By Roy J. Akers — www.skyviewsports.net
Drivers are moving to the second road course of the season and Watkins Glen has moved to the chilly month of May in upstate New York. Drivers reflect on Watkins Glen and other issues in this weeks media availability.
Could Katherine Legge do the double in the Future?
KATHERINE, NOW THAT YOU HAVE A HANDFUL OF CUPS STARTS UNDER YOUR BELT. HAVE YOU EVER GIVEN ANY CONSIDERATION TO RUNNING THE MEMORIAL DAY DOUBLE DOWN THE ROAD?
“Yes. I think it would be awesome. Right? I think a lot of people have mentioned that, and I think it would definitely be something that e.l.f. would be willing to do, because they want to do all the groundbreaking, really cool stuff there. I hope that I get the opportunity one day down the road.”
Kyle Larson on Katherine Legge doing the the Double
Katherine Legge was in here earlier and she said it would be awesome to do “The Double”. And I’m just wondering, somebody who has done it and had every benefit of the resources between the two organizations to do what you needed to do, what do you think the challenges would be facing her if she elects to try that?
“Yeah, first off, I think it would be awesome if she could do it. I believe she would be the first female and only female to have done it, so that would be great.
And then the challenges, as everybody was aware of mine, is just the weather. So, yeah, I mean, the driving and whatnot is a challenge on its own, but ultimately it’s the weather that kind of can put a damper on things if you get any bit of delay. So, yeah, if anybody does do “The Double” in the future, I hope it goes smoother than it did for me and they can enjoy the great race day that it is supposed to be.”
AJ Allmendinger on his prowess on road courses
“I mean, I have to be better, you know, but I think as a race team, we got to be better as well, but I’m always going to put that on my shoulders. You know, there’s no secret SVG (Shane Van Gisbergen) is dominant right now on the Cup side of it. Obviously, Connor (Zilisch), I think is going to be really good, but there’s um, so many guys now and teams that focus on the road courses. I mean I felt like, you know, 10 years ago or whatever, you could kind of show up and you’re going to run top 10 if you didn’t make any mistakes. And you know, you’d be happy with that and move on.
Go Bowling is this week’s Title sponsor and McDowell’s Sponsor as Well
Go Bowling has been a part of the sport for a while now. How important has it been for this partnership in seeing another sport come in and invest in NASCAR?
“Yeah, it’s awesome, and it’s been fun, too. You guys have seen, they do a great job with the promotion and a great job with content and a lot of fun stuff. And even when they were with other drivers, I always enjoyed, like, Erik throwing the longest strike down the esses and just fun stuff that they did. They always had cool opportunities. I feel like any time that you can cross sports, it’s fun. Being able to bring new people to your sport that maybe don’t watch your sport, it’s the greatest way of doing it, when you get multiple sports or multiple industries that are working together and collaborating.
Chris Buescher on SVG being the Road Course King in NASCAR
“SVG has come into the NASCAR world and has instantly shown to be an exceptional talent. Very specifically, we’ve seen it with road races right from the get-go. That’s been a benchmark for the entire garage. There have been a handful of racetracks, and Watkins Glen is one that I feel like everyone has run so much over the years. We’re all closer here. But, we’ve been to new racetracks and we realized that we had some work to do. I’ll stray a bit here… I was probably 13 or 14 years old racing Legends cars. We were traveling a lot outside of Texas because we got comfortable. We could win every week in Texas. We needed to move around, be in front of different people and experience new racetracks. I swear every time zone east that we went to, they were two-tenths faster. It made us realize that we had work to do, and what we thought was good enough, wasn’t. That’s the long-winded way of saying that we still have work to do. Everyone has been studying and playing catch up, and we have put a tremendous amount of work into our road race program. All three teams at RFK being able to dive in, share data on all of us to figure out what works on these racetracks.”
Is this Chase Elliott’s Best start to a season?
“I don’t know. That’s a tough question. We’ve had some other pretty strong years too. I would have to go back and really kind of dive through that, but now is not really the time for reflection. It’s more about what we have going on right now. Like I said, really proud of our team for the win last week and that’s that. It’s like, okay, now we’re at Watkins Glen and we have a new week ahead of us and a new opportunity. And like I said last week, look, it’s not, hey, we have two wins, pressure’s off, we can relax now. It’s no, we have two wins and we have a longer runway than we’ve ever had before to build on that. And I think that’s the part that’s special and really cool. I felt that way after Martinsville and I still feel that way now. So, you know, my mind has 100% shifted to here and reflecting on how terrible last year was, and that’s given me a lot of motivation and energy to want to try and better that this weekend. That would have been the case whether we ran first or 25th last weekend, as well. So, yeah, just looking forward to getting out; getting on track and hopefully getting off to a better start than where we left off here last season.”
Roy J. Akers covers NASCAR for www.skyviewsports.net
