David Ragan, driver of the No. 6 AAA Ford Fusion, has been forced to a backup car after begin involved in a single-car accident during Thursday’s first Gatorade Duel. As a result, Ragan will start in the back of the field for Sunday’s Daytona 500. Ragan, along with crew chief Jimmy Fennig and car owner Jack Roush, spoke about their situation on Friday.

DAVID RAGAN – No. 6 AAA Ford Fusion – JIMMY FENNIG SAYS HE GAVE YOU SOME GOOD ADVICE ON WHAT DO SUNDAY STARTING FROM THE BACK. CAN YOU EXPLAIN? “Starting in the back you can have a gameplan to hang out back there and maybe possibly be behind the big wreck, or try to make the smart moves to make your way up towards the front. Certainly we’d rather be up in the front racing than back in the back cruising around. We’ve got the 42 of Montoya, Gordon, Kevin Harvick – there are some pretty good cars that are gonna be back there – so our plans right now is obviously to get our AAA Ford Fusion driving well, where I can make the right moves to hang in there with those guys. Secondly, we just need to play it smart. Certainly it’s a 500-mile event and try not to bring any bad situations upon ourselves. It’s so easy to get caught up in someone else’s bad situation there’s no need to bring anything bad among ourselves.”

HOW IS THE TRANSITION FROM BUSCH TO CUP? “Learning is the big thing that we’re here to do this year. Certainly it takes years of preparations for the cars and for the team and for the driver combinations to win championships, and we know we’re capable of running up front and contending for wins, but it’s something that separates the contenders for championships and just race winners – how you deal with the bad situation. Yesterday, having two flat tires within five laps, I’ve got to learn how to deal with that situation a little better than I did yesterday, bringing home a wrecked race car. Sometimes you can’t control what happens, but we’re here to make the right decisions and try to stay out of creating trouble for our own selves. That’s something we’ve talked about and experience will help that and just being a smart race car driver will help that also.”

THE YELLOW STRIPE IS OBVIOUS. HOW HAVE GUYS WORKED WITH YOU IN THE DRAFT? “It’s been alright so far. I think running some of the truck races last year helped some. Also having a good race car is probably one of the biggest things that helps. I think the guys will tend to go with you if they know you’ve got a good race car. If you’re a rookie and have a bad race car, I think that’s a double negative towards you, but the AAA Ford is pretty good. It drives well. It’s got some good speed, so I think they’ll hang with me a little bit, but, still, the first opportunity to leave me hung out and dry, I’m probably gonna get that.”

FANS MAY NOT UNDERSTAND HOW HARD THIS IS. “I put it in comparison to the NFL players or Major League Baseball players. There are like over 1,000 NFL players and it’s tough to become a pro player on a top team, and there are 43 top NASCAR drivers. To be in that top 50 or 55 is an extreme accomplishment for myself or for anyone, but at the same time, the competition is so great because you’ve got the best 50 race car drivers in the United States out here and they’re all smart. We’ve all got great sponsors. We’ve all got good crew chiefs, so the competition level is really high, so that makes it tough but it also makes us better.”

HOW LONG WILL IT BE BEFORE YOU LOSE THAT ROOKIE-TYPE FEELING? “A half season. You’re constantly learning. If I go back to Lowe’s Motor Speedway and race a Legend car, I’ll learn something or maybe refresh my memory that I learned five years ago, but I give myself about a six month time period. We’ll go to a couple downforce tracks, a road course, short track and then by the time we come back to Daytona in July, I should have experienced a lot of what there is to experience in a full Nextel Cup season. And by running the Busch Series this year, we hope when we come back to Daytona that will be like having a full season under our belt. That’s how I’m gonna look at it.”

HOW IS IT HAVING THE ATTENTION OF BEING IN THE 6 CAR? “It’s something you can take either way, you can take it either bad or good, but I’ve just learned to make it up in my mind to take it for good attention. When you pull in the garage and you’ve got guys like Jimmy Fennig and Bobby Bakeeff, our car chief standing there, you know that it’s great equipment and great people and it’s just a matter of working with them. They’ve got to learn my style and I’ve got to learn their style, so we can use our advantages at the top level. It’s gonna take a little bit of time. This is the first race I’ve been with Jimmy Fennig. We haven’t really even gotten through a race and I’ve learned so much already, so by California, by Vegas, going to Atlanta, Martinsville and then back here in Daytona in July, I should have it all planned out in my head. It’s just a matter of if I can get it from my head to the race track.”

