Wednesday
2011 NSCS AdvoCare 500 NASCAR Teleconference with Ford Racing Driver, Matt Kenseth
Press Release
HOW DO YOU ASSESS YOUR CHANCES AT WINNING A SECOND CHAMPIONSHIP?
“There is a lot of racing to do between now and then but I am really confident in my team. They have been doing a really great job on pit road and a great job with car prep and all the things it takes to be successful. I feel pretty good about it right now, but like I said there is a lot of racing to do and we need to get running just a little better to go up there and challenge those guys.”
HOW DOES HAVING AN EXPERIENCED CREW CHIEF HELP YOU IN THE CHASE?
“Well, I don’t know if it is a lot different than how he helps us every week at the shop and at the track but certainly having people who have experience and have been there before, with Jimmy winning the first ever championship in the Chase, the experience for the guys to look up to him and lean on him always helps. I think you want that all year. I don’t think it is a lot different in the Chase. There are no races you want to give up on. You want to have that consistency, chemistry and leadership and you want to do that all season long from Daytona to Homestead. The Chase is just a continuation of that.”
HOW DIFFERENT IS IT GOING INTO THE CHASE COMFORTABLE AS OPPOSED TO NOT KNOWING UNTIL THE END? “It is nice to be locked in. I have been on both ends of the spectrum. We have been the last seed before and the first seed before. Looks like we will be somewhere in the middle and hopefully we can climb our way up the ladder a little farther. It feels good to be locked in, especially this early. I don’t recall being in this early before, we might have been but I don’t remember that. It is good to be in but we have two more big races to go here before the Chase starts and we want to do the best we can these two weeks and go into the Chase on a high note.”
TALK ABOUT ATLANTA AND WHAT THAT WILL BE LIKE THIS WEEKEND FROM THE SEAT OF THE RACE CAR.
“Atlanta is tough. It is one of the more challenging and fun race tracks we go to now with the surface being aged as much as it is and the tire that they bring and all that. Especially one time a year, it is going to be interesting without a lot of practice there. You go pretty fast on new tires and it is really high banked and has real long corners. On old tires you do start slipping a lot and you search around the track to find some grip during the run. Managing your tires during a fuel run is a challenge. It is important to be really good on new tires and still be reasonable on old tires. It is tough to find that balance there.”
HOW MUCH MORE PRESSURE IS ON YOU IN THE CHASE AS OPPOSED TO DURING THE REGULAR SEASON? “I don’t think it is a lot more. I think over time you learn to manage the expectations and the pressure and try to keep that even. Pressure for me has always been about whatever I put on myself. There really has not been a lot of outside pressure. I am my biggest critic. It is not a lot different. At the end of the day if you make a mistake or something it is more painful during the Chase than it would be this week or the week after but you always want to do your very best and get everything you can out of your car and your day and get the best finish whether there are points or no points.”
DO YOU TRY TO PLAN OUT THE CHASE AT ALL OR JUST GO WEEK TO WEEK? “I take it one week at a time. With Jimmy at the shop and things like that we plan out what cars we want to take or if we want to test somewhere or maybe some different stuff we want to try at a track, but other than that we take it one week at a time. I think the guy with the best average finish will win the championship and you want to aim to win each and every week but if you can’t win you want to get the very best finish you can and get as many points as you can each week and hopefully when it is all said and done you stack up toward the top.”
ANY DIFFERENCE THIS WEEKEND AT ATLANTA BEING THIS IS THE FIRST RACE THERE THIS LATE IN THE SEASON? “It will be a little different. The thing about Atlanta is you used to race real early in the year and then real late in the year. It almost seemed like it was a whole year between races anyway. Racing there once a year will be different. I think it is going to be slick this time of year because it is pretty warm and the track has aged another year and nobody has been on it for awhile. It is going to be a great weekend of racing. Atlanta has been known for some of the best finishes in NASCAR and it will be competitive and fun and I am looking forward to it.”
BRAD KESELOWSKI COMMENTED THAT NASCAR GOES IN CYCLES OF SUCCESS AND FAILURE. DO YOU AGREE WITH THAT? “Yeah, you hope they aren’t quick when things are going for you. Besides Jimmie winning five straight championships, if you look at what goes on with most teams and groups, it doesn’t seem like anybody stays right at the top or middle or whatever. I think the good teams have their ups and downs and you want to ride the ups for as long as you can and minimize the down time. Everybody in every organization kind of goes through their cycles.”
CAN YOU SENSE THAT COMING EITHER WAY OR IS IT JUST PART OF THE ROUTINE? “That is a tough one. There are times where you are looking at things and you feel like you are on the right path and you keep getting better and you hope it is coming and you are going to start getting some of the finishes and get wins. There are other times you maybe feel like the competition is catching you and you are not gaining on all the stuff maybe as fast as your competition is. It is a little bit different than it used to be with these cars and these rules. It is really hard to get a big advantage you used to be able to get once in awhile. You used to be able to be the first team to figure something out that was fairly ground breaking and have an advantage on the field for a month or so until everyone else saw what you were doing and started doing it. Those days are kind of over now. It is more little things here or there trying to do better than the next guy.”
WHAT HAVE YOU LEARNED OVER THE LAST FIVE CHASE’S THAT JIMMIE HAS WON THAT YOU CAN USE NOT ONLY TO BEAT HIM BUT THE REST OF THE COMPETITION? “I think you just have to be beyond really good. I don’t remember what year it was but it was a couple years ago when Jeff Gordon had a fifth or sixth place average finish and lost the championship over 10 weeks. That was just unheard of how good those guys were. It seems like Jimmie and Chad and that whole group have had a way of being able to do as good as they need to to win the championship. They figure out how to do just a little better and there have been times where maybe the second place guy hasn’t done quite as good and they haven’t looked quite as good either. In the past, the last five years, they have been able to step it up and do a little better than whoever is doing the best at that time.”
