FORD RACING WINS 200TH NASCAR NATIONWIDE SERIES RACE
Today’s win by Trevor Bayne at Iowa Speedway is the 200th for Ford Racing in the NASCAR Nationwide Series and the 999th all-time victory for Ford Motor Company in the NASCAR’s top three series combined. Mark Martin is Ford’s all-time NASCAR Nationwide wins leader with 47, including the very first series victory for the manufacturer on May 30, 1987 at Dover International Speedway.
Below are some additional notes on Ford Racing’s NASCAR Nationwide Series history by the numbers:
DID YOU KNOW?
Mark Martin ranks first on the all-time Ford Racing win list in the NASCAR Nationwide Series with 47, but did you know he achieved that total with four different owners? Jack Roush is the most obvious as that duo combined for 40 series wins, but Martin also won three times each for Bruce Lawmaster and Bill Davis while winning once himself as a driver-owner in 1992.
600 & 200
Trevor Bayne is making a habit of logging historic wins for Ford. In addition to today’s 200th win, Bayne also captured Ford Racing’s 600thNASCAR Sprint Cup win when he won the 2011 Daytona 500 for the Wood Brothers.
1 (2-3)
Kenny Wallace, Jason Keller, and Mike Wallace rank first, second and third, respectively, on the all-time NASCAR Nationwide list for career series starts. What else do they have in common? They all won NNS races with Ford. Keller had six wins while Kenny Wallace registered five and Mike Wallace one.
3
Jeff Gordon won three NASCAR Nationwide Series races with Ford while driving for Bill Davis in 1992.
4
Ford Racing has won four NASCAR Nationwide Series championships and all of them have been by Roush Fenway drivers — Greg Biffle (2002), Carl Edwards (2007) and Ricky Stenhouse Jr. (2011-2012).
11
There have been 11 drivers who have won a NASCAR Nationwide and NASCAR Sprint Cup Series race with Ford, including Mark Martin, Carl Edwards, Jeff Burton, Greg Biffle, Matt Kenseth, Dale Jarrett, David Ragan, Marcos Ambrose, Bill Elliott, Ryan Newman and Trevor Bayne.
33
That’s how many drivers have won a NASCAR Nationwide Series race with Ford.
131
Mark Martin registered Jack Roush’s first NASCAR Nationwide Series win on Feb. 27, 1993 in the Goodwrench 200 at Rockingham, NC. Roush currently has a NASCAR-record 131 all-time series wins with Ford.
382
Jason Keller holds the NASCAR Nationwide record for consecutive series starts with 382. Keller won six times with Ford Racing from 2001-2003, including four times in 2002 with owner Keith Barnwell.
TREVOR BAYNE CAPTURES 200th FORD RACING NATIONWIDE SERIES VICTORY
• Trevor Bayne captured the 200th all-time series victory for Ford Racing with his win at Iowa Speedway Sunday afternoon.
• The win is the 999th all-time for Ford Motor Company in NASCAR’s top-three series’ combined.
• The win is Bayne’s second career NASCAR Nationwide Series win.
• Bayne also was behind the wheel for Ford Racing’s 600th NASCAR Cup Series win when he won the 2011 Daytona 500 for the Wood Brothers.
TREVOR BAYNE, No. 6 Ford Ecoboost Ford Mustang – ANOTHER HISTORIC MOMENT FOR YOU, A BIG COMEBACK WIN AND THE 200th FOR FORD. “I am so proud of this team and what they accomplished here today, not giving up even until the end. We were so far back we could barely see the lap car. We got caught in some lap traffic. I can’t even catch my breath right now. We raced pretty hard and caught a door on the straightaway and I got him loose once and we raced clean and we got by him and we were able to drive away. This team here at Iowa has been so good. It is such an opportunity and such a blessing to be a part of this team and to have Ford on board for the 200th win for them this weekend, man it is great. It has been a rally the last few weeks. I got married this week and she told me I had to win so that nobody could blame that on us running bad. I am really excited about this win.”
“This car was so good on the long run. I can’t thank these guys enough for persevering through this whole race. We weren’t good on the short run but we ran him down and were able to get by him. It is so great to get the 200th win for Ford. I was able to get the 600th in Cup and 200th in Nationwide. We are just showing up for the big one’s I guess.”
