This Week In Ford Racing - NASCAR Edition

Tuesday September 9, 2008

The Chase for the NASCAR Sprint Cup begins this weekend at New Hampshire Motor Speedway with Sunday’s running of the Sylvania 300. Ford drivers Carl Edwards and Greg Biffle recently talked about the chase and what it’s going to take to win the championship.

CARL EDWARDS – No. 99 Office Depot Ford Fusion – WHAT ARE YOUR THOUGHTS ON LOUDON – “New Hampshire is real tough. One time I got the chance to drive the Red Sox car there and we were screaming fast. The car was awesome and I thought, ‘Man, I’ve figured this place out,’ and then we came back the next time and I was terrible. So it’s a real hit and miss. The car has got to be perfect. We’ve been working real hard on it because I feel like of all the tracks in the chase, that’s the one we were the worst at earlier this year. I’m a little nervous about New Hampshire, but we’ll see what happens.”

WHAT IS YOUR VERDICT ON THE CHASE FORMAT? “I think it’s good because it’s more entertaining. I think from a pure racing, determining a champion over the whole season standpoint, I don’t think it’s the same as before and, in a way, it’s kind of not fair to guys like Jeff Gordon, who I believe would have won it a couple years if there wasn’t a chase format. It’s just different, but I think for the health of the sport it’s good. For one or two guys, it hasn’t been good.”

IF YOU COULD CHANGE ONE THING ABOUT IT, WHAT WOULD IT BE? “I’d give everyone one throwaway race. That would be pretty cool to have one race where you could just say, ‘That one didn’t matter,’ because, like it or not, this is a sport where you can run really well but one bad thing can hurt you so much in the points. So it’s not always the fastest guy that ends up being the winner, but that’s just the way it is.”

DO YOU HAVE TO WIN MULTIPLE RACES IN THE CHASE TO WIN THE TITLE LIKE JIMMIE DID LAST YEAR? “No, it’s just math. You just have to have the best average, but the way Jimmie and Kyle [Busch] and everybody is running, you might have to win to beat them. There are going to be days where you definitely have to win to beat those guys, so, for me, we’re just gonna go at it just like we’ve been racing for the last couple months. I don’t believe anybody has scored more points than us, or it’s been real close, so we’re just gonna go do that.”

DO YOU STILL SEE GUYS WHO HAVEN’T WON YET AS A THREAT FOR THE TITLE? “Oh, yeah. Jeff Gordon and Matt Kenseth and Greg Biffle, those guys are good. They’ve all won championships.”

GREG BIFFLE – No. 16 3M Ford Fusion — HOW DO YOU MAKE UP GROUND ON CARL AND KYLE AND WHAT TRACKS ARE YOUR BEST OPPORTUNITIES TO DO THAT? “A lot of the mile-and-a-halfs. You just hope that they’re still mad at each other and maybe they’ll be beating and banging and take care of themselves a little bit. But some of my good tracks to go to, I could tell you the two that aren’t, and the rest are good tracks for me. The two that I don’t look forward to as a driver – not that I don’t like the track, I just don’t run as well – is Martinsville and Talladega. It’s not that I don’t run good at Talladega, it’s just that anything can happen there so it can go in either direction. Those guys could be caught up in the big one or something that got started and I could skim through it or vice versa. Any one of those things can happen. Last year was the first Talladega race I finished, so that was pretty much a highlight of my career at Talladega.”

MAKE A CASE WHY IT WON’T BE CARL AND KYLE FOR THE TITLE? “California is a testament to why it’s not. The 48 and the 16 car were the fastest cars there and nobody talked about the 18 and 99 all night. That could be a reason why. We go to four more race tracks and the same thing happens, then we’ve caught them in points because you would have gained 20-40 points on them in one race and they’re only gonna be 60-80-90 points ahead, so that’s not an insurmountable amount of points.”

ARE YOU HAPPY WITH THE BONUS POINT SITUATION AND HOW IT ROLLS OVER? “Hindsight is 20-20. If they would have had this point system in ’05, I think we would have won the championship. I’m not sure. Maybe Tony only had one less or two less wins, but, in any event, I would have made the chase in ’06 but still would have missed it in ’07, but I like the bonus system. One, it puts more emphasis on winning and that’s what everybody thought that they wanted to see. I heard an interesting comment the other day that somebody said, ‘I’ll fix it, let’s just pay a million dollars to win every race.’ Well, if they would have paid $50 million to win at California, the 48 still would have won and I still would have finished second. It just doesn’t matter if they paid 100 points to win, it doesn’t matter. A lot of people try to build more into it than it is. We try to win every single week. We try and win. I try and win every week and I’m gonna try and win the next 10. I’m gonna go as hard as I can go to win them. That’s all we can do every week.”

