David Ragan, driver of the No. 6 AAA Ford Fusion, is tied with Clint Bowyer for 13th-place in the NASCAR Sprint Cup Series standings, only 26 points behind 12th-place Denny Hamlin for the 12th and final spot in the Chase for the Sprint Cup. Ragan held a press conference in the Bristol Motor Speedway infield media center to discuss his chase chances.
DAVID RAGAN – No. 6 AAA Ford Fusion – YOUR THOUGHTS ON BEING CLOSE TO GETTING IN THE CHASE? “I think we’ve got as good a shot at getting in as any of the guys in the top 12 to 14. We knew coming into this season that we would have the speed and we would have the team with the experience that we could be at this point at this time of the year, but we just had to make sure that we didn’t make any crazy mistakes along the way that would have kept us out. We have made a few mistakes. If I could go back a few races, I think we would comfortably in the top 10, but the bottom line is we’ve had good speed, we’ve had good fortune, we haven’t made many mistakes this year. Our whole program is just a little better from Friday to Sunday – to the completion of the race we’ve just been a little stronger where we seem to hit our marks on a regular basis. Everything is easier the second time around and we’re happy to be in this position. We’ve got three more races to go. It’s not over yet. There’s a lot of excitement to go and hopefully we can outlast everybody else and get in the chase.”
LAST YEAR IN THIS RACE YOU STRUGGLED. WAS THAT YOUR LOWEST POINT? “Yeah, it was pretty low because we qualified fourth and we ran in the top five the first 110 laps until we had a caution and then dropped from there. We had a right-front tire come loose and had to pit under green and lost all of our track position and seemed to lose focus. I think the transmission was popping out of gear and it was just one of those long nights where we were great to start with – a good qualifying effort – and then went down the drain pretty quick. It was certainly disappointing. This is one of my favorite race tracks, a lot of great race fans and good racing here and it’s a place you always dream well about running well at and we had a car that was capable of running it the top five, if not winning, so that was disappointing. Then we backed it up with a few strong runs after this race, so I think this is a race where anything can happen. We just have to be aggressive. I think we’ll have good speed, I just have to drive a smart race.”
ARE YOU DOING ANYTHING TO COPE WITH THE CHASE STRESS? “No, not really. I’ve had a lot of people ask me what am I gonna do, am I gonna take it easy or do things different the next few weeks, and I think we just need to keep doing what we’ve been doing. I was in Milwaukee Tuesday and Wednesday racing. I flew back home late Wednesday night and drove up here for two appearances yesterday and go to Martinsville next week to test the Nationwide car and go back to Milwaukee on Tuesday, so I think we’re just gonna keep doing what we’ve been doing – staying busy and staying in the seat. It’s good to think about the chase, it’s good to think about points and it’s good to be prepared, but it’s not good to worry yourself and get your team on pins and needles leading into the final three races. Whatever happens is gonna happen – just go out and do the best you can and we’ll have to live with it.”
YOU’VE BEEN MORE AGGRESSIVE THE LAST FEW WEEKS. DO YOU AGREE? “As you get more aggressive you better have some experience to back it up. I think I tried to be aggressive my first few starts in this series and I didn’t have the experience to back it up and I looked like a fool, so now I’ve got the experience to back it up. I’ve obviously got better car control and a better feel for what I need in the race car to go fast, and probably have a little bit more respect from the competitors out on the race track and everything is just a little easier. When you have all those things, you can afford to be more aggressive when you know what’s gonna happen, whereas before if you tried to be aggressive and you don’t know what you’re doing, you usually wind up getting yourself in trouble.”
