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NASCAR MEDIA CONFERENCENovember 15, 2016Travis GeislerTHE MODERATOR: We are now joined by Travis Geisler, NASCAR competition director for Team Penske. Travis, thank you for joining us. This is the 50th anniversary for Team Penske. Just over a month ago the team won the IndyCar championship and is now competing for the NASCAR Sprint Cup Series Championship with Joey Logano. What would it mean to Team Penske to collect both championships to cap off the 50th anniversary? TRAVIS GEISLER: It certainly has been the goal from the beginning. I think when we kind of set out the season, we had a 50th anniversary party with all the drivers that had driven for us in the past and everybody on stage at one time. It was a pretty amazing audience there. I think at that time we all kind of looked around at each other and realized the responsibility we had to carry the tradition, and to have a 50th anniversary of a team that goes and races, but a 50th anniversary team that goes and wins and wins championships. I think that's certainly the goal every year, but this year it's something we've been extra focused on, and fortunately the IndyCar was able to accomplish their goals, and now we're poised to kind of do the same on the Cup side as well as maybe an unprecedented fourth owner's title in a row on the XFINITY side. All those goals in mind, Homestead should be an interesting weekend for us. Q. I'm wondering if there's been discussions with Roger or Roger has said anything to the team about the importance of wanting you to get this championship in the 50th year of Penske, following up on IndyCar's success this season, as well? TRAVIS GEISLER: Yeah, certainly I think any year it's important for us to go and meet the expectation from him, which is a championship. But this year I think‑‑ he never came out and said, hey, it's important to do this year because it's our 50th, but we all felt the pressure. We all felt the importance of it. It's no different than when we go to Indianapolis; winning at the Brickyard is something that we need to go and do for him. There aren't many things that he hasn't done in his career or are new or unique for him. Anytime that possibility is there, we've got to go and try to execute, and I think that's certainly been our goal is to make those guys proud. It's amazing to be a part of a race team that's been really at the top level of racing for 50 years. I don't really believe there are many out there that are able to do that. For us to have the opportunity now to go and compete after winning Phoenix, I think everybody has the momentum, and certainly the focus to go and try to accomplish this goal. Q. Travis, I was wondering if the bulletin that came out last week on the mounting slugs for the truck trailing arms, whether that had any impact on you guys? Did you have to make any changes to cars that I assume were already fairly well prepared for Homestead? TRAVIS GEISLER: Yeah, the bulletin really didn't have any impact on us. Fortunately I think it was more of a clarification of something that was pretty clear. The intent of that in the rule book was clear ahead of time. I think if anybody had changes to make, they would have been pretty far outside of what's kind of the accepted norm for those parts, so I think that it was an effort on NASCAR's part to just make sure everybody was crystal clear there. Obviously the importance of Phoenix and Homestead as must‑win races kind of for everybody in it, I kind of applaud them for putting it out there to make sure it's clear, but certainly wasn't anything that really impacted us. Q. So was there anything‑‑ usually when we see something that late in the season, you almost maybe wrongly, from what you're insinuating, we assume that somebody has been doing something and they need to put a clamp on it right here at the end in order to keep things fair; would that be an erroneous assumption? TRAVIS GEISLER: No, I think that's usually the assumption. I think in this situation if you look a few weeks ago, kind of a preview to the 2017 rules came out, and there was some language in there that kind of spoke to this point as a clarification of the rules, and I think they just decided that once it had been out there as kind of a precursor to the 2017 rules that they needed to go ahead and make sure that that clarification was made for '16, as well, to ensure that there wasn't any confusion there. It may have impacted somebody, I'm not sure, but I know I can speak for our side of it, and for us it really wasn't any impact. Q. I know that with the Chase format the way it is and the Shootout to the end that everyone is going to be aggressive, and we've got that. But does this format favor any one of the drivers who might be more a risk taker or more aggressive in their driving style by nature rather than finesse? Do you believe that or not? TRAVIS GEISLER: That's a really good question. I think that there are certain situations where that's probably the case. I think that there are drivers who are better at amassing 36 weeks of very good races across all the different styles of racetracks, and I think the one thing you end up with this Chase format is it's always the same tracks. You always end up with kind of the same cutoff races, so you look at Phoenix and would say, man, Harvick really just has a clear advantage at that track compared to anybody else. You look at Martinsville, you might say Hendrick has a clear advantage just over the history of how they've raced there. I think that's kind of what we see more than anything is that the Chase maybe favors drivers or teams that perform well at certain racetracks. I think that's probably what we see more than anything. That being said, I would say if you look at Brad's ability to kind of produce top‑5 finishes every week, it's something he probably benefits more from than the ultra aggressive, throw‑it‑out‑on‑the‑line kind of strategy that some other drivers have. It's a little different. I think everybody is trying to figure it out still. Every year it evolves. Every year we learn more about it and we see new ways to make it into