Photo Credit: Noel Lanier
Ford Performance NSCS Notes and Quotes
STP 500 Advance – Martinsville Speedway
Friday, April 1, 2016
Ryan Blaney, driver of the No. 21 Motorcraft/Quick Lane Ford Fusion, will be making his debut at Martinsville Speedway in the NASCAR Sprint Cup Series this weekend. This marks the first time the Wood Brothers have competed at their home track since 2011 and Blaney talked about his expectations prior to today’s practice and qualifying sessions.
RYAN BLANEY – No. 21 Motorcraft/Quick Lane Ford Fusion – HOW DOES IT FEEL TO BE BACK WITH THE WOOD BROTHERS AT MARTINSVILLE FOR THE FIRST TIME SINCE 2011? “It’s nice to be back at Martinsville with the Wood Brothers team. It’s nice to be back at pretty much their home track. Stuart (VA) is only 20 miles away from here, not even, so it’s cool to be back here and with those guys and kind of have everybody out and see everything. I think Glen is gonna be able to make it on Sunday, which it’s really gonna be nice to get him to another race, so hopefully that will go well for him. I remember growing up watching my dad race here. I grew up 45 minutes away in High Point, North Carolina and I would come to this race every year and watch my dad and watch the trucks. I just thought it was such a cool place. It’s really neat to be able to run a Cup car, let alone the 21 car over here. That just kind of adds to the special factor, but it’s nice to be back and cool to be making my first Cup start here. Hopefully, we’ll get on the track for a little bit today and I can practice a little bit.”
DO YOU FEEL ANY PRESSURE BEING BACK HERE WITH THE WOOD BROTHERS? “Not really. It’s really just gonna be a lot of fun, to be honest with you, to have them come back here. I honestly get that question every single weekend – if there’s pressure with the Wood Brothers going back to this track they haven’t been to in a while. It’s really kind of the same every week. It’s been a lot of fun to drive for them and be here every week and work with everybody on this race team, whether they’re new or veterans of the Wood Brothers team. It’s just cool to be at the track and be around everybody, so there’s definitely no pressure. We’re just out here trying to relax and have fun, and it’s just kind of a bonus that we’re here in their home state and their home track, where we’re gonna have a lot of fans. Actually, we’ve got a little open house at their museum tonight in Stuart, which will be really cool. The last time they did that I think they had about 5,000 people that came out, so I’m excited to meet everybody and have everyone come out and sign some autographs. It’s gonna be fun.”
HAVE YOU EVER HAD 5,000 PEOPLE COME OUT TO SEE YOU BEFORE? “They aren’t coming out to see me, that’s for sure. They’re not coming out to see me. They’re gonna come out to see the Wood Brothers. I’m just gonna be there and shake their hands. They’re the main stars up here in Virginia. They’re rock stars up here, so it’s cool just to be a part of it. I’m gonna be a part of it tonight to kind of share some stories with some old fans of theirs. They’re actually gonna have all four of the original Wood Brothers now, which is really, really neat to get all four of them together. And then of course Eddie and Len will be there, too. It’s gonna be cool. It’s gonna be a lot of fun, but they’re definitely there to see them. Maybe if there’s like 5,000, there might be seven there to see me and most of the other ones there to see those guys.”
WHERE DO YOUR TWO TOP-10 FINISHES RANK IN TERMS OF THE PRESEASON GOALS YOU SET FOR YOURSELF? “I set a goal at the beginning of the year to run all the laps and that hasn’t come true, so that goal is kind of out the window. It’s good to have a couple top-10s and have some strong runs. I always say there are some races you wish you could take back, like Atlanta and Fontana a couple of weeks ago. We blew a tire, but those are just problems you have to minimize and it stinks you have two of them early off in the year, but you try to learn from them as much as you can and try to grow from them and try to not have those happen again. We’ll do our best to try to make that happen, but it’s nice to know we have fast race cars. We’ve had fairly good cars every single weekend and we’re just getting better every single weekend. As we work together, as this team kind of bonds – this is a fairly new team. We brought on a handful of new guys in the beginning of the season. We kept most of the Wood Brothers personnel that has been there for a long time, but we brought in some new people just to help out with the full-time gig because it’s a lot more work. They’re just kind of getting acclimated to each other. They do a great job of working together already, but just the more they work together the stronger that relationship is gonna be and I think it will get a lot smoother from there on out, but it’s been a good start to the year so far.”
WHAT IS SPECIAL ABOUT THE TOWN OF MARTINSVILLE TO YOU? “I’m staying at the Dutch Inn, which is nice. It’s a good scene of culture. It’s cool. It’s kind of a neat, small town. It almost reminds me of Stuart. I go up to Stuart a little bit and it’s a small town. It’s almost like where I grew up. High Point is fairly small, a little bit bigger than this, kind of a furniture city, but I like it. You kind of drive through Martinsville from where I’m staying to the race track, so it’s nice to see the culture over there. It almost reminds you of an old-school, short-track town I grew up racing in. I’ve been to 100 of these small towns in the middle of nowhere and it’s cool to see the passion they have for racing. I don’t think you pass a house around here without a racing flag posted on the door or hanging off the mantle, so it’s just cool to be here.”