IS THERE A FURTHER TRANSITION AS FAR AS GETTING TO A POINT WHERE YOU’RE RIGHT THERE FOR A WIN? “Yeah, I mean I learned the hard way. You hear a lot of people say you have to be around at the end to be in contention for a good finish and I think the biggest thing that we’ve thought about this year – and obviously we’re thinking about winning and what we need to do to get into Victory Lane – do we need to do anything different at the end of the race – and I think we’ve found out through good and bad experience that you just have to put yourself in contention and things are gonna happen for a reason. As long as we just cruise around in that top 10 or top 5 for a majority of the race, you never know what can happen, you might get an opportunity to make a good pit decision or you might get that good set of tires toward the end of the race and it might be a race-changing move. I don’t know if I’m answering your question or not, but you just have to be in contention the whole race and then your last fuel run or your last 30 or 40 laps, that’s when you can take a few more chances and take a few more risks based on what you learned throughout the race.”
BUT A LOT OF IT IS TRACK POSITION. “Oh, 100 percent. Track position is everything. You’ve got to have a car that’s capable of running fast at the end of the race. You can’t have a car that’s beaten and banged up. Even if you were a top-five car and qualified on the pole, that doesn’t mean anything 300 laps into this thing. Again, that was a prime example of us last year. We had a great car and we didn’t have a car to run at the end of the race. So, yeah, before I’d probably get upset and get nervous and started driving over my head if we qualified good and we fell back to 10th, but I don’t get too stressed out about that anymore. I just kind of wait for the next pit stop. You’re gonna have ample amounts of opportunities to adjust on your race car and you’re gonna have plenty of opportunities to make up positions that you gained or lost throughout the course of a run, so some things like you just learn from good and bad experiences.”
WAS THERE A POINT LAST YEAR WHEN YOU WORRIED ABOUT YOUR JOB? “I feel like every race I’m getting ready to be cut loose almost. I never have that false sense of job security. I think a lot of guys get in trouble and you feel like you can be here forever and I feel like going into this weekend if I don’t perform right, if I don’t get the job done, if I make mental mistakes, I’m gonna be on that border line, so I kind of have that feel every weekend. Certainly last year, yeah, you had that, but Jack Roush stood behind me and the Roush Fenway team – the guys back at the shop and Jimmy Fennig – we would struggle for a while, but then we’d bounce right back and have some top 10s and top 15s and have a fast car. We knew it was around the corner, we just had to make good decisions and try to make laps and try not to make mistakes. But I still have that same feel. I feel like that I’m not irreplaceable, that I can mess up for a few weeks in a row and I’ll be on the hot seat, so as long as I have that attitude, I feel like I’ll always be driving as hard as I can and trying to put my best foot forward.”
KYLE BUSCH SAID HE WOULD LIKE TO GO TO EACH TRACK JUST ONCE. WHAT IS YOUR OPINION ON THE SCHEDULE? “I think the schedule is good. Obviously, I’m a young kid. I’m not married, I don’t have any kids and I think I’m gonna try to race 100 races this year between my Nationwide car, my Cup car, I run a few Legends races, some dirt car races and try to run some road course races over the winter and see if I can’t get in 100 races this year. I think that would be pretty cool. At the end of the year when we leave Homestead, I’m gonna be at about 86, so I’m gonna have I think about 15 races to do between Homestead and the end of December, but I think the schedule is good. I like coming back to tracks for a second time, it gives us a second challenge. When we come here in the spring, it’s usually raining and snowing and freezing cold and it’s always hot here in the winter, so I like coming back to tracks like this for a second time. It’s a different situation. California is the same thing. I think there are some tracks, I’d love to go to Daytona five times a year, so I think the schedule is fine. I think it’s a good mix. I think the races are laid out in a good flow and I’m just happy to be a part of the show.”
