Ford Drivers Comment on NASCAR Fines and Jack Roush

 

CARL EDWARDS – No. 99 Aflac Ford Fusion – WHAT IS YOUR OUTLOOK FOR THIS WEEKEND? “We’re coming off a string of top 10s and we’ve been running very well. I feel like we have a pretty good car for qualifying here, but we’ll see how fast it is in a minute. We go out second.  I don’t know if that’s good or bad, but I just have to try and not hit that curb in the tunnel. I hit it just about every time I qualify here, so I’m hoping to get a good lap in and give the guys something that they deserve. Really, our focus today is on Jack and we’re all wishing him a speedy recovery. It sounds like he’s doing very well considering the circumstances, so that’s all of our focus today – Jack.” 

 

HAVE YOU TALKED TO JACK AT ALL AND HAVE YOU EVER LANDED AT OSHKOSH? “I haven’t spoken to Jack. That’s the greatest thing in the world to see him walk out of that airplane. It’s like they say, any landing you can walk away from is a good landing, so we’re just glad he’s okay. I have flown into Oshkosh a couple of times in my jet and it’s amazing. They get more planes in and out of there than anywhere I’ve ever seen, so it’s very tight quarters and there are a lot of planes stacked up one behind the other, all at varying speeds, so it’s a high-pressure situation for the guys controlling from the ground and for the pilots.” 

 

WHAT ARE YOUR THOUGHTS ON THE SECRET PENALITIES NASCAR HAS HANDED OUT? “I don’t know what’s going on with that. I guess I know as much as you guys know. I don’t know how much the penalities are or who they’ve been give to and what they’re for. I just don’t know.” 

 

DOES IT WORRY YOU? “No, it doesn’t worry me. I think like most of the guys I give my opinion on things. It’s not gonna change what I do or how I speak, but it is a reminder to everyone to consider the fact that we’re all in this together. What’s good for NASCAR on the whole is good for almost all of us individually. Whether the fines have actually happened or what they’re for how much they’re for, like I said, it’s just a reminder that we’re all involved in this sport and we’ve all got skin in the game.” 

 

WHAT’S IT LIKE NOT SEEING JACK HERE TODAY? “I won’t miss Jack yelling at me telling me what to do this weekend (laughing). But Jack is a guy who can drive a race car, he can tune the engine, he can build anything, he can help the crew chiefs with setups, so we’re definitely gonna miss him here at the race track. But I have a feeling as tough as Jack is and as dedicated as he is to all of this and all of us – and all of you guys for that matter, just the whole sport – I think he’ll be back real soon. I don’t see him missing too much time at the race track.” 

 

DOES IT MAKE YOU THINK TWICE ABOUT FLYING AND HOW OFTEN YOU DO IT? “Flying is inherently dangerous. You’re defying gravity and it’s complex, but I think until we really know what happened – I mean, I don’t know what happened. I’ve flown in there. I’m as close to the situation as anyone. I’m a pilot and I still don’t understand exactly what happened. I think it’ll be really interesting to see what Jack has to say and how what went down went down. You’ve got to take safety really seriously. The Cessna Citation that I fly is serviced by the Citation Service Centers. We make sure that everything is up to snuff all the time, but it is a reminder, I think, to all of us. All of us fly on private planes at one point or another and we’re all going all over the place, and it’s a reminder that safety is more important than being there on time or any of the things we usually worry about.” 

YOU JUST HAD A PUBLICIZED FINE. IS IT STRANGE TO HAVE SOME FINES PUBLICIZED AND OTHERS THAT ARE KEPT SECRET? AND YOU DON’T THINK ABOUT BEING FINED FOR WHAT YOU MIGHT SAY WHEN YOU GET OUT OF THE CAR, DO YOU? “I haven’t been fined. I’ve been fined a lot, but we all know what they’re for and I know what it’s for. Like I said, I really don’t know what’s going on. Are the fines $50,000? Is that what the deal is? Anyway, I don’t know. I’m learning this at the same time you guys are, so I don’t know exactly what to say about it. My take on this in the way I perceive this is that NASCAR is wanting to send out a reminder that we are all in this together and we need to make sure we’re all pulling the rope in the same direction. I don’t know how that will all snowball and what that will turn into, but I think that’s the intent. I don’t know. I’m nervous to say anything (laughing).” 

