May 19, 2008 - David Ragan, driver of the No. 6 AAA Ford Fusion, moved into 12th place in the NASCAR Sprint Cup standings after his fifth-place finish in Darlington. Ragan is in his second season racing on the Cup level and finds himself in a chase position this late in the season for the first time.
DAVID RAGAN – No. 6 AAA Ford Fusion -- WHAT WAS YOUR REACTION WHEN YOU FOUND OUT YOU WERE 12TH IN THE POINT STANDINGS AND IN A CHASE POSITION? “That I probably was going to make the drive home to Charlotte because I was going to have a lot of people calling and I wouldn’t get to sleep if I stayed in Darlington, so I said, ‘I might as well drive on home to Charlotte,’ and I stayed up even if it was two or three o’clock in the morning before I got home. But it was really just a sense of accomplishment, along with a good run, but one position either way and we could have been 15th or 14th or 12th, so it’s really close. The top 12 means a lot, but just not right now. It means a lot at Richmond in race 26, but, right now, we’ve got a lot more racing to go and we don’t want to stop with just 12th, we want to keep on going.”
DOES THIS, HOWEVER, GIVE THE TEAM MORE CONFIDENCE? “It’s a confidence boost. We’ve had a lot of confidence on our team that we can be a chase contender and this shows everybody that we are pretty serious and that we can make good things happen. I think that just by getting there to that 12th position that everybody will realize that we are a chase contender and that we can make some good things happen and contend for top-fives and top-10s, whether it be a superspeedway, short track or a high-speed downforce track.”
IS THIS LIKE A SNOWBALL ROLLING DOWNHILL WHERE YOU DIDN’T GET A LOT OF ATTENTION LAST YEAR, BUT NOW IT’S BUILDING AND BUILDING BY THE WEEK? “When you’re low and down, there aren’t too many people that want to stand in your corner, but when everything is lovely, everybody wants to be in your corner. You just get that in any kind of sport or whatever you’re doing in this old world. When times are tough, you’ve got to count on your friends, your family and your teammates to be there beside you and keep on hustling, but when things are good, everybody wants to be on the bandwagon. So things are good now and we’ve got a lot of friends and a lot of people wanting to be our buddies, but we just have to keep working hard and that just comes with time. When everybody realizes that we are just a good, solid race team. We’re here for the future. We’re working hard. We’ve got good chemistry. No, we’re not perfect and there are still a lot of areas that we need to improve on, but we’ve got a lot of racing left in 2008 and that’s what we’re focused on.”
HOW IS THE 600 FROM A PHYSICAL STANDPOINT? “Physically, it’s not that bad of a race because it’s cool and Charlotte is a fairly easy track. It’s not like a short track or a Darlington, where inches matter. You can move from top to bottom and move around a little bit, but, mentally, it’s tough. You’ve just got to take care of your equipment. You might not have the best-handling car the first part of the race and you’ve got to hang in there for the end. You’re gonna have a lot of opportunities on pit road to make your car better, so time will help and you’ve just got to stay calm inside the race car.”
Jon Wood will be making his second appearance behind the wheel of the No. 21 U.S. Air Force Ford Fusion this weekend as he attempts to qualify for the Coca-Cola 600 at Lowe’s Motor Speedway. Wood spoke about his familiarity with the new car and how his confidence level has been raised recently.
JON WOOD – No. 21 U.S. Air Force Ford Fusion -- DO YOU FEEL COMFORTABLE IN THE NEW CAR? “Absolutely. I was actually speaking with my dad after Richmond. The outcome of that weekend and the fact that we missed that race is not a true depiction of what our race team is capable of right now. We’ve done a lot of testing the past couple of weeks. We had, I don’t want to call it a mechanical failure, but it was an issue that we didn’t find until after qualifying was over back at the shop on the pull down rig. It was something that I didn’t want to find out because I actually wanted to say, ‘OK, I’m just not good enough, I give up,’ without literally meaning that, but, then again, I wanted something to be wrong so I could say, ‘OK, here’s what happened and here’s why,’ and, sure enough, that was the result. That one is behind me. These cars are amazingly easy to drive. I know a lot of people talk about how hard they are, but I think when you’re accustomed the way I am to just having to hop into anything, and driving with the progression that our Cup program has followed, I’ve driven the cars when they needed to drive better. I’ve driven them when they are almost at their peak and now I’m driving them when they are at their peak, and it’s really been gratifying and the improvements we’ve made have been leaps and bounds. It’s tough for a single-car team. If you look at Hendrick Motorsports or Roush Fenway Racing, we should accomplish a fourth of what they do in a fourth of the time, statistically speaking or from a numbers standpoint.”
ON COMPETING IN TRUCKS AND CUP. “I think a lot of people don’t give the credit for the similarities between trucks and the Sprint Cup cars now, and I think that is because not a lot of people drive both. You see most people doing Nationwide Series and Sprint Cup combined, but I drive both and they’re almost identical – just a little bit of difference and variance in horsepower. I remember at Charlotte I fired off for the test and my first lap was the fastest that I was on the race track for the entire afternoon session. What that tells me and the crew chief alike is there’s no accustomization time. There’s no getting a feel for the car or getting a feel for the track time period where you just have to make laps. I can fire off each week from here on out, if need be, in qualifying trim and there’s no lag time in getting me used to these cars.”
SO ARE YOU CONFIDENT IN MAKING THE 600? “Yeah, I am. Barring no bad luck, which it’s really cool what NASCAR has done with the draw. Those of us that are outside the top 35 can speak for what a huge asset that it’s been in having all the cars outside the top 35 qualify at once. It makes it so much more fair, but, yeah, I am very confident in that race.”
