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NASCAR PRESEASON THUNDER TESTINGJanuary 11, 2014Regan SmithMATT HUMPHREY: We're going to round out today's media availability with Regan Smith, driver of the No.7 TaxSlayer Chevrolet for JR Motorsports in the NASCAR Nationwide Series. We've got the DRIVE4COPD 300. Talk about what goes into your mind when you drive into this facility when you see the construction going on and just being in Daytona. REGAN SMITH: Yeah, well, first off, happy new year. It seems like we were just in Homestead not too long ago. It was a short off‑season. But Daytona is the same as it has always been for me when you come through the tunnel. This place is magical. It doesn't matter if it's the first time or the 50th time or no matter how many times I've been here, every time I drive through that tunnel, even if I leave to go to dinner and come back, you almost get goosebumps coming through here. To see the work that's going on, the project out front here, kind of makes me want to go hop in some equipment and play with it just a little bit. But it looks like they're progressing along rapidly with that, and I think we've all seen renderings of what the finished product is going to look like, but to see it actually coming out of the ground and coming over the stands and starting to rise is pretty cool. I don't know when the completion date is. I think it's probably next year sometimes. Q. 2016. REGAN SMITH: Well, when it's completed, it's going to be quite the spectacle to look at, and I look forward to seeing that, and look forward to getting back down here to race. This is always a special race, whether it's trucks, Nationwide or Cup. Daytona is Daytona, and you want to win here as much or more than anywhere you go. Q. What's it like to have Bill Elliott right there working with you guys today and I guess tomorrow, whenever? REGAN SMITH: Yeah, it's pretty cool. I tweeted a picture of us and pretty much just said, man, there's a legend behind that window over there. Bill has obviously been around for a long time, has a lot of experience, a lot of good memories, and to just talk to him and hear what he has to say, it's like he hasn't missed a beat. I feel like he's been out there racing all along, and I'm sure he could probably suit back up tomorrow and kick most of our asses tomorrow. It's pretty cool to see him in the car. For him and Chase to get to share that moment of Chase's first Nationwide test and preparing to come down here to race as a father‑son is pretty special, especially the way things worked out, JR Motorsports being able to let them do that and to pair that all up. When the idea first popped up it sounded cool, and we didn't know if it would happen and then it happened. Happy for those guys to get to share that moment, and certainly neat to see him back behind the wheel. Q. Speaking of Chase, you have a teammate this season. First of all, how do you think that will benefit you this season? But you also lost your crew chief who you had a successful year with. Could you just talk a little bit about how they approached that with you and what your thoughts were on that? REGAN SMITH: Yeah. Well, I think on the surface, having a teammate is going to be great, and that's not to say I didn't have one last year. We just had different ones everywhere we went last year, and it was tough to get that week in and week out balance of knowing what that guy's‑‑ whether it was Brad or whether it was Kasey or whether it was Jeffrey or whoever else it was, we had like eight guys in that car, I think, Jamie at one point, Fellows at one point. So it was tough to that balance of, okay, he's saying this, how does that relate to our car. So we really didn't have the opportunity to lean on that at all. Chase is going to have to learn at the beginning of the year, there's going to be a lot of things that are different than the trucks he was in last year and he's going to have to learn as he goes, but what we're going to have is that consistency of the same guy in that seat, so when we go and have our meetings, we'll say what did they do in practice and how did it affect them, we're kind of going to know driver tendencies and what each driver thinks and what each driver says before it even happens, and it's going to be easier for us to say, hey, you know what, that's kind of what we need with our car and we didn't have a chance a try that, so that may be the direction we need to go for the race. From that standpoint I think it's going to be great. He's obviously very talented. There's no denying that. I think his track record speaks for itself there and the races that he's won and what he's done to this point in his career. I anticipate his learning curve being short. If there's things I can do to help him, then hopefully I can be there to help him and make that even shorter, and I anticipate there's probably going to be a lot that I can learn from him as we go throughout the course of the year, too. As for the crew chief changes and what we did there, on paper it just made the most sense. Ryan and myself have worked together before. He's a veteran, he's been around. He knows the garage, knows the cars, knows a lot of these things, and he kind of watched not from afar last year but from a different position last year and got a different perspective. He was in all our meetings. He was inputting on changes that we were making, always a part of all that stuff. I kind of had that chemistry with him from years past and that relationship to where it made it easy for me to pair back up with him and go back to work like we never skipped a beat. And about Chase coming in as a younger guy, Greg having some experience now, it seemed like that was a good mesh and a good fit for those guys, and that was the ultimate determining factor into making the changes that we did. When it's all said and done, it's going to do nothing but continue to make JR Motorsports stronger, that combined with Ernie Cope coming in. We've just got a really solid core. On paper‑‑ not only on paper, what we see in the shop, I'm relatively new to the company so don't get me wrong here, but even as somebody who's watched JR Motorsports for years prior, this is the strongest it's ever been. It's the most excited I think any of us have ever been going into a season about what's to come and what we're going to be capable of. Q. In your Cup career you never truly had the opportunity to run for a championship. Nationwide you only had one other full season previously, so you went through a championship race last year. What was it like? What did you learn from it? Since you hadn't gone through it at this level, were there things that stood out that were a little bit different or things that you can do better if you're in the same situation this year? REGAN SMITH: Yeah, there's a lot of things I can do better in the same situation. You hear everybody talk about you can't‑‑ you can talk about it and say this is how it's going to be, this is going to be how it's going to happen. You hear people say that and you always think that's not going to be the case, but it really is. You have to experience this stuff before you can have a full understanding as to how it's going to play out. When I say that, I think for me it was probably in the middle part of the year last year when we had the big points lead and we stumbled there. We had the road course incidents, which whether it was of our own doing