WHAT KIND OF ADVICE WOULD YOU GIVE JOEY LOGANO FOR NEXT YEAR? “Probably just learn all you can from Tony and that situation right now. Certainly, that’s a strong team and a strong group to be around, and make sure that he learns all that he can right now watching them race and listening to them during practice. I wish I would have had that in the 2006 season, back where I could have gone to all the Cup races with Mark and been around him and Pat Tryson. I certainly feel like I would have learned a little more, so I would encourage him just to follow in Tony’s footsteps and watch what they do for the remainder of the season and get with Zipadelli and make sure they’re on the same page, but Joey’s got a tremendous amount of talent. Obviously, he’s got a lot of experience this year. He’s probably got just as much COT experience as any of us because he’s been driving and testing them for the same amount of time that we have, so he’ll be fine, but I would just say to learn all you can this year from Tony and those guys because they’ve got a pretty good program going on.”
IS THERE ONE DRIVER ON THE BUBBLE THAT YOU DIDN’T THINK WOULD BE THERE AT THIS POINT IN THE SEASON? “No. They’re all proven winners and proven fast guys. You look at the 11 car and they’ve kind of had an up-and-down season. He’s been very, very strong a few weeks, but then he struggles a few weeks. I think the same with Harvick and Bowyer, they’ve had fast cars some weeks, but then other weeks they really seem to struggle. Those are some of the things that I look at and I think that we can capitalize on some of those weeks where they may not be on their game, but, at the same time, they have the experience and they have the teams to overcome difficulties like that. I think we’re part of that same situation. We’ve had good speed. We’ve been strong on some weekends and we haven’t been on others, and that’s where we kind of have to clean up our act on those few off weekends and we can be right where we need to be.”
AT WHAT POINT DID YOU BECOME COMFORTABLE AND CONFIDENT IN THIS GARAGE AREA? “I think I’ve always had a lot of confidence, like I talked about earlier, I had a lot of confidence, but I didn’t have the experience to back anything up. I was just kind of out there free-wheeling running wild at times. Going back to some tracks, Daytona, for instance, has been a good track for us from the get-go, and being able to go back in a different race and performing well again shows you that the first time around wasn’t a fluke and I think we can do this on a regular basis. Certainly, after a couple of good top fives in a row – Darlington, I think, was a big weekend for us to finish in the top five there and that was a long, tough race last year, and it was a tough race this year. Coming out of Darlington and saying that this is one of the toughest tracks on the schedule and we kind of conquered the place tonight, I think that we can do it anywhere if we don’t make mistakes and we make sure that we’re doing the right things. So just a few runs like that certainly helps you, but then you face reality when you go to another track where you’ve run great at and you run 25th, so it kind of bounces back and forth, but I think you always remember those good nights and remember that you can do it week-in and week-out if you just do what’s right.”
Carl Edwards, Matt Kenseth and Greg Biffle are all currently in the top 12 in the NASCAR Sprint Cup point standings. All three drivers held Q&A sessions after Friday’s practice session at Bristol Motor Speedway.
CARL EDWARDS – No. 99 Office Depot Ford Fusion – ARE DRIVERS ATHLETES? “Yeah, I think definitely we’re athletes. The only way I can explain it is I thought I was really in good shape and I was tough and all that, and then I ran my first Craftsman Truck Series race and I couldn’t believe how hot it was and how taxing it was. It’s not like you’re in the car lifting weights or doing something like that, but it’s really tough, especially when you start to focus because of how hostile the environment is, so I’d say we’re athletes. I don’t know if any of us would do that well in a foot race or anything, but these guys are tough that’s for sure.”
IS THERE ANY DANGER OF THIS BEING A TWO-MAN CHASE WITH THE WAY YOU AND KYLE ARE WINNING RACES? “No, I don’t think it’s gonna be a two-man chase, honestly. I told somebody that last week. I hope it is. That would be nice to just have to try to beat one guy, but there are so many good guys. I’m standing here looking at Kevin Harvick and Tony and Dale Jr. and Matt and Greg – everyone has the potential to run really well and you can’t count any competitors out. We’ll know with about three or four to go, that’s the only time you’re gonna know who’s gonna be in this thing.”