WOULD YOU LIKE TO SEE NASCAR COME UP WITH A WAY TO MEASURE AVERAGE SPEED ON PIT ROAD OR ARE YOU GOOD WITH THE CURRENT LOOP SYSTEM? “I think that is a little track specific. It makes a big difference how long the segments are and how fast the pit road speeds are. A lot goes into that based on how much you can cheat the segment or however you want to say it. It has always been like that since they came up with electric scoring. It has happened at every single race at Bristol since then. The guys that were first on it was probably the 48 and everybody started picking their pit stalls for timing lines more than anything. That has been part of it, getting whatever advantage you can get, whether on pit road or the race track. As competitive as it is these days you are going to try to use that advantage. This week I think it got so much attention because the guys that qualified up front and got those pit stalls just happened to run up front too so they were showing their pit stops and happened to notice it. That has happened at every single Bristol race for at least those four or five pit stalls. That is probably one of the tracks it wouldn’t hurt to address it and if you put twice as many speed lines or extra two per straightaway you wouldn’t have that because the segments wouldn’t be long enough to go faster and then slow down before the next one. That is really how most pit roads are. The speed limits are fast enough and the segments short enough that you can’t fudge it very much. I think the loops are a big step toward policing it compared to the old days on pit road which was done by a stop watch. If they wanted to do a GPS tracker to check the speed that would be fine with my but I think most tracks are pretty under control.”
ATLANTA IS BECOME MORE ABRASIVE OF A TRACK HAVING NOT BEEN REPAVED SINCE 1997. ARE YOU CONCERNED WITH TIRE WEAR THIS WEEKEND? “I am not sure about the tires for sure until we get there. The speed falling off and the drop off in the tire wear and all of that is a good thing in my opinion for racing. I think it makes it more interesting and creates more side by side racing. Those are all good things. When you can take off real fast on four new tires and then be real slow at the end of the fuel run, I think that is good. Some guys get four and some get two and that creates passing. When everyone is running the same speed on new and old tires creates no passing and it being about 100-percent track position. When you get a track like Atlanta that has so many grooves and the asphalt is worn out and your car wants new tires, in my opinion that promotes really good racing.”
WHO DO YOU SEE AS THE TOP GUYS YOU WILL HAVE TO BEAT IN THE CHASE? “Well, this is kind of a generic answer but I think after Richmond going to Chicago it is all 12 drivers. I think all 11 other guys are guys that are legitimately contenders. As the Chase goes on you prove every year that a few of them drop out pretty early and it gets to be a smaller group and every week that group gets smaller as to who has a legitimate shot. Look at Brad for instance. A month and a half ago I don’t think anyone in the media or garage would have uttered his name at the same time as talking about a championship this year. I don’t think anyone would have thought of that. Look at how amazing his streak has been the last month or whatever it has been. Right now he has to be one of the picks to have a shot at it. Things can change pretty quickly and I think everyone is a contender to start off with.”
HOW DO YOU FEEL ABOUT YOUR OWN CHANCES COMPARED TO THE LAST FEW YEARS? “It has been funny. There have been times I went into the chase and have been, believe it or not for me, brimming with confidence and feeling like we are one of the favorites and we haven’t won it obviously. We haven’t won one since we have been in the Chase yet. Then there are other times I haven’t felt good and we have done okay. You just never know. Right now I feel like since we are going to be a part of that group that if we can do everything right that we can be a contender if everything goes our way and the breaks go our way and we run as well as we are capable of running, but you never know until you get into it.”
DO YOU FEEL LIKE THIS MIGHT BE YOUR BEST CHANCE SINCE 2006? “I can hardly remember what happened last week. Our probably best shot in the Chase was that one year that we ran second to Jimmie. I think we led for most of the Chase and had a really fast car and led a lot of laps and we were in position to win some races but just couldn’t get it done at the end of the year. I can’t recall every Chase specifically and what happened or didn’t happen. Over the last three years I feel like this is probably our best chance. There have been a couple years where we made it and I knew we probably weren’t going to be a legitimate threat unless everything absolutely fell our way. This year it seems like there have been a lot of weeks where performance has been good. If we can take that performance and do our adjustments right and have everything happen where we at least get the finish that we think we deserve off speed or overachieve a little then I think we can be a contender.”
WE HAVEN’T SEEN ANYONE DOMINATE ALL YEAR, GUYS HAVE GONE IN SPURTS. DO YOU SEE ANYONE DOMINATING THE CHASE OR DO YOU THINK IT WILL BE LIKE THE WAY THE SEASON HAS GONE WITH CONSISTENCY BEING BETTER THAN A COUPLE OF WINS? “I honestly don’t know. I think that with this points system that consistency will be a little more important than what it has been before. If you get a real bad finish or two then it will be real easy to get buried. You just don’t know what is going to happen. I think that whoever wins the championship will have a couple wins in the Chase or at least one, I would think, but I don’t know that. It has been won before without a win in the Chase. You just don’t know what is going to happen. Someone could get hot like Brad has been here and put together a string where they are running in the top four every week and win some races, or they might not. It is just too hard to predict.”
- PCGCampbell for Ford Racing
Article Tags: AdvoCare 500, AMS, Atlanta (GA), Atlanta Motor Speedway, Hampton (GA), NASCAR, NASCAR Sprint Cup Series, NSCS