Erik Darnell, driver of the No. 99 Northern Tool + Equipment Ford F-150, has two top-ten finishes in two career starts at New Hampshire Motor Speedway. Darnell talks about racing on the mile-track and compares it to the Milwaukee Mile. Darnell is seventh in NASCAR Craftsman Truck Series standings and seeks his second win of the season.

ERIK DARNELL – No. 99 Northern Tool + Equipment Ford F-150 – LOUDON LOOKS LIKE IT’S SHAPED LIKE MARTINSVILLE. DOES IT RACE LIKE MARTINSVILLE? “It’s kind of similar to Milwaukee, but you can run a little bit different line. At Milwaukee, you try to stay on the bottom. At Loudon, you run in the middle to the top of the track, but it has a little bit of progressive banking. It’s kind of a cool place to run. I like it because you can move around out there. If your truck is not handling somewhere you can go to where to it is handling pretty well. It’s been pretty good to me over the years. I’ve only been there twice and I’ve had two top-10 finishes. We had a really good run last year. We ended up finishing second and we’re looking to improve on that by one this time.”

WHAT DO YOU LIKE ABOUT RACING AT LOUDON? “It’s a typical flat mile oval, for the most part. But I like it because there is a little bit of banking and you can move around and go where your truck is running good. I grew up racing at Milwaukee and I’ve done pretty well there over the years, and I think that’s why I run well at Loudon because it is similar to Milwaukee.”

YOU HAD A GOOD TRUCK IN MILWAUKEE. ARE YOU TAKING THE SAME TRUCK TO LOUDON IF THE TRACKS ARE THAT SIMILAR? “Possibly. The truck that we ran in Milwaukee, we also ran at Gateway. If we don’t bring the Milwaukee truck, we’re going to bring the truck to Loudon that we had last year, which was obviously a good truck for us. We’ve run it a couple times this year and it’s been pretty good. We’ve run it on the short tracks. Since the truck looked pretty good after Gateway, we might take the Gateway truck otherwise, we’ll run with the one that we ran second with last year.”

WHEN RACING ONE-MILE TRACKS, DO YOU USE SHORT-TRACK SET-UPS OR INTERMEDIATE? “More toward the short-track stuff. Loudon is a big short track just like Milwaukee. It is a mile but it has relatively sharp corners and you’ve got a lot of hard braking there, so you’ve got to kind of approach it like a short track deal instead of a mile-and-a-half track. That’s why we bring our short-track trucks to places like that. Aero stuff is not nearly as important at those places. Whichever truck we bring, we’ve got a good one that’s going to be coming up there. Both of those trucks have run well for us this year and either one is going to be good.”

AS THE END OF THE SEASON APPROACHES, DO YOU DO ANYTHING DIFFERENT? “Our focus this year has been to finish in the top-five in points and contend for the championship. As strong as Johnny [Benson] has been lately, it’s been pretty tough. We’ll finish second or third and he’ll win the race and we’ll still lose points. We’ve been steadily losing a little bit of ground there. As we saw in the beginning of the year, anything can happen. Johnny’s had bad luck at the beginning of the year. Ron [Hornaday] had some, too, and that tightens the points right back up again. We’re going out there with the focus to run in the top five and win races. If we can accomplish that, we’ll let everything fall where it may. Hopefully, we’ll end up in the top five in points. I believe we’ll end up in the top five in points and that’s our main focus right now.”

COMPARED TO LAST YEAR, IS THE RACING DIFFERENT? “I don’t think the racing is any different. I still think you seeing some of your typical guys up front. This year has actually been a little bit different with a couple of first-time winners. The racing has been good everywhere we’ve gone. I think with the reduced horsepower that we’ve got this year compared to last year it’s kind of kept the field a little bit closer. It has made it harder to pass at some tracks, but I think it’s made the racing a little bit better, too. And the points are definitely tight. It goes to show that everybody has had a little bit of bad luck this year no matter how many good runs you’ve had. And that little bit of bad luck has kept everybody really close. I think that’s the cool think about the truck series. I don’t think we need any kind of chase system like the Cup guys got. We’ve only got 25 races and everybody goes out and runs hard every week and it makes it exciting.”

WILL WE SEE A LOT OF PASSING AT LOUDON? GENERALLY PASSING IS PRETTY HARD AT SHORTER TRACKS. “Loudon is a little bit different. You do see quite a bit of passing there just because there are multiple grooves with the progressive banking. It’s not like Milwaukee. Milwaukee is pretty tough to pass, just because you generally try to keep your truck on the bottom. It’s tough to come off the corner and get underneath a guy or get a real good run. Loudon is a little bit different just because you’ve got the freedom to move around a little bit. I know we made quite a few passes there on the high side. I don’t think we qualified the greatest, but we were able to move right through the field and work our way up to toward the front. I think you’re going to see a little more passing at Loudon than you would at a place like Milwaukee.”

This report was provided by an outside PR source and posted by Kim DeHaven.