ARE FRESH TIRES AS IMPORTANT AS TRACK POSITION LATE IN THE RACE HERE? “I don’t know how this is gonna work out. We’ll find out tonight, but you can definitely race more places on the track right now. It’s still really hard to pass because they did such a good job of making each lane about the same speed, so it’s real tough. I don’t know how that will play out, though – fresh tires versus track position – we’ll learn tonight, I guess, how that will be.”
SO LATE IN THE RACE WILL TIRES OR TRACK POSITION BE MORE IMPORTANT IF YOU HAVE TO PIT? “It’s hard. You kind of get a sense for that during the race, so we’ll just have to see how it goes, but I would imagine there will be a lot more staying out than there will be getting tires here.”
HOW MANY RACES DO YOU THINK IT WILL TAKE TO WIN THE TITLE WHEN THE CHASE STARTS? “Really, it doesn’t take a win in the chase to win the championship. If you can finish second every week, you’re gonna win almost for sure just statistically, but people seem to be stepping it up. There is a lot of teams that are running really well, so, just like anything, it’s gonna be defined by your bad days, but it’ll probably take a better average finishing position to win this championship than before.”
YOU COMPETE IN CUP AND NATIONWIDE. WHAT ARE YOUR THOUGHTS ON THE GIBBS PENALTY? “I don’t know the whole story, but Gibbs was penalized for what they did and that’s good that NASCAR takes a strong stance. I don’t know the whole story, but it seems like the points on that penalty were a lot, but that’s the first time I can remember in a long time an actual pre-meditated, planned out scheme to cheat. I don’t know, I guess that sets the precedent right there.”
NASCAR LOVES A GOOD RIVALRY. ARE YOU AND KYLE HEADED IN THAT DIRECTION? “That would be cool. Rivalries are good. They’re fun, but it’s still too far out. We don’t know exactly how this is all gonna go. Me, personally, my rival every week is the person that’s in front of me. There’s not enough time to focus on one guy because you’ve got to worry about everyone else, so we’ll see what happens.”
RIVALRIES USUALLY START WITH AN ON-TRACK INCIDENT. WOULD THAT RAMP IT UP IF YOU AND KYLE GOT INVOLVED IN SOMETHING? “I don’t know. We’ll see what happens. I hope it comes down to just me and one other guy. If it’s Kyle, that’s fine. He’ll be my arch nemesis and I’ll want to beat him more than anything in the world. If it’s Matt Kenseth, it’ll be Matt Kenseth and I going to the last race. I’m just kind of curious to see what will happen. I think, really, all I can do is just do the best I can.”
HAS DAVID PEARSON TALKED TO YOU ABOUT HIS RIVALRIES? “David Pearson is pretty funny. We’ve never really talked about that, but we’ve talked about a few things. He definitely needs his own column or radio show or something like that because he gets straight to the point. It’s pretty neat to ask him questions about stuff. He doesn’t go for the p.c. answer, he goes for exactly how he feels and that’s pretty cool to have somebody like that you can call.”
DID HE CALL YOU AFTER LAST WEEK AND SAY HE’S THE BEST DRIVER OF ALL TIME BECAUSE HE BELIEVES IT. “I know he does. That’s why it was fun to joke around about that, but he’s a smart guy, that’s for sure.”
HOW HAS THIS NEW LAYOUT CHANGED THE RACING HERE? “There’s more than one groove, so if you’re faster than someone, you can try to pass him another way other than running into him and moving him out of the way or rooting him out of the way, so it is different. I think it still remains to be seen exactly how the racing is because I don’t think there’s a specific lane that’s fast. I don’t think it just kind of depends on your car, so, as a driver, to me, I like it now a little more than I did before because I have options. It’s still Bristol, though. It’s still awfully tight and awfully fast.”