 

CAN YOU TALK ABOUT HOW GATEWAY HASN’T REQUESTED ANYMORE RACES? “That’s sad, to me. I know from my part and Justin Allgaier, and all the guys who go there and do the best we can to raise awareness in that area of the race and to make it an exciting race, I know it’s very frustrating for all of us that, for some reason, we haven’t had the success there fan-wise and attendance-wise that we want. I remember one of truck races I was in where trucks were sliding down the back straightaway sideways and we had six green-white-checkered restarts – one of the most dramatic finishes ever – and we’ve had some really dramatic Nationwide races, but I’m not smart enough to understand why that track wouldn’t succeed. It is a little heartbreaking. I like racing there a lot.” 

 

HOW SHOULD THE MEDIA HANDLE ALL THIS STUFF? SHOULD WE BE CHEERLEADERS OF THE SPORT OR NEUTRAL? “I don’t know. That’s a good question.  First of all, if I did know and I told you, you’re gonna do whatever you want anyway (laughing). I don’t know. I do think, and this is not me taking sides or anything like that, I think we all have to remember that we’re all involved in this sport and we’ve got to go out and do the best we can. I’ve criticized this sport and the decisions just like anyone else, but I guess we all just need to remember that. You guys have to do whatever you have to do, but I do also think that honesty is always the best policy, so you’ve got to call them how you see them.”

 

MATT KENSETH – No. 17 Crown Royal Ford Fusion – WHAT ARE YOUR THOUGHTS ON THESE SECRET FINES? “I don’t know much about it. I missed it.”   SOME SAY RYAN NEWMAN AND DENNY HAMLIN WERE FINED FOR COMMENTS THEY MADE. WILL THAT CHANGE HOW YOU COMMENT ON NASCAR? “Yes and no. I think you always have to try to think about the big picture and think about your sponsors and think about your team, think about the sport, think about the fans. You always try to take that stuff into consideration when you say stuff, but yet there’s a line there where you need to be yourself and say what you want when you’re mad, and I don’t think they’re trying to stop that. So I honestly don’t know what those two would have said or what they got fined for, so I don’t really know. If I knew what they said and what they got fined for that would help me a little bit. In other sports they do that. In the NFL, if you criticize officiating, I know that folks have been fined, so you’ve got to protect the sport, too.” 

 

HOW HAS THE CAR BEEN IN PRACTICE? “We struggled a little bit in our little bit of race trim stuff that we did. In qualifying trim we seemed to get it a little bit better as we ran, so, hopefully it’ll be all right. I think we learned some stuff today.” 

 

ANY UPDATES ON JACK? “I guess he’s doing a little bit better today. I haven’t really talked to anybody there directly, but it seems like he’s doing a little bit better so we’ll see him back at the track soon.” 

 

GREG BIFFLE – No. 16 3M Ford Fusion – HOW DO YOU KEEP YOUR MOMENTUM GOING THIS WEEK? “We elected to bring the same car here as we ran at Indy. Normally, we don’t do that these days, but I think Erwin felt like he wanted to bring that car here and I was okay with that. The car is running good. Unfortunately, we had an incident on lap two on the race track. We hit a piece of metal that was off another race car, a swaybar arm was broken and laying on the race track, so it wiped out the splitter and bent the tube on the right-front – took the exhaust pipes out and all that – so we only got one lap of practice and went into qualifying trim when they repaired all the stuff and the car was decent in qualifying trim, so we’re looking forward to tomorrow and getting some race trim practice in to see how the car is running.   The one lap of race trim was 10^th-fastest on the board, so that’s pretty respectable.” 

