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NASCAR MEDIA CONFERENCENovember 16, 2016Adam StevensTHE MODERATOR: We are joined by Adam Stevens, crew chief for defending champion Kyle Busch and the No.18 M&M's Core Toyota at Joe Gibbs Racing. The No. 18 team looks to defend its championship title on Sunday. Adam, do you believe having the experience of racing in the Championship Four last year and winning the title gives you and the team an extra boost as you head into Miami? ADAM STEVENS: It certainly doesn't hurt. You know, the biggest benefit is probably just knowing what to expect all week long. There's a lot of extra stuff we need to do, like this here today, that's not normally part of our week that may affect our preparation time. Q. Adam, with this tire we saw short pitting play a role at Texas here a few weeks ago. I think if I remember correctly there was a good pit of short pitting in the Homestead race last year. How might that impact or play a role this weekend, and my second question is your teammate tested at Homestead last month; obviously in this era of information sharing you'll get a lot of that information. Is there much of a difference with being there and not being there in your eyes? ADAM STEVENS: Well, the first question with regard to the short pitting, certainly this year at all the tracks that we see a lot of tire wear and a lot of tire falloff, short pitting has been a major contributor to the race strategy. We saw it early in the year at Fontana. We were coming when we were only putting 12 or 13 gallons of fuel in our cars as opposed to a full fuel load. At Homestead it's really no different. There's such a tremendous amount of lap time falloff that when the leaders start to hit pit road, you really can't afford to stay out there and give up that chunk of lap time. But when you do hit pit road early, you're exposing yourself to potentially losing a lap if somebody tries to stretch it and stays out, so there's two strategies that are always at play there. Being that we're only racing three other competitors, you're going to have to play it by ear. It bit us last week at Phoenix. We tried to come a little bit early and two cars got together coming onto pit road and we had to take the wave around as we were a lap down during that pit cycle. The outcome of the race can change in a hurry and sometimes that risk is rewarded and sometimes it's not. Second question with regard to the test, in my eyes there's really not much difference from my perspective of being at the test or having a teammate go. The biggest benefit from acquiring the test data is literally getting the track data from the car and the driver to use to develop our simulation tools. We could have sent anybody down there to do that. Certainly Carl and Dave gathered that information for us and shared everything they could to help make our program as good as it can be. Would it have been nice to go, yes, but that also takes away from preparing for that week's event. As tight as the schedules are, you kind of have to balance that out and spread that workload out amongst the teams. Q. Adam, Kyle talks about how winning back‑to‑back would be cool because people say you can't win back‑to‑back in this format. I'm curious, is that something he just says, or does he tell you that often? Do you get any sense of what winning back‑to‑back would mean to him? ADAM STEVENS: We haven't talked about that specifically, but the chances to win a championship in this sport aren't going to come every year, so when you get that chance, you want to make sure that you've turned over every stone and taken every turn that you can to try to make it happen. You know, back‑to‑back or once every 10 years or however often you can find yourself in this opportunity with a shot to win is colossal. You see with this Chase format, it's just so easy to have a bad day and fall out. You know, you have to run the gauntlet I like to say to make it to Homestead. It's certainly a big deal to be there. THE MODERATOR: Adam, thank you for taking the time to join us today, and good luck this weekend. FastScripts Transcript by ASAP Sports |
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