IS THIS RACE MORE MENTALLY OR PHYSICALLY EXHAUSTING? “This place is more exhausting, period, mentally and physically. It’s really tough physically just because you’re so tense the whole time and that’s the first thing you get used to, and then mentally you’re really working the whole time and things are happening really quick. It seems relatively quicker than any other track we go to, so I’d say both. It’s both physically and mentally taxing.”
WHAT’S YOUR BIGGEST CONCERN FOR SATURDAY? “Just getting caught up in something. We want to go out and, hopefully, keep the nose clean and I believe our car is fast enough to run really well, so as long as I don’t make any mistakes, have lapses in judgment and we don’t get caught up in something, I think we should be pretty good.”
WHAT DO YOU THINK ABOUT THE OLYMPIC ATHLETES? “We were watching badminton players and that’s unbelievable. Every sport that’s being competed at the Olympics is cool to watch because they’re just the best in the world at it. The track and field stuff is amazing. I got to watch the 100 and 200 and some hurdles and that’s wild. Obviously, the swimming is something that I definitely cannot do, so I look up to all those folks and it’s just neat to watch them perform.”
SO YOU WOULD LIKE TO BE A KILLER BADMINTON PLAYER? “That would be pretty cool. Tom, my motorhome driver, says he’s gonna put up a court. He’s really excited about it because we played in school, but you play for a week or something and that’s all the badminton we ever played. It wasn’t like this. They’re really good.”
JEFF GORDON SAID YOU AND KYLE WERE THE ONES TO BEAT. HE’S IN A WINLESS STREAK NOW AND YOU’VE BEEN THERE AS WELL. HOW DO YOU FIGHT OUT OF SOMETHING LIKE THAT? “You just have to go perform the best you can every week. It’s really frustrating when you’re not winning. We all come here to win and especially when you’ve won a bunch, but I can guarantee you that Jeff Gordon has not forgotten how to drive. They’ve just had things go in a way such that they haven’t been able to win, so I’m sure he’ll come out of it. We can never count him out for a championship, so we’ll see. He might just be kind of laying low and getting us all to kind of forget about him so he can sneak up on us. We’ve got to watch him.”
WHAT’S DIFFERENT ABOUT BEING A CONTENDER NOW VERSUS BEFORE? “What’s different now, for me, is I truly believe we’re good enough to compete week-in and week-out and I feel like we can win at every race track we go to. In 2005 when we were in the chase everything was real new and there were a lot of unknowns, so now I feel like I’m a lot more on top of things. I understand the pace of everything and how it goes and I think that benefits me now.”
MATT KENSETH – No. 17 DeWalt Ford Fusion – DOES THIS RACE LEND ITSELF TO MORE CONSERVATIVE RACING BECAUSE OF WHERE IT FALLS IN THE CHASE CUTOFF? “I don’t think it really has anything to do with that. I think there’s a couple of things – the main thing is the track has been reconfigured so it’s much wider than it used to be. You have some options to pass cars, whereas before you didn’t necessarily have that. If there was a guy in front of you and you were just barely faster than he was and he was stuck right on the bottom, it was almost impossible to pass him without running into him and moving him out of the way. Now there are a lot more options. You can run on the bottom, middle or top and you don’t really have to move somebody out of the way or get moved out of the way to be able to pass, so I think that’s the biggest thing. I think the racing here is always intense when you get in an area this small and this fast and run 500 laps with 43 cars out there.”
DO YOU FEEL GOOD ABOUT KICK-STARTING THIS FINAL THREE RACES TO THE CHASE? “Well, I did yesterday but not so much after first practice. Today has really been a struggle to say the least, so right now we’ve got a lot of work to do and we’ll have to make a lot of progress that last practice to be anything decent at all. We haven’t run really that great here since they switched cars and then after they reconfigured the track. It’s all basically new for everybody. My teammates seem to be doing really good and I can’t seem to figure it out for some reason, so we’ll just keep working on it and hopefully it’ll get better.”