WHAT HAS IT MEANT TO HAVE THE SOCIAL IMPACT YOU HAVE SO FAR WITH NASCAR? “I like it. The fans are what makes this sport possible and the most that we can do is to try to interact with them as much as possible. That’s how we influence them to become fans and influence the fans who are already fans of the sport to tell their friends who aren’t fans to watch it. That’s all we can do. NASCAR has done a great job with implementing drivers into interacting with fans and doing neat things to kind of give fans an inside look of what we do, or just kind of a funny outlook on personal drivers. It’s just neat what they’re doing and it’s been fun interacting with fans. It’s fun to hear their stories and where they come from. I like talking to fans. I wish we had more time in the day to talk to fans, but it’s neat. I like it and they make the sport possible, so the more they enjoy it and the more impact we can have on them is just good for the sport.”
DO THE WOOD BROTHERS TELL YOU ANY OLD STORIES? “All the time. If you ever talk to the Wood Brothers that’s what they are. They’re storytellers and that’s awesome. I love old racing stories and knowing the history of our sport and growing up around it I like to learn as much as I can about it. Leonard told me a really neat story this week at the shop. He and Glen are the biggest storytellers, for sure. They have really, really cool ones. Leonard didn’t drive too much and tested a car out here one time and he was messing with intakes like air flow and air boxes and he would run a hose down it and run the hose back to his mouth and he would blow in the intake to see if it made more power or suck air out of it to see if it made more power. He said neither of them worked, so he just kind of did away with that project, but that was really cool to hear that story. That’s what they did back then. I was fascinated by it and that kind of shows you the brain he has that he would even think about something like that, let alone be doing that and driving. It’s really cool, so they’re definitely storytellers and that’s one of the neatest things about them, I think.”
BUBBA WALLACE WAS IN KNOXVILLE PRACTICING WITH THE VOLUNTEERS. HOW WOULD YOU CRITICQUE HIS PERFORMANCE? “The first thing he made a mistake on was being a fan of the Vols. I’m sorry, but I’m a Buckeye fan. I haven’t criticqued him yet. I saw a video of him completely miss a pass. I don’t think he got a hand on the ball or it went right through his hands, so that was funny – how terrible of an athlete he is (laughing). No, he’s a pretty good athlete. That’s cool. I saw him do that and I’m like, ‘Man, I’d like to do that with Ohio State,’ so maybe that will kind of sway me to go do it, but I haven’t criticqued him yet. I haven’t given him too hard of a time for it.”
WHAT HAVE YOU LEARNED FROM THE TRUCK RACES YOU’VE RUN HERE? “I think we can take some things away. Those truck races are only half the distance of a Cup race and that’s a long way to go another full race, but there are things you can take away. You’re always wanting to conserve brakes here. That’s one of the biggest things and rear tires, I think, are some of the most important things. That’s something I struggled with in the truck of being too aggressive and burning my rear tires off. That’s something I try to prepare as much as I can for and it just gets worse in a Cup car as you up the horsepower. That’s something I’ve been talking to my dad about and watching a lot of videos and trying to do the best that I can to try to make sure that doesn’t happen. Today we’ll be in qualifying trim all day, so it doesn’t really apply. You drive a truck a whole lot different. It’s a whole different driving style from qualifying to the race here, so tomorrow I’ll get a better read of what to do and messing around with that stuff, but there are a lot of things you can really take away. Even though they are completely different vehicles, there are a lot of things you can take away here.”
WHAT’S BEEN THE BIGGEST CHALLENGE OF TRANSITIONING TO A FULL SCHEDULE? “It’s a big change just from getting more cars to more parts and pieces. You need more people to make it possible. The travel schedule is a lot higher, so it’s a big jump not only for me, but for the whole team and the organization. The Penske group has been very, very helpful when it comes to that and helping us out, whether it’s with personnel or helping us out with cars and everything like that, so they’ve done an amazing job of doing their part. That means a lot for the Wood Brothers and everybody like that, so they’ve really, honestly made it possible for us to do this. It puts a lot more work on everybody that has been around it and maybe done part schedules for the past handful of years, but it’s nice to be at the race track. I know they like it, even if they have only been at half the races, you know the people that have been at the Wood Brothers for a long time. They only ran half a season for some years and they like being at the track even more. They want to be at the race track. They’re racers and that’s what they want to do. There’s a lot more work, but I think they like it and things have been going really good.”
JOEY LOGANO HAS WON THE LAST TWO POLES HERE. HAVE YOU TALKED TO HIM ABOUT WHAT QUALIFYING IS LIKE HERE? “I haven’t. I haven’t talked to him about qualifying or anything like that. I’ve really talked a lot to my dad and honestly I’ve talked to my dad more about this place than any other race track just because I feel like I’ve struggled here the most in my career. I haven’t talked to Joey at all. He’s been really fast here the last few races and he’ll definitely have something to offer. I’ll probably have to track him down after this practice and before qualifying. We’re spoiled now. We have data and everything like that, and we can sit down and compare data and see if he’s doing anything different. Then he and I can maybe figure it out, if he’s willing to help, which he usually is and that’s great. I’ll have to track him down for sure.”
