NASCAR BGN: This week in Ford Racing

Posted By Terry Callahan
Motorsports Editor, The Auto Channel

March 21, 2001

NASCAR Busch Series

For the past two weekends, Jason Keller has been the workhorse on the Busch Series, climbing a combined 52 positions from the drop of the green flag to the cross of the finish line, netting the No. 57 ppc Racing team two straight top-10 finishes. With those two performances, Keller has also made the jump into second place in the Busch Series point standings, just 46 points behind teammate and defending champion Jeff Green. Keller heads back to familiar territory this weekend, when the series visits Bristol Motor Speedway for the fifth race of the season. Keller, who won the 1998 spring Bristol race, is only one of two drivers to win that race from the pole position. Keller talks about his season to date and his recent success at the .533-mile oval.

JASON KELLER-57-Albertsons Ford Taurus - YOU'VE HAD SOME RECENT SUCCESS AT BRISTOL, AND BESIDES FINISHING SECOND THERE IN LAST YEAR'S FALL RACE, YOU WON FROM THE POLE IN 1998. "If you go back to my early days of racing there, I never really had a whole lot of success there, and then I went there in '98 and we just unloaded fast and ran fast all day. It was the first time ever that I had a car that stayed free all day long, and to ride around there fast for a couple of laps is one thing, but usually because it's so fast and so tight, your car gets really tight off of the corners, but that car stayed free all day long and we won the race."

HAS IT BEEN THAT YOU'VE BEEN ABLE TO USE WHAT YOU FOUND OUT IN THAT ONE RACE EVERY YEAR? "Yeah. I don't know if I found out anything else or we went there and got a good setup and the driving kinda came along with that. It's just a real fast race track, and I never really liked it until I ran good, but now I love to go there because it's so much fun when your car is working good."

BUT IF YOU NOT RUNNING WELL? "It's a long day. There is no place that is a longer day than at Bristol when your car is working bad or if you get into a wreck early in the race. It can be one of the shortest races, or on the totally other side, it can be one of the longest races. It's just a really tough race track mentally and physically."

IT'S SO EASY TO GO A LAP DOWN AT BRISTOL. IF THAT HAPPENS, DOES YOUR RACE THEN SNOWBALL AND YOU FEEL LIKE YOU'RE TRYING TO STAY OUT OF EVERYBODY'S WAY? "You can't stay out of everyone's way enough there. If you're running bad, some cars will try to pass you on the outside, some on the inside, and on restarts you'll go up high and try to stay out of the way, but you can't get out of the way fast enough because things happen so fast there. For me, probably more than any other track, Bristol is a rhythm race track. You hear about drivers getting into a rhythm, but the key to Bristol, if I had to say one thing, you have to be in a rhythm all day long because you don't have time to think. You have to drive the car from the seat of your pants and go forward."

DO YOU TAKE ONE OF YOUR FAVORITES CARS TO BRISTOL KNOWING THAT THERE'S A GOOD CHANCE IT WON'T COME BACK IN ONE PIECE? "Now, each race is so important that we can't get away with that anymore with the competition being so tight. In the past, maybe we took a car that wasn't the best in terms of body shape, or something you didn't worry about tearing the sides off of, but it's so important to run good at every race that we're going to take a car that has a brand new body on it. It was one of our Chevrolet cars last year that we re-skinned into a Ford, and it's one of my favorite cars from last year. Bristol is extremely important to me. It's about two hours away from home, and although it's in Tennessee, it's right over the mountains for us and I have a lot of family and friends that will attend."

IS PITTING ON THE BACKSTRETCH AS BAD AS EVERYONE MAKES IT OUT TO BE? "It's terrible. If you qualify to where you won't get a frontstretch pit stall, you probably won't have a legitimate shot at winning the race. That's just one of few bad things about Bristol, but that's why you put an extra emphasis on qualifying there. You can't qualify towards the back because there are only a certain number of frontstretch pit stalls and the back pit stalls will definitely hurt you in the long run."

DID YOU TEST AT BRISTOL IN THE OFF-SEASON? "We didn't go test there. We haven't been really aggressive with our testing quite yet. We need to get working on that, and I did talk to Steve (Addington), and we're going to go to Richmond in our off-week, so we just need to get through this first stretch of races, and I think we'll be good."

WE'VE SEEN ALL THE OLD QUALIFYING RECORDS GET SHATTERED THIS YEAR WITH THE NEW ENGINE PACKAGE. WILL THAT TREND CONTINUE THROUGHOUT THE YEAR? "I think that's going to be a trend for the rest of the year because a lot of the race tracks that we're going to now are cool, we haven't gone through the summer months where they've gotten real hot, and with that 100-plus extra horsepower, I think you'll see all of them fall this year."

HAVE YOU BEEN PLEASED WITH THE NEW TIRE COMPOUND THIS YEAR? "Well, they've been a lot different than in years past. They're a good tire and they seem to be consistent longer into the runs than in past years, but they're just different and another variable in the setup equation. I don't want anyone to misinterpret me saying that I don't like them because once you get a handle on them, they're great and we saw that firsthand at Darlington. In qualifying I couldn't do anything, but once we got the setup under the car that I needed in comparison with the tire, we took off. We're just having to shuffle some things around with that right now."

YOU'VE BEEN THE MAN ON THE MOVE THE LAST TWO RACES PICKING UP A COMBINED 52 POSITIONS FROM THE START TO THE FINISH. "Hopefully I don't move up any this week, and by that I mean hopefully I start up front and finish up front. I think that goes back to the fact that we haven't had a really aggressive testing schedule because of all of the changes that went on over this winter at ppc Racing with the change to Ford, so we have had to use some of the time at the race track as a test session. Darlington was a prime example of that. When we unloaded we were terrible, but then in Happy Hour we finally hit on something that was great for the race car and we came straight from the back to the front. You always say, 'What if we would have started from the front?' Well, it just took us a little bit more time than we thought, but at least we found it. We found the setup we needed and hopefully what we can do now is build from what we learned at Darlington and say, 'OK, we changed last year's setup this much to this year's setup, so let's do the same thing at Bristol."

YOU AND JEFF GREEN ARE BACK IN FAMILIAR TERRITORY LEADING THE POINTS RACE. DOES THAT CHANGE ANYTHING IN TERMS OF YOUR RACE MENTALITY? "No, I'm just a whole lot closer to first place than I was last year. It doesn't change anything for me; it's way too early in the season to get wrapped up in it. But having said that, I don't want to fall way behind like we did last year. By mid-season last year, we were 500 points behind, and we battled back to finish second in the points, but we were 600 points down to Jeff. We don't need to do that. We just need to stay strong every week, and I really feel like if we continue to run like we have been running, our wins will come, we just need to put the whole package together."

IS THERE A FRIENDLY RIVALRY BETWEEN THE TWO PPC RACING TEAMS? "It really is. We trade all of our information. If I can help Jeff out in any way, shape or form, I do and I feel he does the same for me. We have an open-book policy there and if it comes down to the last race and we're separated by 10 points, I would hope, and expect, that would be the same thing that happens. We don't want to lose sight of the fact that's what's made us successful at ppc Racing and we want to keep that in mind and keep building on that. If we can finish one-two in the points and finish 600 points ahead of third, that's an improvement for this organization, and we need to keep ourselves challenged to avoid becoming complacent. Unless you win every race and lead every lap, you can't say there isn't room for improvement."

Text provided by Greg Shea

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