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NASCAR CUP SERIES: FEDERATED AUTO PARTS 400September 12, 2020Jeremy BullinsRichmond, Virginia THE MODERATOR: Jeremy, thank you so much for taking the time to join us and congratulations on another win. Can you walk us through how it feels heading to Bristol, getting this win, and how the No.2 team is going to approach Bristol? JEREMY BULLINS: Yeah, I mean, it's really nice to be locked in because Bristol is certainly one of those places where things beyond your control happen quite often. But as far as how we're going to approach it, it's a lot like this week, we're going to go try to get a stage win and a race win and get some more playoff points and keep adding to the pile for moving on through the next round. I really feel like the second round is probably the toughest. There's a lot of things you can't control in the second round with the Roval and Talladega. The more playoff points we can get, the better off we're going to be. Q. Jeremy, a lot of talk this season about the 4 and the 11 and how dominant they've been, but if you look at it a little bit closer, on the track with the 750 rules package, Penske as a whole, as an organization, has four wins this year. Do you guys think you're getting overlooked a little bit and how it sets up for you in a playoff if you look at Phoenix, and also what makes you guys so good with this rules package? JEREMY BULLINS: Yeah, I don't get too caught up in whether we're being overlooked. Those guys have a lot of wins this year and they've really been the teams to beat, so they should get the attention that they're getting. It's up to us to do something about that. First off, I think all of our guys are really good short track racers. They have a short track pedigree. They're really good at that discipline, and I think, like a lot of teams, most of us came from short track backgrounds, so it's something that we take a lot of pride in running well at the shorter tracks. We want to run well here, just like everybody else does, and it's not to say we don't work as hard on everything else, it just seems like our guys are really good at coming up with good mechanical grip setups for these short tracks and hopefully we can keep improving on them. Q. As a whole this season and here in the playoffs you guys have started with back‑to‑back third‑place finishes, or the win now for Brad. Where do you feel that Penske is as a group, especially going into the second round with those tracks that you mentioned as challenges? JEREMY BULLINS: I mean, I feel like our cars are competitive week in, week out. I feel like there's nowhere left on the schedule that we can't go win at. I just look at the schedule and think about things that we can't control. You know, obviously speedways are tough to‑‑ there's a lot of things that are out of your hands. The road courses a lot of things there's things out of your hands, inopportune cautions, things like that, that are less‑‑ that we can't do anything about. I look at those races and think, man, I'd love to win Vegas and not have to worry about either one of those. That's my goal right now. That's the number one thing on my mind is all right, let's go, we've got two weeks here, let's make sure we've got everything ready for Vegas and go try to win that one. There's nowhere in the next eight races that a Penske car can't win in my opinion. Q. Jeremy, the other day Brad said he came into the season with the pit crew and team swap and he really didn't have any expectations, he just wanted to see how it would play out. For you guys as the leader of this team, going from Ryan coming over to Brad, what were your expectations? JEREMY BULLINS: Yeah, I think I've always looked at the three drivers at Team Penske and I feel like from a talent perspective they're all very equal. I think they all have a boat load of talent. They all have maybe tracks that they're better at than others to each other, but really the difference in the three of them is just their experience levels, and Brad is obviously the most experienced. And even when we were working with Ryan ‑ I've used this term a lot ‑ that we tried to leverage Brad's experience. We tried to use his comments about what racetracks were going to do from practice to the race and what he expected to happen. We used that information when we were working with Ryan. So working with him firsthand, we're just closer to the source, and we've been trying to leverage that, and we've been trying to use his experience and the things that he's learned over time and the course of his career to make our cars better, make our setups better and help us make better decisions. I think when you're put in that position, we felt like that was the best approach to it, and obviously we're happy with the success, and we need to keep winning races and try to win this championship. Q. Is this a statement season for your group in the sense of, again, when you guys were the 12 it was almost like you guys were a step behind the 2 and the 22? Is this a statement of what your group is capable of or does it go back to what you just said and it just comes down to driver experience? JEREMY BULLINS: Yeah, I wouldn't say that. I felt like there were a lot of times if you look at Ryan's strengths‑‑ I would say that the mile‑and‑a‑halfs are probably his strengths. I felt like going into this year that if we were still working with Ryan we'd have probably won three, four races with him. I truly believe that. I do think it's good for our team to have some success and get the credit they deserve. There's a lot of people on this team that have put in a lot over the years, and our core group has been together a long time. When I look at the 4 and the 11, those guys, their teams have been together for a while, so I think for us, we're kind of coming into our own with Brad and hopefully we can just keep building and keep making it better. Q. Jeremy, do you even look much at the Bristol car this week, or do you just pretty much focus on Vegas? JEREMY BULLINS: No, we'll look at both. Like I said, the playoff points and the race win points that are available are invaluable when it comes to moving from round to round. Just to make sure that if we do catch some bad luck here or there, we're going to go in there and try to win next week, just like any other race. But yeah, we'll certainly get a jump start on looking at the Vegas car. Everybody at Team Penske is always working ahead, but no, we're not going to leave anything out there for sure. Q. Is there anything comforting in the sense of you have been good on the short tracks but there haven't been many short tracks, and you come out here and show you haven't lost a beat? JEREMY BULLINS: Yeah, it's good that we were able to‑‑ I feel like the whole group, our engineering group, everybody took what we learned at Loudon and sat down with Brad and debriefed and made some really good decisions. I think the whole group just really made some good decisions leaving Loudon, and okay, we ran really well at Loudon but what can we do better, and I think that's the key to success. Moving forward between now and Phoenix and Martinsville and Bristol even, we need to look at our short track stuff and keep trying to make incremental improvements to it. THE MODERATOR: Jeremy, thank you so much for taking the time to join us. Congratulations on another win, and we'll see you at Bristol. FastScripts Transcript by ASAP Sports |
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