This Week In Ford Racing: Las Vegas Preview

Kelly Bires, driver of the No. 47 Clorox Ford Fusion, takes his favorite race car to this weekend’s Sam’s Town 300 at Las Vegas Motor Speedway.  Bires is comfortable racing on the mile-and-a-half tracks and seeks to have a top-10 finish in the third race this season.

KELLY BIRES – No. 47 Clorox Ford Fusion – HOW DO YOU PREPARE TO RACE AT A TRACK WHERE YOU’VE ONLY TESTED?  “I’ve only been to testing in Las Vegas.  I didn’t get a chance to see what the city is about when I was out there.  We were pretty busy and I’m sure we’ll be busy this week.  It’s a place that everyone says is fun to go to, but it’s a place for business for us.  That’s why we’re heading out there.  We have the test under our belt where we were really fast. We’re really looking forward to racing there this weekend.  We were outstanding at the test.  There are a few tracks where I haven’t raced and we’ve been fast out of the truck like California.  We were fast in California.  I’m really ready to go to Vegas.  We’re starting the year good so far.  In Daytona, we did what we wanted to do and get a top-15 finish and brought the momentum to California.  We had a top-10 time in practice right off the bat and that’s impressive for our team.”

HOW DOES TESTING HELP YOU IN THE RACE?  “Testing is just more finding your package for your handling and your body.  You try to determine what is the best and get a baseline so you can build more cars like that.  This Fusion has been outstanding.  It’s the same car we ran at Homestead-Miami and Charlotte.  It ran well at Vegas earlier this year at the test.  We brought it with us to California and it was faster off the truck.  We have a good idea what our cars need and what it takes baseline.  We’ll have a lot of people and support from the great folks at Clorox in Las Vegas this weekend.”

DID YOU LIKE THE TRACK IN TESTING?  “Yes, Las Vegas is a track that I like.  I’m starting to like those mile-and-a-halves, like Vegas, Charlotte, Atlanta, Texas and Kansas.  For some reason, it fits my driving style.  I don’t know why, if I can just run the car a lot freer than a lot of people. It’s just the handling package that we’ve got on this 47 Fusion, it’s seems like every mile-and-a-half that we go to, anywhere from Kansas to Charlotte, to Miami to Texas, where they’re all a little different mile-and-a-halves.  We brought it with us to California, a two-mile track, and it was outstanding in practice and during the race.  Unfortunately we weren’t able to finish the race in that car after being hit.  It’s a good baseline that we have.  I think we’ll build a couple more cars just like that one to be prepared for the rest of the year.”

WHAT DO YOU LOOK FORWARD TO IN LAS VEGAS?  “I’d like to get a top-10 run in Las Vegas.  That’s all were looking forward to this year.  We started the season off right with that top-15 finish in Daytona.  We want to finish in the top 10.  We want to gain points and not tear anything up.  We don’t have room to tear anything up.  We need to get through these first six weeks clean and then we’ll have a couple of cars waiting back at the shop.  Right now, we’re pretty low.  We don’t have as many bullets as we want, but they’re in the process of being built.  It’s going to take about four or five more weeks and we’ll have what we need.”

HOW MUCH OF THE TRACKSIDE DATA GETS USED TO BUILD MORE RACE FUSIONS?  “We’re pretty much running what we did at Las Vegas during the test.  Set-up wise, this is very similar to what we ran in Vegas, Miami and any other places that we ran this car.  It’s a matter of track conditions, rubber on the track, the temperature of the day and that determines what way we tweak it.  It’s a mile-and-a-half package that we found last year and it’s been good.  It’s a top-10 car everywhere we’ve taken it.”

WHY DO YOU LIKE THIS CAR?  WHAT MAKES IT GOOD?  “It’s fast.  It’s comfortable for me.  It can do what I need it to do.  It’s a neutral balance car, body-wise, chassis-wise.  It just does everything that I need it to do.  I’m very comfortable.  I think when a driver is comfortable in a car, they almost say they get their favorite car.  I think this is my favorite car until we build another just like it.”

DO YOU HAVE THE SAME CREW THIS YEAR?  “As far as the road crew, it’s really similar.  But the pit crew is fairly new.  Everyone is working really hard together.  It takes a lot to get a brand new pit crew clicking.  They were good in Daytona and California, so I’m expecting a good year.  Gary Smith, our pit crew coach, does a really good job with them.  He has them prepared and that’s what we need.  We need solid stops during the race, where we don’t lose spots heading back to the track.”

ON RACING ON CUP COMPANION WEEKENDS WITH CUP DRIVERS.  “You approach every weekend the same.  You’ve got to get your car handling the best you can and get it driving the best for you. After that, it takes care of itself.  If you have a good handling race car and you’re comfortable in it, you can run with any of the Cup guys because they’re fighting the same thing.  If their car is not right, they can’t race as hard.  The competition is so close that they might not be able to do what they need to do either.  They might have an advantage where they can move around the track line-wise to make them a little bit better, but other than that, we need to race against them.  We’re going to race against these guys in the future, we might as well race against them now.”