Santino Ferrucci finished 8th in the 2024 Indianapolis 500 and talks about his career, his team and 2024 season. He also speaks on the Detroit Grand Prix coming up this weekend. Part of the transcript is below. The complete interview is above.
Dave Furst from Indy Car is the Moderator
Roy J. Akers –www.skyviewsports.net
THE MODERATOR: Good afternoon, everyone. Certainly
after a thrilling Indy 500, the season begins to pivot to the
streets of downtown Detroit. Today’s guest has some fond
memories of the day back in 2018, made his NTT
INDYCAR SERIES debut over at Belle Isle. Returns to
Detroit after an eighth-place finish in the 500. Has three
top 10s this season. The driver of the No. 14 AJ Foyt
Racing Chevrolet, Santino Ferrucci joins us from parts
unknown. He’s driving back home to Texas, will fly to
Detroit in a couple days. That’s how it works.
First things first. We’re going to forgive you for not turning
on the video because safety first. Where are you right
now?
SANTINO FERRUCCI: Yeah, I appreciate you guys. I
don’t want to do a Noah Gragson and do the video
conference while I drive.
I’m in Missouri. I have about 500 miles left to go to get to
Dallas. Yeah, take me about eight hours.
THE MODERATOR: It’s a full car, too, right?
SANTINO FERRUCCI: Full car. I have myself, my wife
Renay, both of our pups Kodak and Cleo. Everybody is
enjoying the road trip. Everybody is taking a nap. Kodak
is up with us listening in.
THE MODERATOR: Coming off a top 10 at Indy, there’s
plenty of buzz around the team throughout the course of
May and certainly on race day. How do you keep that
momentum going heading to Detroit?
SF-Looking forward to seeing what we can do, what we can
improve upon. Excited be back at (indiscernible). That
was one of the coolest things. Excited to hear about all the
repave they’ve done at the end of Jefferson and turn nine.
Yeah, hoping we have a little bit more fun this year.
THE MODERATOR: What do you really like about the
streets of downtown Detroit layout? The pit lane is as
unique as it gets.
SANTINO FERRUCCI: Honestly, Detroit is probably now…
Belle Isle was my favorite street course. Not saying that
because it was my season opener and I celebrated my
birthday there. I genuinely loved Belle Isle. I thought it
was one of the best racing tracks we had on the calendar.
Honestly, Detroit really lives up to that, downtown Detroit.
It’s one of the most scenic tracks we go to by far GM
building in the background. You have all the buildings,
parking garage structures. It’s a very scenic race, all things
considered, for where we are.
THE MODERATOR: We’ll go ahead and open it up for
questions.
Q. Santino, we saw the strength of Penske. How
much do you feel you have benefited with the alliance
over the last couple of weeks?
SANTINO FERRUCCI: Yeah, so obviously the race cars
are the race cars. The Q cars kind of showed that alliance
in full form. We were missing something. We couldn’t
quite figure out what was going on with our car. We
couldn’t get it above the 233.2 mark all day. Not quite sure
what that was. Same thing in the race. We were just
missing a little… For a complete