or not, it happened, and then you've got to rebound from it. Then we go to the next race and we have a parts failure, and we lose a 58‑point lead in a matter of two races, you know, I'd never experienced something like that and I hadn't raced for points in probably 10 years at that level, racing for a championship. So it had been a little while, and just got caught up in the moment and didn't‑‑ it kind of spiraled quicker than we thought it would‑‑ Q. What do you mean caught up in the moment? REGAN SMITH: Caught up in the moment of losing all those points and thinking we have to go out and win a race and get our points lead back. We went from one week of thinking, okay, we've just got to go out and be smooth to two weeks later thinking, oh, man, they're back on top of us and now what do we do. The reality was they weren't really on top of us. We were all right there together and in it, and quite honestly up until‑‑ for us I would say Dover. When we look back at the points and we look at what happened throughout the course of the season, we were still 100 percent in that battle until Dover. Dover was kind of the race that I look at and say, that was the straw that finally got rid of us and that took us out of the hunt, and we ran out of gas. We were running third. I think if we would have finished where we were running, we would have finished eight or nine points out going into Kansas. I think that was after Dover. Don't quote me on that. But we had to pit, we ended up losing points, we lost like 15 points and left there like 25 or 28 or something like that behind. So no matter what we did at Kansas, it wasn't going to put us in the position we wanted to be in necessarily leaving there. You know, with that said, we had the spiral in the middle of the season that was tough to get over and tough to understand what was taking place. We still had the same race cars, the same speed, but we started doing things a little more desperately that early in the year and probably didn't need to, myself as a driver and other things along the way. And then we had a couple other hiccups here and there, which are going to happen throughout the course of a season, and just I think we got too desperate too early to be blunt about it. Q. Does it surprise you thinking about that, looking back now? It's almost like a trap, I guess? REGAN SMITH: Oh, it's definitely a trap, yeah. It does and it doesn't. Everybody talks about it, and you can have the conversations, of, okay, internally we have these conversations, let's just be smart, let's do the right things, and you don't realize until you look back at it after the fact that maybe you weren't. Yeah, you know what, we did change a little bit. We approached it a little differently or we started trying to set up here or we tried this setup at one track that we thought was unbelievably fast and it didn't work out and instead we finished 15th. It's a lot of little stuff like that. I think the experience from that last year is going to play a big part this year in understanding that until we really get down to a certain part of the season, you don't have to panic. You don't have to get desperate. You have to be smart and do the things that you know how to do. As I said, I had probably 90 people tell me that, and until you sit back at the end of the year and you look at it, you don't realize it. Q. You're pretty good at these plate tracks. The new rules look like it's taking away the tandems. What are your thoughts on that? What do you think about plate racing this year in the Nationwide Series? REGAN SMITH: We haven't drafted yet ourselves, so I'm not sure‑‑ we'll get into that some of that this afternoon. I can probably after that better after the afternoon session here. But I think the whole idea with the rules was to try and get rid of as much of the tandem as possible. If I understand it they're going to police it and keep us from tandeming. We don't want to see that this year with our stuff. You know, it's good. I don't mind it either way. I don't particularly care for the tandem. I liked the way the Cup races were last year where you could go out there as an individual and work your way up through the pack and you don't have to search for somebody and say, hey, can we be friends for 10 laps and then get up there and find your teammate and have to dump that person and hook back up with your teammate or whatever the situation may be. Racing to me is, short of your team that you come to the racetrack with, is a very individual sport, and when we're running that racetrack, it's tough to comprehend the concept of let me help this guy get to the front, knowing that I might have to finish second to him just so I can finish second because it happens that he's the car out front and I'm the car in back. I think getting rid of that is going to be good. I'm excited to see the style of race it will be when that's gone, and assuming that that's gone completely this year. Just the rules alone I think are going to be enough to do away with 90 percent of it, with the spoilers coming off of that. It seemed like last year I think we took an inch off the spoiler before we got to Daytona last time, and it really changed the way that the cars pushed and what we were capable of doing. We could still do the tandem but it wasn't as big of a deal. You could still hang with the pack a little bit and hang with tandem cars as a single car just a little bit better. Now we've taken another inch off, and I think it's really going to reduce that again. And if that doesn't, the simple fact that we've got the capacity of the radiator shrunk down like it is, that's going to play a big factor, too, because it does a number of different things. One is if you push water, you're going to be out of water really quick. And the other is if your water gets hot, it's going to get hot quicker and it's going to be a little tougher to cool it down. I look forward to the race. I look forward to a different situation on the last 10 laps and a different style of how you get to the front on the last 10 laps. Q. In regards to the young guys moving up, as far as learning curves that you have hurdled at NASCAR coming up, what would you share with them, the inexperienced young drivers that are coming to race you? REGAN SMITH: Well, I'll share it with Chase. I don't know if I want to share it with the rest of them. I've got to race them. They can figure it out like I had to figure it out. There's just a lot of experiences that they'll go through that you don't realize, and it can be humbling, too. It gets tougher progressively as you go through different series and you get to different levels. Whether that's the quality of the drivers, the quality of the equipment, you might have more equipment that's equal to each other. You're going to have obviously tougher drivers, and I think the biggest thing is the humbling factor of it. For me I was kind of a slow learner. It took me a while to get to the point where I felt confident not only in myself but in my position in the garage area. Heck, I don't know that I even got that until last year. It can be a long process or it can be a short process for some of them, it just depends on the individual and how they take to things. THE MODERATOR: Regan, really appreciate you joining us here today and good luck this whole NASCAR Nationwide Series season. FastScripts Transcript by ASAP Sports |
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