JIMMY FENNIG, Crew Chief – No. 6 AAA Ford Fusion – HOW MUCH DOES THURSDAY’S ACCIDENT SET YOU BACK FROM THE STANDPOINT YOU DON’T HAVE YOUR PRIMARY CAR FOR THE DAYTONA 500? “I don’t know if it sets you back as much as if you’ve lost your primary car, you’ve lost your best thing. That’s why it’s a primary versus a secondary. We tested both cars down here so it really didn’t set us back, I just feel like we lost the better of the two cars, that’s all.”

HAVE YOU BEEN ABLE TO FIGURE OUT WHAT HAPPENED WITH HAVING TWO TIRE ISSUES SO CLOSE TOGETHER? “I don’t know what happened with the right-front, but I think we ran over something. And then when we left pit road I’d have to say we probably ran over something again because the apron is pretty dirty around this place. We cut them both. We cut the right-rear for sure, but I’m still looking about the right-front, but I believe we cut both tires.”

BEING A ROOKIE, HOW WOULD YOU SAY DAVID HAS HANDLED THIS SITUATION? “That’s what it is, now he’s been in another situation that he can learn from. He did a good job drafting yesterday. I was pretty proud of the way he was drafting and how the car was running, so it’s just unfortunate we had those two flat tires.”

FROM HIS STANDPOINT HE DIDN’T DO ANYTHING WRONG OR MAKE A MISTAKE, SO HE DOESN’T FEEL HE’S PUT HIS TEAM IN A BIND DOES HE? “No, you can’t do anything about cut tires. That’s part of racing and all we can do is go forward from here.”

YOU’VE WORKED WITH YOUNG DRIVERS BEFORE IN KURT BUSCH AND HAD ALL THOSE YEARS WITH MARK MARTIN. HOW WOULD YOU SAY DAVID IS PROGRESSING? “David is doing an awesome job as far as being a rookie. Like any rookie he’s going to go through his bumps, but he’s a very talented race car driver. He learns very fast from his mistakes and remembers everything he learns out there. Hopefully what he learned yesterday will be applied on Sunday.”

TODD PARROTT TOLD DAVID GILLILAND THE OTHER NIGHT IN THE SHOOTOUT THAT IF HE GOT BEHIND THE 48, 24, 8 OR 20 TO JUST STAY THERE. HAVE YOU TOLD YOUR DRIVER ANYTHING LIKE THAT FOR SUNDAY? “We just got done talking about it. We talked about the 24 being back there with us and the 42 and we told him to try and latch onto the 24. I think people know that we have fast race cars, so people will help us get to the front if need be because of the speed we have in our race cars. I told David that, too. Hopefully, we can work with the 24 and get to the front and try to stay there all day.”

JACK ROUSH, Car Owner – No. 6 AAA Ford Fusion – HOW DO YOU FEEL ABOUT THE 6 CAR HAVING TO GO TO A BACKUP? “David has not had the experience that the 28 and 30 year olds have because he just had his 21st birthday. There are a lot of things that he’s trying to understand and to figure out the rules for and the wisdom of that are beyond his experience. Jimmy is talking to him. I’m talking to him. His mother and father and uncle are talking to him. He’s getting a lot of input from the people outside saying, ‘If you just do this, it will be a good result, and if you don’t do this, it will be a bad result.’ But it’s awful hard to assimilate all of that and to figure out how to apply it. He did a great job in the ARCA race. Everybody was thrilled with the way that worked out. He took what I’d say was probably a fifth or sixth place car and he finished fourth with it. He didn’t make a mistake all day and took advantage of every opportunity on the race track in a very conservative way that the circumstance gave him. He didn’t do as well in the twin 150, obviously. He had a front tire, which may have been caused by debris on the track or may have been caused with contact by another car. Certainly there was some contact in that area because the fender was bent, but he did react to that well. He got it on pit road, they changed the tire and then NASCAR allowed him to make his lap up because he was the person entitled to that. As he was chasing to catch the field, he runs over a piece of debris that undoubtedly was on the race track and it put a hole in the rear tire. He recognized that was a problem and Jimmy talked to him about being careful. The spotter had confirmation that the tire was going down and then he used judgment that wasn’t great in trying to get to the pits and wound up wrecking the car. You go along and things work really well and then something happens that’s avoidable and it’s clear that you aren’t where you’d like to be with regard to experience and the judgment process.”