MIKE KELLEY, crew chief, No. 6 Ford Mustang – “This means the world to us. You want to win on every weekend but when you can get a legacy win, a 200th win for a company like Ford, it does so much for four program. Ford does so much for our program. Jamie Allison, Edsel Ford and all the guys at Ford that do everything for us and to have their name on the car today we couldn’t be more proud. They are not a sponsor of us, they are a partner of ours and that is what means the most I think.”
TREVOR BAYNE AND MIKE KELLEY POST RACE PRESS CONFERENCE
TREVOR BAYNE, No. 6 Cargill Ford Mustang – YOU GOT YOUR FIRST NATIONWIDE WIN A COUPLE YEARS AGO, BUT THIS MUST RANK PRETTY HIGH UP THERE FOR YOU. “This does. We are back. I get to drive a championship contending car with a team that doesn’t give up. We have been through some trials this season but the Lord just made us stronger and we have come back and fought hard the last couple weeks and now we get a win. I didn’t know that it would come this soon but I knew coming to Iowa we would have a good shot at it. Mike over here skipped out on my wedding so he could build me a race winning car. I will let it slide this time. I can’t thank these guys enough for standing beside me. No matter what happens each weekend I know I can walk in the shop and have a team that is standing by me. Mike is such a good leader, he doesn’t let our guys get down. This race today, we weren’t great on the short run but the long run we could really go after them. I knew we had to keep that lead to a minimum while he was fast on those restarts, that way we could catch him at the end of the run. Lap traffic worked out perfect and our Ford EcoBoost Mustang was so quick after 30 laps that we were able to catch him and battle pretty hard, a little harder than I wanted to. We were able to pull it off and get the win and I couldn’t be more excited for Ford for their 200th win and for Iowa Speedway to get this race in. The rain was not what we wanted to see but it paid off staying around this time.”
MIKE KELLEY, crew chief, No. 6 Ford Mustang – “When we unloaded we weren’t that good and Trevor did a really good job of telling us where we were wrong and what we needed to work on our car. That is probably what hurt us the most in the fall race here last year. The tire changed and when we got here with Ricky we had won the previous three races and really dominated this race last year. We were a little hesitant to change what we had and when we got here with Trevor we needed to change what we had. In the middle of practice we were probably one of the worst cars on the race track. Nobody gave up and we wholesale changed that thing and there were actually teams around us that were surprised there was anything left on the race car halfway through. We did a really good job and Trevor stayed focused. We have a really new engineer this year and he stayed focused on helping us get the simulation changes. By the end of practice we had a car that wasn’t the fastest car here, the 3 was incredibly fast in practice and the early part of the run but Trevor told us he thought he had a car he could win the race with. The last couple of weeks we have changed a lot of things we are doing on the 6 car and Trevor stepped up to be a leader on the team and he has been telling us what the car is doing and making changes to what Trevor says, not what Ricky was doing last year. One of the big things that kind of helped us was about four weeks ago we sat down and looked at some simulation, the first time on track all year long, that I could compare anything with Ricky and Trevor was the Texas Cup race. I could go home and take the Cup data and run through simulation and find the differences of what Ricky and Trevor had in the same car on the same track on the same day. I started applying that to our Nationwide setups from Ricky before. I don’t want to say it was like a light switch, but it started answering a lot of questions and his feedback has been spot on. We hadn’t won until today but at Charlotte and then Dover last week we knew we were there. I don’t care who has driven the 6 car the last few years, Dover has been a real pain in our side and that was a great run last week there. We still have a long way to go in the points. We quit looking at points a few weeks ago and we know our trailer is getting closer to the front where it is used to being parked. That is our goal right now, to keep this thing going in the right direction.”
