NASCAR CUP SERIES: THE GREAT AMERICAN GETAWAY 400 PRESENTED BY VISITPA.COM

July 14, 2024

Jonathan Hassler

Press Conference

An Interview with:

THE MODERATOR: We're joined by our race winning crew chief, Jonathan Hassler. Incredible race there today. Pocono is known for strategy and a lot is put on the crew chief's shoulders coming in here. Walk us through the race.

JONATHAN HASSLER: From my perspective, we started the race and felt like we had pretty good speed. Once we kind of knew what we had, we felt if we could keep it up front all day, we'd have a chance to win as long as things went right. We just kind of focused on that.

THE MODERATOR: Questions, please.

Q. Team Penske has won four of the last seven races. What do you think they have found or Ford has found?

JONATHAN HASSLER: I know within our organization, Joey Logano and the team had a good test at North Wilkesboro March, April time frame. That got us going in the right direction on our short track program.

Once we all kind of got some wins, I think we've been able to push the envelope to try to make speed on the intermediates. Proud of the effort we had with that.

Q. Pocono Raceway, especially in the stage racing era, we've seen split strategy. Walk us through that side of things from your perspective today.

JONATHAN HASSLER: It certainly played out a little differently than we had planned. You have a plan coming in, but then the way cautions fall certainly dictates really kind of the way everything else works out.

I think that caution around that 50 of the second stage really kind of diverted the strategy, spread the field out where we had an opportunity to short pit, flip the stage there going into stage three, get our track position at the right time.

Q. The problems with the speed limit on section seven, were you one of the teams that were over?

RYAN BLANEY: We were definitely fast in section seven. I would say fortunate for us we pitted in that section, so we were going to be slower anyway. So we didn't have to check up or make any adjustments.

Q. Do you have any idea off the top of your head how much each light on the dashboard corresponds to speed?

RYAN BLANEY: It's about a half mile an hour.

Q. Obviously cars in the wall, crashes are nothing new. Does it ever really get easier managing those things when it comes to communicating with your driver?

JONATHAN HASSLER: In terms of wrecks or accidents?

Q. Yes.

JONATHAN HASSLER: No, it's never easy. Certainly in this instance it was easy to communicate that we're getting a lot of cautions at the right time that we needed it. Certainly made it where we could run hard and not save a lot of fuel at the end of the race.

Q. Denny Hamlin said you never lose a race, just always run out of time. Talk about that, if you will.

JONATHAN HASSLER: Yeah, the 11 was really fast all day. I would say they were probably the class of the field. To be able to win the stages and recover the way they did is very impressive. Like I said, they had a lot of speed.

Yeah, with us, where we were running, when we pitted, probably lap 15 of the race, I feel like that kind of steered our course. We lost a little bit of track position. We were really kind of playing the long game. That kind of put us in a position to short pit the third stage and get our track position.

Q. How do you look at Pocono, the fact that things can go wrong?

JONATHAN HASSLER: That's certainly one of the things they have to weigh out when you're looking at your different strategy options. I think Loudon, if you look back a couple weeks ago, some guys pitted at opportune times and were collected in accidents because they were in traffic.

Certainly fortunate that while we were back in the back of the pack, we didn't have any incidents.

Q. Given that a half mile is huge when you're looking at 60 or 50 miles an hour, wouldn't it make more sense to give them a tachometer that would give them a lot more sensitivity? Have you thought about using sound cues so they don't have to be looking?

JONATHAN HASSLER: Certainly everybody has to use the same digital dash. There's certainly some limitations on that. Currently that's certainly the most common and the standard way of regulating pit road speed.

Certainly open to any opportunities we have to find an advantage, whether that be audio cues or other.

Q. When you made your final stop during the caution, how close did you feel you were on fuel then? Did you ever have an instance from that point forward about stopping either for tires or gas, or did you feel the extra cautions helped your cause?

JONATHAN HASSLER: Yeah, when we first pitted, we were probably three laps short of making it, but haven't seen that in the past. You certainly have to jump on that opportunity because if you don't jump on it first, you're not going to put yourself in any kind of position to win.

Like I said before, we were really fortunate that those cautions came out really to start that run. After the three cautions I think it was, we were in really good position and could run hard the rest of the race.

Q. (No microphone.)

JONATHAN HASSLER: Yeah, no, tires were good all day. Had no issues, so...

Q. You ran out of fuel on the last lap at Gateway. Are you a little gun shy? Is that in the back of your mind at all?

JONATHAN HASSLER: Yeah, we try to learn from each and every opportunity that we have. That was just an opportunity for us to learn, a situation we could learn from and try to improve on.

We made some adjustments to our process since then. Certainly was a little more nervous than I was at Gateway. Like I said, our guys kind of learned from that moment. We've continued to move forward.

Q. You were more nervous today?

JONATHAN HASSLER: I was definitely more nervous today. You lose one on the last lap, and you certainly get an appreciation for it's not over till you take the checkered.

Q. It's not over till the checkered flag. At what point do you start to calm down, or does the heart race?

JONATHAN HASSLER: Yeah, I think the 11 passed the 48. Ryan asked for the gap. I think it was 2.2, 2.4 seconds, something like that. I think the next lap after that, for whatever reason, maybe he just kind of backed it up for a lap, but we lost 3 or 4/10ths of a second. Certainly the brain starts to go, Oh, God, what is it, what is happening?

The moment we got on the frontstretch and he started to celebrate, we had a big gap back to the 11, I knew we were in good shape.