 

WHAT WOULD YOU LIKE TO SEE DONE HERE AT THIS TRACK TO IMPROVE THE SAFETY? “I think the superstretch or the stretch between turn one and the tunnel has always kind of been an issue. I think we’ve seen on TV from races a while ago and as recent as the last race here five weeks ago that the large area of grass down off the race track can present problems. These cars are really, really hard to control at 200 in the grass. It’s a challenge and whether it’s more pavement like the restrictor plate race tracks did when they had problems – Daytona and Talladega both had issues like that and they paved that whole area and the cars don’t get upside-down and flip through there anymore. They spin around and get slowed down and, a lot of times, put tires on and keep going like nothing happened. That could be done or there could be a wall – jersey barriers or something to prevent us from getting down in there, similar to like you have on the frontstretch. You’ve got a wall on the inside and the outside all the way down the frontstretch, so there are some things that can be done. Certainly those cost money and we understand it’s pretty tough economic times right now.” 

 

WHAT WERE YOUR THOUGHTS ON JACK’S ACCIDENT? “It was kind of funny how I heard about it, but it really isn’t because none of it is. But it’s ironic because my brother had left that afternoon at 6 o’clock. He had a 6 o’clock flight and I was in my office at house checking e-mail and doing some things at the end of the day. When I got home I went in there and I left my phone laying in there, so Nicole’s phone rang while we were sitting on the couch watching TV. She was talking to whoever and was bright-eyed and I thought that she said, ‘Jeff’s plane crashed.’ That’s my brother and he was on a commercial flight from Charlotte to Portland. I couldn’t believe what she just said, and then she said, ‘Yeah, it’s confirmed. It was his airplane.’ That was the second thing she said, so I’m like, ‘Oh my gosh.’ I didn’t even know what I was thinking, and then she said, ‘Yeah, it’s his tail number, November 6JR.’ And so then I realize that she said Jack and not Jeff, and I was just as devastated – come to find out it wasn’t my brother, it was Jack and this all takes place in about 15 seconds.   So the first reports were that he crashed on arrival and that’s much worse than crashing on landing. None of it’s good, but if you crash off the airport a mile away, you’ve got big problems. So that was the initial report that we got, and then news started coming in – that he was okay and been taking to the hospital. I was pacing back and forth and just couldn’t hardly stand it. I immediately called Matt and Carl to see if they had heard or knew anything about it. Matt didn’t so I filled him in and then Carl had a little more information than I had. He actually talked to somebody that was on the ground there.   Someone had called him because Carl usually goes to that show, so we’re thankful that he’s kind of out of the woods now. We know that he’s got some surgeries to probably go through and it’s gonna be a little bit of a road to recovery, but we know he’s gonna be all right and back at it.” 

 

CAN YOU TALK ABOUT THE NEW NATIONWIDE CAR? “I cannot elaborate a bunch on that. I did drive it, boy it seems like two years ago almost, but maybe early last year at Iowa. I went there for a test with what would be the very first version of the car at that race track and it drove decent for what could be expected of it at that point. It was a bunch of R&D and it’s evolved a lot since then. I haven’t driven it or been very up close to it. The only time we’ve had it at the track was Daytona and the Nationwide shop is over in Mooresville and we’re in Concord, so I really haven’t been close to them – as far as seeing them up close or driving them again. But they look pretty cool, I can tell you that, which is good. That’s good for our sport and good for our fans. We want something that looks good and the decal packages and stuff like that, so I think the cars look really good and I think the people are excited about it. Even the guys in our sport are excited about it, so I think that’s one good aspect of it.” 

 

DOES JACK’S ACCIDENT SEND SHOCKWAVES THROUGH THE GARAGE, ESPECIALLY FOR DOUBLE-DUTY DRIVERS? “Guys are gonna race just to race. I think we all have to travel. We all know what we go through and take as many precautions as possible. The planes are much safer today than when we had the last tragic plane crash in the sport, just like our race cars are almost. You can almost compare it to that because the planes have proximity ground warning systems and lots of things, so our aircrafts are a lot safer. You look at it and I think it’s an isolated deal. I think the situation just arose and things can happen in a hurry. I’m a pilot and things can happen in a hurry.”