HOW DO YOU AS A CREW CHIEF KEEP YOUR TEAM FOCUSED AND IN THE RACE MODE WHEN YOU HAVE A RAIN BREAK LIKE TODAY? “A lot of you don’t know but this year on the 6 car we have been through more adversity away from the race track. My car chief this week, Brett Ragan, he is going through something where his dad has been ill all year. He hasn’t been in the shop all year. He has come to as many races as he can and we are borrowing people to replace him as I can. I had an engineer for six years, Seth Barber, who a lot of our success has been attributed to things Seth Barber has done. He went on to be a crew chief for that third Nationwide team. I got sick in Texas and we had some crazy races but I think days like today are becoming more easy for us because of a lot of things we’ve had to go through all year long. We’ve had people in and out and crazy things happen on the race track that we have never seen before. We have to go back and rebound. We go back to the shop these last three or four weeks and we are taking cars back that aren’t wrecked, we are learning more and our heads are clear. If you have a really bad weekend, like Bristol, it really shocked us. Trevor has been really good at Bristol and Ricky was really good at Bristol and we went there and we sucked. That takes two weeks out of your season trying to figure out why. I have always said, when a team is struggling you work way harder than a team that is running smooth. When you are running smooth you don’t try to figure out what is wrong with the program or the people. I think things are getting smoother and we are spending more time getting ready for these races.”
TREVOR BAYNE CONTINUED – MARRIED ON TUESDAY, WIN ON SUNDAY. CAN YOU TALK ABOUT HOW MUCH MORE SPECIAL IT IS TO GET A VICTORY IN THE WEEK OF YOUR WEDDING. “Man, just getting the victory would be awesome but to do it like this on such a special week for me. I was teared up on the altar on Tuesday and I about teared up in victory lane on Sunday. It is such a great week and to have her here supporting me, not many women would be willing to get married on a Tuesday and come to Iowa as part of their honeymoon. Ashtyn has been such a support for me through the good times and bad times. We have been together for like three years now and we have been through a lot of times but this is the first time she has been in victory lane with me. To be married and have this ring on my finger that I can’t get used to, it is such a good feeling to know we have a lot of years left racing and forever to be married. It is cool. By the way, we are trying to talk Kelley into moving his wedding up now. It is supposed to happen in the off-season but we are thinking it should maybe happen next week now.”
WITH THE WEATHER CONDITIONS TODAY, HOW MUCH DID YOU HAVE TO CHANGE THROUGH THE COURSE OF TODAY? “I feel like our car changed dramatically when the clouds were out or when the sun was out. I would pick up two-tenths versus the competition as soon as the clouds would come out. That was part of the reason we caught Austin at the end of that run. The clouds came out and we were able to run him down. The sun started peeping again and it started to worry me. I feel like after it rained it washed the track off and we restarted like we did at the beginning of the race. All the rubber was washed off and our car was free on entry all day. I had more front brake on the car than I have ever had anywhere I could think of. After that red-flag caution I went two more turns of the front brake to help it on entry and the more rubber the track took the stronger we got. I kind of wish this would have been a night race because I think we would have been stronger under the lights in a cool condition. But now we have learned for day races here. If we have this situation again, we know what we need. We need to start tighter, work on our entry more, and if we have a night race we will be really stout.”
MIKE KELLEY CONTINUED – “These races are won long before today. Great drivers do a great job in the race but engineers, we sit back and look at history of the last few races back here and that was the thing. We were guessing on when we were going to race. There was one point we thought that if we got 75 laps in last night, what would our balance be? We left a lot of adjustability in our car and a lot of spring rubbers. A lot of things that, because we didn’t know when we would race – it changed when the cloud would come out the car would react one way and when the sun came out another way. We would have a long run and then the rain and then we sat there in between the rain delay and talked about it. We knew we would be starting over with a green race track. We knew the key was to try to hold Austin’s lead and keep it as short as we could. We had seen all day long that he would fire off and we would run him down about three-seconds. If it went from that restart to the end, we couldn’t let that lead get over three seconds. It got to 2.6 at one time and I was getting nervous. Then it slowly started coming back to us. If it would have been two short runs, we wouldn’t have had anything for the 3. Those guys had a tremendously fast race car.”
TREVOR BAYNE CONTINUED – “We talked about that after practice too for that 3 car. There is a lot of times you see speed like that – the 54 at Richmond for example was dominant in practice and it is seldom you see that transfer to the race. We weren’t sure how he would stack up but he held that speed and was able to get those short runs. He had four tires at the end versus our two tires which is a little advantage on the short run but we just had to keep him in sight. There were times he would get where I couldn’t see him and then the next lap I could see him again and it gave me hope that I could catch him again.”
