COREY LAJOIE, NO. 7 CELSIUS CAMARO ZL1, met with the media prior to the NASCAR Cup Series’ qualifying session at Atlanta Motor Speedway – Media Availability Quotes
YOU HAVE ONE YOUNG TEAMMATE AND ANOTHER COMING IN. AS A VETERAN, WHAT FACTORS DO YOU WANT THEM TO BRING TO THE TEAM?
“I think for us, its consistent feedback in those two cars. Where its really been a one-car team that has more or less functioned as a two-car operation the last couple of years. But there were part time guys, and some crew chief turnover throughout the course of last year on the 77. I don’t think Ty (Dillon) had a great shot at it. There was just a lot of inconsistency with the other car, so if we could just get a little consistency there. Carson (Hocevar) has been doing a majority of the simulator time for us and validating the tires and things like that, that allows me to be at home a little more with the kids and then when I can go on a Thursday evening for two-and-a-half hours, I can really plug in and focus and fine tune and get our stuff ready for the weekend. So, for us, just consistency in the 77 and consistency in the 71, will help the baseline of our team collectively which is something we have had a hard time with the last couple of years.”
ARE THERE THINGS YOU CAN TEACH THEM AS THEY ARE COMING IN, JUST BASICALLY LIKE PIT STALL ENTRY AND THINGS LIKE THAT?
“Those guys are pros. They are championship guys from the Truck Series, and I don’t have the credentials next to my name statistically for those guys to listen to what I have to say, but I have been doing this for a long time, and they have asked some good questions. But at the end of the day too, it’s just like when you’re dad tells you to do something, they aren’t going to listen to you. You kind of have to figure out how to do it yourself. But those guys have a lot of good people in their corner whether its Josh Wise, Scott Speed, and everyone from GM to just help prepare those guys for Sunday. It is a large learning curve, and we are getting the better parts of people to compete on Sundays as well. The learning curve is much steeper if you’re cars aren’t fast. So, if we bring fast cars to the racetrack, then that learning curve flattens out a little bit and I think those guys can succeed.”
DID THE NEAR WIN HERE AND OTHER GOOD RUNS AT RESTRICTOR PLATE TRACKS GIVE YOU AND EXTRA SENSE OF CONFIDENCE?
“I have a lot of confidence every week, but drafting tracks isn’t such a handicap for what I have had to drive the last couple of years. But after the reconfiguration here I have run well and Talladega and Daytona is somewhere where you can play chess with a little bit slow remorse and take advantage of some guys that might get too greedy or something like that. Where those were my only opportunities to succeed, but now we are going to succeed on short tracks, intermediates, and road courses as well. Going in here, you don’t want to circle a speedway as your chance to win, because a lot of it is out of your control. You can do your best to put yourself in position to win, but sometimes it doesn’t bounce your way. We know we have done it pretty much every race here, put ourselves in position to win, so I think we are going to do the same thing here tomorrow.”
HOW DIFFERENT IS THAT CHESS GAME HERE IN ATLANTA COMPARED TO DAYTONA OR TALLADEGA?
“It’s like speed chess. Talladega is chess, but you have to see runs happening, see runs forming, but the energy of lanes coming or going is a bit slower here. Runs come and then they close. Openings come and then they close, probably double the speed they do at Daytona or Talladega. And I think much more of it is handling here at Atlanta. With a good handling car, you can be aggressive. Where some guys will have to roll out (of the throttle) if their cars are all trimmed out and they are hanging on halfway through a run. We have passed some really good driving cars here. And you have to have some friends, because if you make that move to the bottom for the lead, and the guy behind you goes with the guy you are trying to pass, its not going to work out. So, all of those deposits you make in the bank like at Daytona last week to make buddies, trying to push the right guys at the right time….seems like guys are more apt to stay on my rear bumper now, after all the success we have had at the speedways. So, hopefully that continues here tomorrow.”
IT WAS SAID THAT RACING WAS A BIT SKETCHY HERE, EXCEPT FOR THE TWELVE GUYS THAT CAN HOLD IT WIDE OPEN AROUND THE TRACK. ARE YOU ONE OF THOSE 12?