the Final Four and we see new ways to get knocked out of it. I think it's become very clear that DNF's or mechanical issues or anything crash related is really almost a nail in the coffin for you. I think you've got to have perfectly clean races, and winning certainly in that final round is pretty clear, having all three that transferred win, so you had to be the point leader to make it. It's certainly a challenge. Q. Do you see all four drivers in the finale as equally aggressive by nature when it comes down to it? TRAVIS GEISLER: I think whenever you put the championship on the line with guys of that caliber, they're going to be pretty darned aggressive. I think all of them will find a way to be ultra aggressive at that point. I think there's certainly guys that maybe that's more their style than others, but I think when you put them all in a box like that, they're all going to find a way to be that aggressive. It may not happen at the beginning of the race. It's something that as you watch that race play out, the track moves around a lot from kind of the top middle, and even the bottom sometimes plays a little bit for grooves, so you'll get to see guys moving around kind of figuring out what works best for them, and by the end of the race, I think you'll see a lot of like what we saw at Phoenix: All the cars that were really in contention or had to do something found a way to get to the front. I think if you looked at the middle of the race at Phoenix, really it was pretty spread out still, but by the end everybody was there, and I wouldn't expect much different out of this class of four that we're going to see at Homestead Sunday. Q. You've recently talked about Phoenix and the top four, the Championship Four, being competitive there. Does winning Phoenix bring any type of momentum for Joey and the team heading into Homestead? TRAVIS GEISLER: Yeah, unquestionably. I think that he was really fired up after that win. It was a hard‑fought race. If you noticed, we were pretty good on short runs. He was able to kind of get out, make some track position, but then as the run went on, we faded, and it really became a struggle. I think at one point there we were out of it, and it was kind of looking a little bleak as to how we were going to get ourselves back in it. I think to kind of come back from that as a team, execute really well on pit road, put together a really good race, I think that momentum is something you can't replace, especially with somebody going for their first championship. He knows coming in that he's led the bracket, I guess, for the last three now. If you look at kind of the Chase bracket NASCAR puts out, he's been at the top of the last three. He's certainly planning on his name being in the last box and having a chance to win at a track that hasn't been one of our best tracks. I think it's been since '98 since Team Penske has won there, so to be able to kind of put ourselves back on the map at that track and go out there when everybody needed to perform and come out with a win, I think he's definitely feeling he can do the same thing again. Q. I wanted to ask you something Todd Gordon said back at Talladega, which was the best of times and the worst of times with Brad's engine going and Joey getting the win. He basically described it as one Penske organization, it's not two teams, it's one team going for success. How much has Brad helped Joey make the transition to fitting into the Penske mold since he's been there? TRAVIS GEISLER: Yeah, I think it's no secret that Brad was a real proponent of Joey. I think the time that they spent racing each other in the XFINITY Series showed Brad what Joey was capable of and that he probably was‑‑ had more talent than what we had seen with his performance on the Cup side. So I think he helped push to get him in the fold, and once he got here, he did a really good job of making sure he was well supported enough from a decision making standpoint of what you need to do as a driver, what you need to do personally, and some of the things that‑‑ Joey really had to evolve. I think it was a big change for him. When he got put into his role when he was over at Gibbs, I think he struggled with that. He went into a team with a championship driver and kind of stepped in there as the young, fresh kid on the block, and I think the first couple years, confidence and just his performance struggled. I think when he came to Penske, knowing that Brad was a major supporter of his, I think all of us were excited to have him. We were looking forward to what he could bring because we had seen his performance on the XFINITY side. I think all that rolled together kind of gave him the confidence to go out there and do what he's done for us. I think his career has been pretty amazing since he's got with us. We're all still really excited to have him. I know him and Todd, those two are tied at the hip. They trust each other 100 percent, but they also challenge each other, which I think is really important in that relationship. You can't just take everything for granted. You've got to push each other, and I think that's what they do really well, more so than any groups I've seen. It's exciting to have a relationship like that between your drivers, and it's really not a whole lot different with Ryan Blaney. Obviously he drives for the Wood Brothers, but he's still involved with our guys a lot. He still runs our XFINITY car. You see a lot of the same things happening with him, and I think that strength goes from our drivers down through our teams, and when our‑‑ everybody that works on the cars sees that kind of relationship at the top, they're going to do the same with their peers, so the car chiefs all dig in together and help. There's always a lot of different colored uniforms working on problems throughout the weekend, and from my role as kind of trying to help create that environment, you can't really replace the drivers being willing to work together the way ours do. THE MODERATOR: Travis, thank you for your time today, and good luck this weekend. FastScripts Transcript by ASAP Sports |
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