HOW DO YOU FEEL ABOUT THE 6 CAR FOR SUNDAY? “I think the car Jimmy has taken off the truck will be marginally better than the car that they wrecked. It’s a higher downforce car with more drag. It should be better in traffic when the tires get worn and when they lose some of their adhesion, so the result on the race track in the 500 for David, if he misses the wreck as he works his way forward – through attrition and through pit stops and through passing a few cars on the race track – as he works his way forward, if he can miss the wreck, I think he’ll have a great result. But I think this will give him pause and will make him be cognizant of some things that he may have been more cavalier about if he hadn’t had that problem in the twin 150.”

THOUGHTS ON THE ROUSH CARS – “My assessment of the cars in the race the other day is that David was obviously doing OK. He was trying to be careful even though he got caught up in his problem. Greg Biffle was determined to protect his car for the 500. He has tested the backup car. It was the same car he had for the shootout. He had three cars available and decided to use his shootout car as a spare and it’s not as good a car from a handling point of view as he had for the twin 150. So Greg was determined to keep that car well and not suffer a problem with it. As a result, he wasn’t very exciting in the race. He just hung out. Matt Kenseth was similarly conservative, but, based on the way things worked for him, was able to get up front and stay up front more than Greg did. I looked at the cars and the way they were able to move on the race track, it looked to me like Matt – from what he showed – was as good as anybody out there, including the 24 that won the race. The team made the decision not to put tires on and leave him on the race track, and that really left him disadvantaged for the people that did have tires as it developed there. If Robbie had been here, that might have been a different decision or it might not, I’m not sure. But if you’re in a commanding position, which Matt was one of the cars in a commanding position, you don’t want to beat yourself so you don’t want to take some strategy or do something coming off the race track that could be worse for you than if you just left it alone. By the same token, if you’re not in a position to go take it, then you want the better tires and you do want to take a chance and try to make a jump ball out of it and try to make something happen. That’s what the 24 did and a number of people did as they got two tires and were able to go to the front. So Matt’s real good. Greg’s real good. Jamie’s real good. Carl’s real good. Carl’s car was a little loose. We think it’s gonna be warmer for the race, we expect, and the handling will be more of an issue with twice as many cars out there and we think that Carl has a car that has more downforce than most, and we think he’ll be in good shape with that. I’m guardedly optimistic. If you say, ‘Jack, what do you think your chances are to win this race?’ Well, given the fact that we’ve never won a Daytona 500 in 19 years, you’d say it’s not very good, but I think our chances of winning here with any of our cars – our Busch cars, our Cup cars or our Trucks – are at least as good, if not better than they were at Homestead and, of course, we prevailed at Homestead and won all three.”

WHAT ARE YOUR THOUGHTS ON THE THINGS THAT HAVE HAPPENED HERE AT SPEEDWEEKS AND THE CRACKING DOWN NASCAR IS DOING ABOUT THE INSPECTION PROCESS? “NASCAR works, I think, knowingly and sometimes unknowingly, making excitement for the fans and the competitors. They make things happen and they make things that people want to talk about and debate in terms of the wisdom or timeliness of decisions – in favor of or in deference to particular teams. NASCAR is making an attempt to take the technical inspection part and the compliance to the next level, where it’s never been, and they’ve been admittedly inconsistent in what they’ve done and unpredictable. If you said what is a predictable part of NASCAR and what could you predict? I can predict unpredictability (laughing). They’ve penalized, in some cases I think, more than precedent would dictate and common sense would allow, and on other things they’ve given free passes to people that were clearly outside the box and the culpability and the intent that was involved, by comparison, would have dictated a more stronger and more stringent penalty.”



John Force, driver of the Castrol GTX Ford Mustang in the NHRA POWERade Funny Car and 14-time series champion, visited Daytona International Speedway on Friday. The NHRA season opened last week in Pomona, where Force’s daughter Ashley made her debut in the Funny Car series. Here are highlights from Force’s press conference.

