Also, check out our Zoomcast with NASCAR reporters, Dustin Long, Roy J. Akers, Steve Sweitzer, and Bob Francis.
By Roy J. Akers — www.skyviewsports.net
NASCAR moves into the Windy City, and the only Street or ‘Grand Prix’ style course is on tap for its third edition. This is what the drivers said during today’s media availabilities.
Joey Logano – Trying new racetracks
HOW WOULD YOU LIKE TO SEE NASCAR BALANCE THE DIFFERENCE OF TAKING THE SPORT INTO NEW VENUES WITH ESTABLISHING A FOOTHOLD IN A MARKET LIKE DOWNTOWN CHICAGO AND BEING ABLE TO KEEP THOSE NEW FANS COMING AFTER THREE YEARS? “I can probably go a couple different directions on that. I’m always a big fan of going to new facilities because it’s worked every single time. I’ve got to go back to just thinking about early in my career when we never did anything like this. It was the same schedule every year for decades. Nothing changed. A big change would be like moving a date a couple weeks from where it was. It wasn’t changing anything. Now we’re going to new venues. You think of Road America, we’re not too far from there, and that was a huge success. The L.A. Coliseum, the first couple of years was a huge success. I think if you do it too long it gets stale. I think there are tracks that are part of our roots that we must go to, but I think there’s a handful of tracks that should be on a three-year term kind of thing that you can just move around and go to new places. Look at what happened at Bowman Gray this year – a huge success, a new track. People love going to see something new. The unknown. The uncertainty of all the teams not knowing what to do. It’s fun to watch. You have an idea now of what Chicago is gonna look like. We know what Richmond looks like. We know what Daytona is gonna look like. When you go to a new facility you don’t know. What was Bowman Gray gonna look like? We don’t really know until we get there, so I think the newness is important to keep something like that going on in our schedule. That’s just my opinion, though.”
Erik Jones on the Legacy improvement
How does the No. 43 team approach the rest of the season with the recent surge in performance?
“Yeah, I mean we’re kind of in a tough spot, right? We’re 39 points out of the Playoffs which is kind of eight really good races. Obviously, a win would be great, but I feel like there’s a couple of tracks we really have to target hard on what places we can win at. For us, I mean, it’s just doing what we’re doing. If we keep running the way we’ve ran since Charlotte, we’ll yeah we’ll probably point our way in barring another kind of obscure winner farther back in points. So, that’s the plan right now is just to keep running well and keep racking these points up. I hope it goes well again this weekend. Kind of three strange weeks: here (Chicago), Sonoma and Dover, so it’s going to kind of make-or-break us. You know, one bad race, (pause) if we have a race where something goes wrong, we don’t score any good points, I mean it’s kind of over unless a lot of other people have bad races too. We’ve been on a great roll, tons of momentum. It’s easy to look at it right now and say it’s going to keep going, but you don’t know how things ebb and flow. Pointing our way in is the number one goal, but we’re banking hard on a couple of races that we can win too.”
Shane vanGisbergen on the playoffs
I know the win obviously puts you in a great position for the playoffs, but is there something to be said for building some momentum for you and your team in this stretch here? Obviously Chicago, that you’ve had a lot of success at, and then going to Sonoma, another road course, kind of building toward the playoffs?
“Yeah, and our oval stuff really was getting better and better. We had a bad week at Pocono, but again at Atlanta, I felt like we made a huge step and a huge gain from earlier in the year at Atlanta. We were running up front, even before half the field got taken out. But I was having some great times there and learning. You know, I had learned so much since the start of the year. I felt really comfortable up front, so yeah, I think we’re really still learning, getting better every week. It’s been a really fun road to be a part of this, I’m enjoying it. And then, as I’ve said before, road courses are just a bonus for us. We know we’re going to be good and we can just focus on trying to get results there.”
Bonus: Joey on his Ford Salesman practical joke
YOU DID A VIDEO RECENTLY ON SOCIAL MEDIA WHERE YOU WENT UNDERCOVER WITH A DISGUISE AND GAVE A FORD DEALERSHIP SALESMAN A RIDE. DO YOU ENJOY DOING STUFF LIKE THAT? “That was a blast. Backstory. This was literally the week after we won the championship at Phoenix. We went to Huntersville Ford in North Carolina. I’m friends with a lot of people there and this is Ford’s idea. They’ve done this a couple other times with other drivers and they brought this up to me and I’m like, ‘Yes. This is what I live for. I want to do that so bad.’ So, I went undercover. I was a chicken farmer from Arkansas, my wife and I. We just moved to North Caroline and we wanted to get a family vehicle. That was the story behind the whole thing and we ended up giving a salesman named Joe, great guy, we scared the hell out of him and made a lot of good jokes. Unfortunately, apparently, a lot of the things we said were not OK, so a lot of it got cut out (laughing). It’s amazing. We’ve got the raw footage, which I’m trying to put it all together so I can post some things I can. There’s more to come, I will say that. The actual video, the real thing turned out great, but we’re gonna try to get all of the outtakes and put them together and do some more cool content behind it. It was definitely a fun experience and we got him. He had no idea, which is crazy. I figured eventually he was gonna figure this out, but it definitely was a wild experience for Joe.”