“I was one of those 12, and I qualified 30th. So, for whatever reason, it doesn’t translate. Sometimes the ones that drive good are a little slow. I have also had bad driving ones here too. So, I anticipate the Fords being strong and as strong as they were in qualifying last week, and I think the Penske cars qualified 1-2-3 here last race. So those guys are going to be tough to beat as always, they know how to make a race car go fast in a circle. That hasn’t been our strong suit, qualifying at any speedway. I don’t think we have qualified within two of the front at all ever. If we can do that, that would be a huge win and give us a little bit more pace to be offensive in the race. But you think it looks easy, just going around there by yourself, but the guys have all the rounds taken out of it for qualifying and you are essentially sitting on three bump stops with, I don’t know, 60 pounds of air in the tires and you are on the razor’s edge of grip by yourself. They make them a little less sketchy to drive for the race, but you still can put yourself in a bad spot pretty quick.”
DO YOU LOOK AT SPIRE IN ITS CURRENT SITUATION AS SPIRE 2.0 COMPARED TO WHERE YOU WERE A YEAR AGO?
“Oh yeah, it’s a totally different team. The transition of the shop, and the shop is one thing, right? But the Gainbridge relationship, the new teammates, the added engineering, the more help from GM and Hendrick Engines, and Hendrick pit crews, it’s not even remotely the same team. The addition of Doug Duchardt too. It would be nice to come to a situation like this, but I was at the dry erase board with the Expo marker trying to figure out how to get to this point. So rarely does it work out where a vision where TJ or someone like that has grandiose visions come to life. It’s pretty cool to be a part of that and it’s almost like we just started being like a legitimate race team. The last three years have been like, how can we just go put a car on the racetrack. So, the intention in going to the racetrack is a little bit different and the expectations are different also.
FOR WHAT YOU HAVE JUST SAID, IS THAT WHY THIS YEAR WILL BE THE NEXT STEP FORWARD THAT YOU HAVE SEEN COMING?
“We have been taking steps forward every year. We have had some good runs on occasion, but not very frequent and not very consistent. In every measurable category statistically last year, we were better than the year prior. And I don’t anticipate this year being any different and we are going to take a step now. Taking a steps in this garage isn’t like 10 places. It isn’t like going from a 25th place team to a Championship Four team overnight, that is not how it works. A tangible step forward might be one spot, two spots, because now there are 24 factory teams essentially between Toyotas, and Fords and Chevrolet. Those are key partner teams. So, for us to be in that 20th to 16th playoff team on points, you are beating eight teams that are fully funded, fully resourced, and we are still on the outside looking in when it comes to key partner information. So, I feel like we have done a great job so far and especially overachieving for the resources that we have and we are going to continue to take…..it may not be noticeable to any of you guys in here, but we are going to be better in the amount of top fives we have, in the amount of top tens we have. There is not a measurable amount, but there is going to be more. We just have lofty goals in terms of……I can’t calculate it right now, but we have for the bonus structure for the guys in the shop, we separate the Daytona 500 as its own race. You race that one different because you want to have a good points day and you want to cash a check. So we essentially start this season as a team here in Atlanta and we break the season up in seven, five-race mini seasons. And if you have a better finish than an average finish over those five races better than 20th, you acquire a certain amount of points, its like 80 something. We set the benchmark of all these with 19th or better metrics with laps led, laps completed, average finish position. If you hit those markers for the five-race mini season, then everybody in the shop gets a bonus. Even the Truck team gets a bonus if the Cup team hits it. So, we introduced that last year and it made the season much more palpable. You know it gets long and grueling, but it allows you to reset and kind of attack each race segment with attention and some attainable goals. I think we hit two out of the seven last year and came up a little short on two more, so if we can hit all those little mini season benchmarks then that should put us up in the conversation as right on the fringe, right on the outside looking in of pointing our way in the playoffs. But obviously you feel pretty good about it if you can get a notch on that column and be in the playoffs.”
IS IT PLAYOFFS OR BUST AND IS THAT LOOKING REALISTIC FOR THIS TEAM?