JOHN FORCE – Castrol GTX Ford Mustang – YOU’VE BEEN HERE BEFORE AND MUST HAVE A LOT OF FRIENDS IN THE GARAGE. “Yeah, I’m meeting a lot of my buddies. Coming around here just seeing what the big guys do here in NASCAR. Of course, I’m a Ford guy and we drive those Mustangs; we had a big outing last week in Pomona, and it was a good weekend for all us. It’s exciting for me to come to this press party here. It’s a lot of new faces and a lot of old faces that I’ve known for years. As you know, I’ve been around for a long time, so thank you for having me.”

ON HIS DAUGHTER ASHLEY’S DEBUT LAST WEEK AT POMONA. “It’s just an exciting time in our sport. We just unveiled my daughter Ashley in a Ford Mustang and got pretty tense right down in the last day of qualifying at the NHRA POWERade kickoff at Pomona. And, Dad bumped the girl out but the girl bumped right back in. I’m real proud of her, she did a great job. I think the drag-racing market, Shirley Muldowney gave the start, women in drag racing, and really opened the door, and now for the first time in NHRA history, they have four women in all four categories.”

WHAT WAS IT LIKE, COMPETING AGAINST YOUR DAUGHTER? “It was exciting until I bumped her out. If you’ve seen my [TV show] on A&E, ‘Driving Force,’ I’m sleeping on the couch and it didn’t help none when I took my kid out in that first session, last session of qualifying. I got back to the starting line and the wife was a little bit upset. My kid went out there, like the tiger she is, she bounced back in the show, and it was a proud moment for me. When she straps in that seat she’s a tiger, she’s like her old man, and looks a whole lot cuter. She looks like her momma.”

WHAT HAPPENS IF YOU GET CAUGHT CHEATING IN NHRA? “You get fined. And the trick is, I guess, if you’re going to cheat, don’t get caught, at least that’s how we look at it down there in drag racing. But, to be honest, I’ve never cheated. And I’ve even asked my crew chief because I’m not a real motor head, I’m just a driver and a promoter and an owner, but I said to my drivers, I’ve got 30 years in this sport, and I’ve got 14 championships, 15 championships overall with one of my other drivers, and I said it’s no time in my career to cheat and I don’t ever want to go down that road, and my boys say okay. But I’ve got to admit, they fudge it. Even Castrol, that we’re sponsored by, ‘is it out there?’ And what I said, ‘What’s out there is we push it to the max.’ We push it. The only twice that I was ever in trouble was I come out of the roof hatch at Richmond and I got hung up on the bolts coming through the roof, so I told my guys, ‘Turn ’em over so I don’t hit ’em going out,’ so they were sticking up. We set the track record that weekend, but we were busted because they said they were vortex generators, that we deliberately turned them upside down to redirect the air, and I said, ‘No way. It was to keep from tearing my fire suit.’ I’ve got a photograph I’ll bring back. It’s kind of fun. I’m going to show it on TV tonight, just so when this issue came up I could dance around it. You’ve got to give benefit to the doubt. I don’t know if anybody was cheating or not, and I’m not going to give an opinion on it, okay? I think these are all great racers, and I just can’t give an opinion because I don’t know. I have this photograph because they said my car, that we were so good, and that’s the problem with being so good that NHRA came down and said, ‘Look, we don’t need this on our sport, that if you’re cheating, if we bust you, we’re going to fine you, take points away from you, throw you out of the race, whatever it takes.’ I said, ‘Well, we’re not.’ I even went to my crew chiefs and asked them and they said no. So, they said that we had an automatic device braking system because my car had magic. The real magic wasn’t me, as a driver, it was Austin Coil [crew chief]. This kid could walk on water and he could make my hot rod go down a dirt road that was unbelievable. And this went on the months. And finally, in the middle of the race, they stripped my car completely, took it apart, and they could find no automatic devices that could make this car slow down, to keep it from smoking the tires.So we made the run and the next day, in the heat of the day, 90 degrees, set the track record and they were screaming, every team. No way could anybody run like this, don’t care if it’s John Force and Austin Coil, and the rumor was I was carrying the automatic device in my fire suit. And here I was standing at the end of the race track and Steve Evans, a great friend of mine that announced at the time, he’s passed away, but he said, ‘John, I hate to ask you this, but you have to prove right now on national TV,’ and we were live, ‘and he said, ‘you have to prove right now that you’re not carrying that device.’ Well, John Force unzipped his fire suit and dropped it to the ground, and buddy, when you see a guy like me with Budweiser ads, it ain’t a pretty sight. Okay? Sitting there in my old dirty underwear, skinny legs – my wife cried, said she couldn’t go to church for months, was hiding – and they took photographs, it was all over the internet, but there was no device on me. We were just good, and we’re still good to this day. We get a lot of technology through Ford, the wind tunnel, we’ve got a new motor program that we’re building with Ford that should be out later in the year. We’re building an NHRA Ford spec motor, we’re excited about that. Dan Davis and John Szymanski from Ford Motor Company have really worked well with us to help us create a program that we can continue to dominate, because that’s what we like to do. It’s real tough racing right now. So, I’ve got that picture, it ain’t pretty but it’s me. If I get beat up tonight on TV I can show that picture and help me dance around the issues out here because I don’t get in the issues. I think the sanctioning body, they do what they have to do. The NHRA makes calls I don’t like; I don’t tell them how to run their series, they don’t tell me how to run my race car, and that’s the way we play the game.”