IS THIS PLACE MORE PHYSICALLY OR MENTALLY DEMANDING? “It’s a little bit of both. I think that all of our races are way more mental than physically. I think you see a lot of different sizes and shapes of drivers driving these things and people with different physically conditions, so I always think it’s much more mental. But out of all the tracks, this is probably the most physical track that we go to.”
HOW HAS THE CHASE CHANGED THINGS FROM A DRIVER’S POINT OF VIEW? “Maybe with some people in some situations. Ours, we’ve never really been in a situation where we really altered it a lot. I think the first year of the chase we tried altering our testing schedule when we used to be able to pick our tests and that kind of backfired on us, so I guess there are certain situations, maybe, where you’d change your strategy, but I haven’t really been in that situation. We just do everything the same as we always do – bring your stuff that you think is the best to the track and do the best you can to try and finish as high as you can and go from there.”
YOU BACKLOADED YOUR TESTS IN ’05. “Yeah. We tried to do all of our testing at the end and it didn’t necessarily work out for us. We didn’t really have a test team or extra stuff in place, so all the guys that were already tired from racing 26 weeks had to go to the track every week for two extra days and go test and do all that stuff and even if we did learn something, you didn’t have enough time implement it in your cars anyway, so it didn’t really work out for us. I think you just do everything probably the same as you would do it if it was all season long.”
CAN YOU IMAGINE RUNNING THIS CIRCUIT AT 18? “Times change. It’s a lot different now than it was, obviously, with the younger drivers coming in. You used to have to kind of prove yourself through the short tracks and do all that stuff, and it’s not that drivers don’t prove themselves now, but people start racing at five years old now. When I started racing, most people started at 16. Some kids were doing go-karts, I guess, but all big-bodies stock car stuff up in Wisconsin, you couldn’t drive them until you had a drivers license so you couldn’t really start any younger. I think that’s a big reason for it is the kids can get experience a lot sooner than we used to be able to.”
CAN YOU IMAGINE BEING IN CUP AT 18? “Not then I can, but in this day and age I guess maybe you could. I was kind of glad because it went well for me. I got to learn a lot about the cars and build cars and do all that stuff. We just did it for fun and I just got a lot of good breaks along the way and got kind of lucky. Back then, though, I couldn’t really imagine it.”
GREG BIFFLE – No. 16 Dish Network Ford Fusion – IS THIS NEW CAR ANY EASIER TO DRIVE OR BALANCE? “I think it’s just faster and pretty much the same. The thing about it is we start closer to the correct setup now. When we rolled it off the truck, we ran a 15.93 on our second or third lap so the car was right on. We tried to make it a little bit better and made it worse, made it worse, and got back to about the same. We didn’t make it any better. I think we’re getting close to fine-tuning on the car. It’s as good as we’re gonna make it with the tools we have. We’ll continue to make small pieces better, but we’re beyond those big gains right now. Now we’re fine-tuning on this car.”
WHAT KIND OF MENTAL STATE DO YOU HAVE TO BE IN AT THIS TRACK? “You really have to be thinking. You’ve got to be sharp. You’ve got to be on your game. There’s no time to take a breath around this place. It is very, very fast and that’s what makes it fun and exciting.”
WHAT ABOUT THE PHYSICAL PART? “It’s a little more physical just because you’re turning on the wheel so much, you’re holding your breath, you’re down in the corner. It’s as physical as Darlington is in the corner, but Darlington has got a little bit of a straightaway to take a breath on. This doesn’t. This is a little short straightaway and then you’re back into the corner again, so it is physically a lot more demanding and probably more demanding than anywhere we go, really.”
DOES THIS NEW SURFACE TAKE THE X-FACTOR OUT OF THIS PLACE? “No, not at all because you can be caught up in a wreck here just as fast as you can shake your head. If somebody checks up in front of you, you’re in an accident. It’s easier to drive from a standpoint of it’s easier to manage the car, but it’s just as easy to get into accidents and bumping and banging like it was before.”