“I think there are a couple of us internally, particularly Doug, myself and Sparks, and Dickerson, that we feel like that if we execute, we can be in the playoffs. That is a reaching goal, but the only way you can score it is if you have a goal. The goal is also a goal that we set out for the team three years ago, and some of them were let’s just finish the race here. Literally. So, we continue to move the benchmark and raise the bar for our goals. The bar for this year, for our team, is the playoffs. If we can get close to that, it would make a lot of guys, myself included, really happy. I have matured as a driver behind the wheel as well as off, and I think it will be a dogfight. It will be an absolutely dogfight, but I think if we execute for the next 20 weeks, 24 weeks, I think we can be in the conversation.”
IS THERE ANYTHING THAT CAN BE DONE TO LESSEN THE FOCUS ON FUEL SAVING OR IS THIS WHAT EVERYBODY HAS GOT?
“I don’t know. I think everybody seems to have a quick fix and not much thought behind it when it comes to the people that actually have to make the decision, those guys are the ones looking at the data. Because sometimes you think its going to be a fix and you create four more problems. Because there are world class crew chiefs and engineers that will sit there and nitpick thousands of an inch, or thousands of a mile in terms of miles to the gallon to try and make the races as advantageous for themselves as possible. Do I like trying to work to get the lead and then get yelled at by our crew chief because you are burning too much fuel? No. But what do I do? Just let six or seven guys go by me so I can ride at 60%? No. So, I don’t love that its how its kind of worked. I understand that it’s kind of the game that is presented right now, and with everybody as equal as it is, you want to be on pit road or in your box the least amount of time possible to leapfrog the guys you are in front of. I don’t look at enough data to be able to make a fix and I think anybody that sits here and says they have a fix probably is not correct. But I do know that NASCAR doesn’t like the fact that the entire field was running 51.50s and a guy in a single car qualified two seconds faster than that. So that’s something they are going to be looking at.”
REGARDING THE MOUTHGARD DEVELOPMENT YOU ARE INVOLVED WITH.
“I am glad I haven’t been the crash test dummy before, or too much like Ryan Blaney has been lately. I appreciate him collecting the data for us. When they first came out, they have been working with Wake Forest and those guys are top notch. I think really and truly it speaks to the investment that NASCAR is making in the health of the drivers and seeing how much….especially with the Next Gen stuff and speaking about the comments about how stiff and rigid the car was, they actually wanted to see how much of the energy was transferred to the drivers. The first couple of mouthpiece designs were pretty clunky and sat in the top of your mouth and you sounded like you were talking with a mouthful of peanut butter. Something we came up with was to wear it like a night guard, like an Invisalign at night, and we actually put all the hardware on the outside of your teeth. Which is something they hadn’t done before because normally with football players you want everything inside and in the top of your mouth, so for now with the way the races are and no contact with the helmet, we are able to put the hardware on the outside of your mouth. There are probably 15-18 guys interested in wearing them because you can talk, and it’s comfortable. So, we have continued to evolve that and they have some really cool stuff like the bus stop at Watkins Glen, and some other areas of the race track where they were really high G load, whether it was left to right or up and down. And we have really worked hard on the headrest surround foam, so its all correlating and that has been a really big piece to understand head knocks in our sport.”
YOU HAVE COME SO CLOSE HERE AND YOU HAVE SAID YOU KNOW WHAT TO DO, ARE YOU CONFIDENT YOU WILL KNOW WHAT TO DO IF PUT IN THAT POSITION AGAIN?
“Well, I can assure you this Bob. I don’t think any situation is the same, but the characters, the players and the point in the racetrack and how much run you have, will never be the same. So, I have relooked at that lap here a couple years ago here at Atlanta and I was trying to get to Chase’s right rear, and the moment that I kind of thought it was a racing thing. It was probably one-half step over the line of what would not be considered dirty, but nonetheless, he did what he had to do to win. With experience here now at speedways, there are things that I am going to do different. Preferably be the one in front. It is much easier to defend than to be on offense on the last lap. So, we are going to do all we can to put ourselves in that position here tomorrow.”
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