THERE HAVE BEEN SEVERAL WOMEN COMPETE IN TOP FUEL, BUT NOT FUNNY CAR. WHY DID YOUR DAUGHTER CHOOSE TO RACE IN FUNNY CAR? “Well, the real truth is, the Funny Car is an animal. You’re talking about 2,400 pounds, short wheelbase, full body with all the aerodynamics, that fact that the motor’s out front. I always felt that I like the motor out front so, since I’m paying for it, if it blows up, I want to see it blow up. It’s a bad joke, but it’s kind of the way I look at it. I’ve found from being in a crash or being on fire, I got more ink in the early days than I did from winning the race, because in the early days I never won a race. My daughter got a taste of that fire at Phoenix and we took her out the next day, and I said, ‘You’re going in and out of rook hatch 30 days per day for the next four days up to the race.’ And I wore her out. I guarantee you know, she can get out of anything. That’s my little baby, and I don’t want to burn her.”

CAN YOU REFLECT ON WINNING 14 CHAMPIONSHIPS – THE SAME AS RICHARD PETTY AND DALE EARNHARDT COMBINED? “I really appreciate and thank you for just mentioning me with those types of individuals because those are guys that I read about, that I dreamed about. I had great sponsors behind me – Mac Tools and Ford Motor Company and Castrol and AAA of Southern California, it goes on and on and on – but I hired the right people. I think the best quality that I had picking good people. I’ve been together with Austin Coil for 22 years. He met Ashley when she was two years old, so he’s helped raise my kids. And Dean Antonelli, the crew chief for that Mustang is a kid that’s worked for me for 14 years that when he met Ashley she was seven years old, been around the shop, snotty-nosed kid with curly hair, you know? They’re really working hard to take care of her. But I’ve been lucky because I get the right people behind me, and I work as a team. I don’t take any of the win money. All the money goes into a pool that pays all four teams. That’s why our teams team up. And I think that’s why we’ve dominated for so many years. I did lose a year ago to a young kid named [Gary] Scelzi in a Dodge, but I bounced right back and got the championship back. I wear this POWERade jacket and people think I’m nuts, when it’s 90 degrees I’m wearing this jacket because I’m very proud of this accomplishment and to carry the colors for my sport.”

HOW DO THINK ASHLEY COMPARES TO YOU AS A DRIVER AT THE SAME AGE? “I told the USA TODAY the other day, took off, because the weather was coming in on Lake Tahoe and I forgot to pull up the anchor and ripped the front of the boat out. It was sinking, and my wife very calmly said to me, ‘Do we bail water or do we swim?’ And I was running from one end of the boat to the other like I was going to cure it from sure pure panic. I have always fought the fight on adrenaline. It’s the old saber-tooth tiger effect, you know, chases the cave man, gets up for the fight? That’s me. Ashley, the skill, because if you know you can drive even with all the championships, there was a lot of luck and a lot of craziness and a lot of beer went down in the early days, and how I survived it I don’t know, but I love what I did. But what I think that Ashley has that I don’t have is her mother’s composure. She doesn’t panic. She has that. And her mother was that way. Ashley has the ability to be better than me, because if you can be cool, that’s better. If I could’ve been I cool, I might’ve won more races. It’s going to take a lot of years. It’s not just going to happen. I don’t believe she’s going to go out and win a championship, but what you see in her eyes, on TV, on ESPN2, no pressure.”