Ford Performance NSCS Notes and Quotes
Quicken Loans Race for Heroes 500 Advance – Phoenix International Raceway
Saturday, November 14, 2015
Brad Keselowski, driver of the No. 2 Miller Lite Fusion, needs a win tomorrow in order to automatically advance into the Championship 4 at Ford Championship Weekend. He spoke after today’s first practice about the opportunity he has in the Quicken Loans Race for Heroes 500.
BRAD KESELOWSKI – No. 2 Miller Lite Ford Fusion – DID THAT PRACTICE GIVE YOU SOME HOPE THAT YOU CAN CONTEND TOMORROW? “No, not yet but we’ve still got one more to go.” YOU FEEL LIKE YOU HAVE TO WIN IN ORDER TO ADVANCE? “Yeah, I think it’s a pretty safe bet that you’re gonna have to win this race if you’re not within five or six points of the cutoff and we’re not.” WHAT ABOUT THIS OPPORTUNITY YOU HAVE TOMORROW? “We have an equal opportunity to win the race, just like everyone else does, and to win these championships you have to win races. Our opportunity is there. It’s a short race and it’s a track I feel comfortable on and now we just have to put it together.”
Richard Petty, owner of Richard Petty Motorsports, competed in his final race at Atlanta Motor Speedway in 1992. As many fans of the sport know, that race also coincided with Jeff Gordon’s first NASCAR Sprint Cup Series start. The King spoke about Gordon’s pending retirement at the end of this season, along with other topics during a media session Saturday at Phoenix International Raceway.
RICHARD PETTY, Owner, Richard Petty Motorsports – YOUR THOUGHTS ON JEFF GORDON’S CAREER COMING TO AN END? “Everybody’s career comes to an end. He’s going out strong. I admire him for that part of it. I wouldn’t mind seeing him win the championship because he’s meant so much to NASCAR over the years. They’re gonna miss him a whole lot from that standpoint.”
IT’S RARE TO SEE A DRIVER GO OUT WHEN HE’S STILL COMPETITIVE ISN’T IT? “Yeah, it really is. We’ve had three or four to it, but nobody that’s been a championship like Jeff has been, so I guess everybody has their own path and this happens to be his path, which is really, really a great deal.”
YOUR IMPRESSIONS OF JEFF AS A DRIVER AND A PERSON? “He’s good at both. He’s a heckuva good driver – had to be to be able to win the races he’s won against the competition he’s been running against, and also winning some championships. He does so much not just at the race track, but away from the race track which is half of what Jeff Gordon is.”
HOW MUCH IS NASCAR GOING TO MISS JEFF? “They won’t. No matter who you are you’re not strong enough to carry the whole load. He’s been a strong leader all these years, but over a period of time the next crowd comes along and kind of fades them all out. Over a period of time you go away whether you want to or not.”
YOU HAD THAT ONE RACE WITH HIM. DO YOU REMEMBER ANYTHING? “I think both of us were just in the race. I didn’t really pay that much attention. We were so busy. It was very last race we ran and he was just another driver. I had watched him come up through the Sportsmen, or whatever they called it at that time, and really admired what he was accomplishing there and knew he was gonna be pretty good it was just gonna take a little bit of time to make it work.”
RICHARD PETTY CONTINUED — YOU GAVE MONEY CLIPS TO THE DRIVERS FOR YOUR LAST RACE, RIGHT? “Yeah. When the race was over I went by and gave every one of them a money clip. It was just a thank you for putting me where I was at and running against them, so it was just something we thought about doing.”
DO YOU REMEMBER WHAT YOU SAID TO JEFF? “No, he was just another one. Good luck and hang on.”
CAN YOU IMAGINE HAVING TO GO THROUGH YOUR LAST RACE AND RACING FOR A CHAMPIONSHIP LIKE JEFF WILL NEXT WEEK? “I imagine from a mindset deal it’s gonna be a lot different than what it was with me. I was just trying to make it to the last race and get through it and he’s still got a good chance to win the championship and he doesn’t have to win the race. That’s one thing about the way they’ve got the point standings and stuff going now, that he could run 10th and still win a championship. He’s a good runner to be in the middle of the pack, in other words from fifth or sixth or seventh – somewhere like that – he’s really, really regular so it’s basically not what he does it’s what the other guys are going to do and that’s where the championship will be determined.”
