pit carts and everything else, so we’re just taking all precautions for the 600 to go back to we know what works, we know we’ve used this in the past and have never really had issues.” IS THERE ANY CHANGE YOU CAN THINK OF THAT WOULD MAKE THE CAR LESS TEMPERAMENTAL? “You know what? I’m probably not the best guy for that. Maybe some of our engineering team might have a better idea of what makes the thing so temperamental. We’re still trying to figure that out. We’re trying to pinpoint that, almost pin the tail on the donkey almost. We’re still learning. There’s so much to learn about this car. We’ve got a long ways to go. I wouldn’t really change anything. I think it’s a pretty good platform to build on. There are things we could probably change to make the car racier, if you will, and possibly changing the splitter height might be one of those things, but we’ve spent a lot of time and a lot of technology getting it ironed out where it’s at, so it’s tough to just go and start making major changes on that car. But, in the future, I’m sure NASCAR is gonna tweak on that thing.” KYLE BUSCH SAID SUNDAY WOULD BE THE SAME AS THE ALL-STAR RACE. YOU SAY TRAFFIC MIGHT MAKE A DIFFERENCE? “Yeah. You’ve got to remember, I led the third segment and the 31 car was in the middle of three and four and I was in the center of the backstretch. That’s 20 laps and I caught him. So, if there were 43 cars, I would have been passing lapped cars at that point. That’s what we all see when we see races. I think of Richmond or some place like that, then it puts side-by-side racing back in it. The reason why it looks so boring is it’s a mile-and-a-half race track, the fastest car got to the front and the thing kind of strung out. We only had 22 cars in the field, so you’re not gonna see a whole lot of racing because there wasn’t enough cars. Now, if it was the Bud Shootout and you have restrictor plate cars, and they’re all bunched up and there are only 20 of them, you’re gonna see something exciting. But on a downforce race track, I don’t think you’re gonna see a lot of exciting stuff in 20 laps with only 20 cars. I think it’s gonna take the night. I think it’s gonna be a good race. I think you’re gonna see passing. You’re gonna see strategy – definitely. You’re gonna see two tires, four tires, no tires. And then a guy is gonna have to come and put tires on and he’s gonna be back in traffic. It’s gonna be exciting. There are gonna be 15 cars a lap down, 10 cars a lap down. Restarts. It’s gonna be a bunch of stuff going on.”
COCA-COLA 600 QUALIFYING
TRAVIS KVAPIL – No. 28 Lumber Liquidators Ford Fusion (Qualified 43rd) – “It’s a big letdown. We came here with a little bit of a different package with our primary car and we just didn’t have it worked out right. We bottomed out going into turn three on the first lap of practice and wrecked the car. Unfortunately, we didn’t get a lot of laps on our back-up car, but on the good side this is the car we raced all last weekend. We’ve got great test information to fall back on, but we just didn’t get a good chance to give our qualifying run a good effort. We only made three or four laps of practice with this back-up and, obviously, we’re in the field so we just need to take care of it and work hard on Saturday to get ready for Sunday.” THE SAME THING HAPPENED IN TRUCK PRACTICE LAST WEEK. YOU WRECKED ON YOUR FIRST LAP. “Yeah, it was kind of the same thing last week. We cut a tire last week and wrecked a truck. I don’t know, we need to change our luck and do something a little different. I hate it for the guys because they have to work real hard and both things just happened. It wasn’t like I messed up or the guys missed something, we just had some issues there with that first car and it just got us behind. The worst part about it is we talked all week about how important we thought it was gonna be to qualify. That’s why we came here in qualifying trim today and we haven’t done that all year. Our plan really unraveled on us.”
DAVID GILLILAND – No. 38 freecreditreport.com Ford Fusion (Qualified 32nd) – “My day wasn’t too bad. We experienced a lot of the same things we did last week in practice for the showdown. We tried some stuff for qualifying trim in practice and just never really got a handle on it, so we went back to some stuff we tried in the test. We weren’t 100 percent happy with either, so in qualifying we were just a little bit too tight. We’ve been loose in qualifying historically this year, so we opted to go toward the tight side and we were too tight. It could be worse because we could be in a back-up car, but everything is good. I feel really good about our race and the stuff that we were able to learn last week in the showdown is gonna help us. We’re real excited about that and looking forward to the race.”
JAMIE MCMURRAY – No. 26 Irwin Ford Fusion (Qualified 15th) – “It was OK. That was as fast as I could go. We tested here and made a couple of qualifying runs and the car was pretty good, but it’s so much hotter now that the balance isn’t quite the same. When my lap was over, if I would have went any faster I felt like I would have spun out, so that was all I had.”
DAVID RAGAN – No. 6 AAA Ford Fusion (Qualified 5th) – “I’m pretty happy. Certainly I would have liked to have gone a little bit faster. We were just a little free. We were pretty good in practice and we thought it would cool down a little bit, which it did, so we just made a little small adjustment on it. I think we’ve got a great race car. Certainly the 18 and the 9 are pretty quick, but we’d always like to go a little bit faster.” BUT IT’S A GOOD STARTING SPOT. “Yeah, anywhere in that top five or 10 is a good starting spot. We feel like we’ve been pretty good on some of the longer races this year. We just kind of find our rhythm and get comfortable and start riding and I think we’ve been bringing some really good race cars to the race track. Hopefully we have a good Saturday and are able to fine-tune our race car during the night session on Saturday. That practice is gonna be pretty important and we need to get the car comfortable to where we can get going.”
GREG BIFFLE – No. 16 Dish Network Ford Fusion (Qualified 4th) – “I had no idea I missed it by that little. There was a big huge white trash bag laying on the race track getting into turn one. I knew I couldn’t run it over, so I had to be a little bit lower on the track and I must have turned down in the corner harder and the car just ran up the track. It would have done a flat or a 28.90 easy. The car was just so fast – so unbelievably fast. I don’t know with a car this good if it matters where you start. This car is good enough to win the race if we don’t have any problems. We’ll just have to wait and see.”