WHERE DOES THE 600 RANK FOR YOU WITH EVERYTHING INVOLVED – MEMORIAL DAY, YOU’RE IN THE AIR FORCE FORD, AND YOUR TEAM’S SUCCESS HERE? “I feel like from a mental standpoint and from an overall image standpoint that the 600 is the biggest race of the year. The Daytona 500 probably has the most heritage. The Brickyard 400 has the biggest purse, and the races at Bristol have the most crashes. Every race track has some sort of stigma about it that makes it the best in its particular category, but this one with the involvement of all the military, it being on Memorial Day Weekend and it being the longest race of the year, all of that combined makes it the biggest race in my opinion.”
HOW DO YOU FEEL BEING VIEWED AS THE ONE TO GET WOOD BROTHERS RACING BACK TO WHERE IT USED TO BE A FEW YEARS AGO? “I tell you this, and this has been a big eye-opener for me in the past few weeks. It’s very tough to maintain focus and interest in something that you aren’t involved with every day. Now that I’m getting the calls to go do the testing, I’m getting the calls to drive the car whenever the opportunity arises, just the fact that the crew chief and the guys want me to do it over whomever else, that’s all it took for me to jump in with both feet.
WHEN WAS THE TURNAROUND? “It was literally overnight almost. I got the call to go do the Iowa test. There was a Ford test that we did in Iowa and I did that, and then after that all the guys and the crew chief actually told my dad and Len that they wanted me to drive at Richmond. That was like, ‘Man, OK. I really want to put in my two cents worth.’ So combine that with Talladega and doing everything I was told there and not getting in any trouble, it just seems like blue sky ahead.”
SO YOU FEEL BETTER NOW THAN IN MARCH WHEN YOU GAVE UP THE VEGAS RACE? “Yeah. The decision I made in March to kind of let someone else drive, particularly someone that was accredited, that was sort of a chess piece move for me. It was a strategic move that I imposed to show that if I were to be the one to go out to Vegas and miss the race, it wouldn’t necessarily be my fault. Since then, things have gotten a lot better with the cars. We weeded out some negativity within the upper management of that race team and the new crew chief has just been superb. It’s made me want to literally get on my knees and beg to drive each week.”
WHAT IS YOUR SCHEDULE LIKE OVER THE NEXT FEW WEEKS? “I’ve got the majority of the next upcoming races – the 600, Dover, Pocono. There’s a string of them and, fortunately enough for me, these races weren’t picked because of this reason but they all have test sessions. Pocono, I believe, has a test. Charlotte had a test, so that helps me a lot to have seat time. If nothing else, everybody on this race team understands my language and lingo whenever I start describing things and I learn the pros and cons of driving these race cars.”
ANY TRACKS YOU’RE LOOKING FORWARD TO OR ONE THAT IS MORE CHALLENGING THAN ANOTHER? “They’re all pretty challenging. That’s an understatement. With that being said, nobody can fully appreciate the level of competition that there is at the Cup level. It’s insane. You’ve got to be on your game. You’ve really got to step it up and if you have one little problem, whatever it may be – have never been to the race track, some sort of little problem with the car – it shows and it shows tremendously on the race track and in qualifying. I just can’t say enough how competitive it is. It’s crazy.”
Jamie McMurray, driver of the No. 26 Crown Royal Ford Fusion, has jumped from 36th to 23rd in the NASCAR Sprint Cup Series point standings over the last six races. McMurray, who posted one of the fastest speeds during the recent Charlotte test session, spoke about his team’s improvement going into this weekend’s Coca-Cola 600.
JAMIE MCMURRAY – No. 26 Crown Royal Ford Fusion -- WHAT HAS BEEN THE KEY TO YOUR RESURGENCE? “Really, nothing is different. We had five races where we had some things go wrong with our car – some of it self-inflicted. But like at Las Vegas, I spun out avoiding a wreck and slid through the infield that didn’t really tear the outside of our car up, but it broke an exhaust pipe. So I ran the rest of the day with seven cylinders basically, and then at Bristol the axel caps were left loose before the race started and axels were falling out, so we had to pit and then got caught up in a wreck as a result of that, so we just had five races where things just didn’t go right and that got us way behind. Our cars have been fast and they’ve probably even faster than where we finished. We haven’t been able to really put it together at the end of the race, so we feel really good about a lot of these tracks coming up. We tested as one of the best cars here at the Charlotte test and there are just good places coming up and our cars have been good.”
ARE THE LAST 100 MILES REALLY NOTICEABLE IN THE 600 OR DO YOU JUST COUNT DOWN THE LAPS AND NOT THINK ABOUT IT? “It’s a longer race, but I wake up and work out for about two hours a day, so I look forward to races like that and when it gets really hot because some of the guys that don’t train and don’t put the time in for that, that’s when you really see the benefits from staying in shape.”
WHAT’S IT GOING TO TAKE TO TAKE THE NEXT STEP? “Our cars are fast enough right now and with the road courses coming up and some of these other tracks that I really like and maybe some other guys struggle at, it should be a really good summer for us. I just can’t emphasize enough that the cars have been really quick and that’s the hardest part of this sport, especially with the car of tomorrow and making your cars to where they drive decent enough to run good lap times. Our practices have gone really well and our pit stops have been good, you just have to put all of that together in a race weekend and be consistent at that, so we have to work on that.”
WHEN THINGS ARE GOING WRONG HOW DO YOU HANDLE IT? “It’s mentally draining, but, at the same time, when we ran those races in practice you thought, ‘Wow, we have a car that can finish in the top 10 today,’ and it didn’t work out in the race. So it would be way more frustrating if you were one of the teams that when they unload every week they’re 30th in practice and they race their hearts out and they’re still 30th when the day is over. So, fortunately for us, our cars have been fast enough that you’ve seen promise.”