SOME WOULD SAY WHAT MATT KENSETH DID WAS LIKE THE OLD DAYS. THAT’S OLD SCHOOL RACING – YOU TOOK EACH OTHER OUT. “I don’t ever remember, but one or two occasions where that happened, where somebody just deliberately took somebody out. I took people out and they took me out, and it was deliberate, but it wasn’t that brazen. We’d do it on the backstretch where nobody could see us.”
HOW DID YOU RECTIFY A SITUATION LIKE THAT? “I went straight to them and said, ‘OK, let’s get this crap straight.’ The deal was I did it in the heat of the game. As soon as the race was over I’d go find whoever it was and we’d have it out right there. We didn’t have all of you wandering around, so we could do it behind the truck or in the truck and nobody ever really saw what was going on.”
WHAT DID YOU THINK OF A TWO-RACE SUSPENSION FOR MATT? “I think as deliberate as that was it needed to be done. In fact, I think he got out lucky with two races instead of three.”
CAN YOU TELL US WHEN YOU TOOK SOMEBODY OUT ON PURPOSE? “No comment. (laughing)”
INITIALS B.A.? “I never took anybody out intentionally, except trying to get around him, but it was always a racing deal. It wasn’t a deal where I went out and took somebody out because they took me out. I never got into that deal.”
DO YOU THINK NASCAR SHOULD HAVE STEPPED IN BEFORE THAT GOT OUT OF HAND? “Everybody was anticipating something to happen, but you didn’t know what it was going to be. They couldn’t get ahead of that deal. There was no way to get ahead of it. That was a deal, the way I looked at it, the Kansas deal is sort of what started it. I think Kenseth kind of put it off to the side, but then when they crashed him coming off the second corner at Martinsville all of that came back and he was just in a corner and he had to get out.”
WHERE ARE YOU WITH THE 9 CAR FOR NEXT YEAR? DO YOU HAVE A DRIVER YET? “No, we’re still working on what we’re gonna do with the 9 car and crew and all that stuff. Things are looking up. We’ve got some stuff coming down the pike, but we don’t have it corralled yet.”
RICHARD PETTY CONTINUED — WILL SAM BE BACK NEXT YEAR? “No, I don’t think so.”
DO YOU WANT A VETERAN OR A YOUNG GUY? “We’ve got to look at sponsorship as much as anything else. It’s a combination deal. We can’t just go with a driver and then not have the money, and we can’t go with just the money and not have a driver, so it’s gonna be interesting.”
HOW CONFIDENT DO YOU FEEL THE OWNERSHIP GROUP WILL HAVE SOMETHING IN PLACE WITH NASCAR THAT GIVES YOU LONG-TERM VIABILITY BEFORE NEXT YEAR? “The one deal that NASCAR has, they have slowed down and we’re talking to them and they’re listening. Will they do anything or not? We’ll just have to wait and see, but there have been a couple of pretty interesting suggestions the RTA has made, so it’s gonna be a long, drawn out deal. We’re not gonna get everything we want, and they’re not gonna get everything they want, but if we can get a start, then I think the RTA can really help NASCAR and I think NASCAR can help the RTA. It’s a combination. We can’t hurt each other. If we do, we’re killing each other.”
HOW WILL THIS HELP AN ORGANIZATION LIKE YOURS? “You’ve got to figure we’ve been here in racing since 1949 and we’ve got no equity in the game, we’re just here. If we go away, we just go away. We’ve got nothing to back up that 65 years of being in NASCAR and I think that’s what the owners now are looking at. ‘Hey, we’ve been putting money in this thing and when we go away we don’t have anything to take home with us.’ That’s what they’re really looking at.”
ANY CHANCE YOU WOULD GO TO ONE CAR NEXT YEAR? “No, we’re a two-car team.”
DID YOU EVER THINK YOU WOULD SEE JEFF GORDON DO SOMETHING LIKE SATURDAY NIGHT LIVE? COULD YOU HAVE EVER DONE THAT? “The times are so much different now. He came through a couple generations different than me. Things have changed and he’s done one heckuva job of getting NASCAR out to the general public and that’s something some of the rest of us hadn’t done.”
ARE YOU SURPRISED NO ONE ELSE HAS BEEN ASKED SINCE? “No, his personality blended right with what these people were wanting to do – good-looking, very articulate – he’s a very, very good representative of NASCAR.”
WOULD YOU HAVE DONE THE SMOTHERS BROTHERS SHOW OR JACKIE GLEASON? “I probably would have. I didn’t know any better then, either.”
YOU DID SOME RACING TV STUFF. “In the TV deal I’d get to watching the race and talking about the race than what was showing on TV, so that didn’t work out too good.”
