Chevy NCS at the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum: Corey Lajoie Press Conference Transcript

“I think the one thing that everybody’s overlooking slightly is that we all are in a way, sometimes we don’t show it, are all professional racecar drivers. I think what you see on a quarter bullring on a Saturday night isn’t quite the product you are going to see here on Sunday or even Saturday nights. With the consideration of everybody’s pretty lean on equipment and cars right now, I don’t think you are going to see really bonehead moves or aggressive moves besides maybe some rutting and gauging for a transfer spot, but you’re not going to see people wiping each other out often I don’t think. I could be wrong, but I have seen races at Bowman Gray go green to checkered with no cautions, I think people are overlooking the potential that we could see very minimal amount of cautions. I think it will be a good durability test for these Next Gen cars for sure.”

 

“I mean I can assure you that if somebody left rears you and backs you into the fence at 80 miles per hour, you are not going to drive away and not have any damage. The most vulnerable thing on these cars are the rear toe lengths. That is what keeps the rear tires square with the independent rear suspension versus the Ford nine-inch. You can beat and bang with those rear-end housings all you wanted to and they are not really going to bend a whole lot, if at all. Now we are going to be beating those 18-inch wheels, which are obviously three inches bigger than what we had, so it is going to have more torque on the suspension when you do beat and bang and those toe lengths are only about the size of my pinky and about this long. I think those are going to be the first things to go and bend. I can assure you if a rear tire is not pointed in the right direction with this car you are going to have a bad day. I think that what you are going to gain in durability with the composite bodies beating and banging, leaning on guys and not really worrying about a fender rubbing a tire, you are going to give up the durability of the suspension pieces. Particularly the ones that keep them pointed straight. You are going to be going fast enough to wreck. Ask Daniel Suarez how it went at Bowman Gray when he was up on the tires at pit road entry. He was going fast enough to almost have it pointed vertical. You’ll definitely see some wadded-up stuff at the end of the night. Hopefully it’s not the seven Nations Guard Camaro.”

 

“I’m guessing 85 maybe top end, you may see that in qualifying with the little big longer straightaways. I think you saw somewhere close to 80 at Bowman Gray and it looks like the straightaways are a bit longer there and tighter corners. In the simulation runs somewhere around 14 flat, I don’t know what that works out to be average speed wise, but you’ll be going fast enough to do some damage if you back the thing into the fence for sure.”

 

“Yeah, unfortunately it’s not a points paying race right? It is kind of like a pro bowl and I love the fact that NASCAR opened it up for the teams that wouldn’t capable or qualified for the CLASH in its old format. It opens it up to everyone available to qualify for the race, especially for the first one that is such a monumental event that’s going to be this weekend, but my expectations are as high as they have ever been in the Cup Series. Which the bar is set particularly low, because any given week I know that single car speed I haven’t been driving anything faster than a 25^th place car and you know with a couple of Next Gen tests under our belt we have had pretty good speed and I think that this is the most even going into an event in the history of NASCAR you could argue. With the limited amount of notes, the quarter mile racetrack, temporary racetrack that nobody has any notes on it, you know, and everybody is guessing at their simulation. It kind of goes back to old school racing where you try to set the car up based on what you know and align left and get the elbow up and get after it. So, I’m excited to see how much speed we have off the truck and hopefully we can punch our ticket and race on Sunday night.”

 

“I think you will see a lot more lock up, like guys come to pit for lock ups. The brakes we had on the Gen 6 car weren’t capable of really, you could lock the tire up a little bit, but the weight of the car far overcame the max potential of the smaller rotors were. Now we are going to have I think more brake than what tire grip we are going to have available when the tires get hot. You are going to see a lot more lock ups into guys when they are racing hard because you are going to be able to go deeper into the corner whether that is Martinsville or Turn 3 at Phoenix or here at LA, you are going to be able to get into the corner deeper but that margin for error for sliding the tires is considerable smaller. So, what you gain in potential and abilities you are going to give up in tire grip once those 18-inch tires get hot they definitely degrade pretty quick. I think it is going to be pretty interesting to watch.”

 

“I mean at the end of the day there are no points on the line, not an exuberant amount of money you know like you are not racing for Daytona 500 money, you are racing, I can promise you first probably pays better than second last time I checked. There’s lots of things you have to consider, which you are not going to consider once you put the helmet on. We are all racecar drivers and that goes out the window with any common sense when you put the visor down. When, let’s just say two potential playoff contenders get into it and they want to fight and beat and bang, that is a thing that can last all season long for something that might not truly be worth it. I do think that anything is going to be worth it to be the first guy to win in the Next Gen car as well as the first guy to win, potentially the only guy to win, in the LA Coliseum. I think there’s going to be a lot of guys going to some great lengths, myself included, to get myself into the show as well as hopefully put ourselves in position to win the show.”

 

“Yeah, bar none. I’m not going in with just the hopes of making it. I think if we don’t finish in the top seven, I feel like I would be pretty disappointed in myself and our abilities to you know not finish inside the top seven we didn’t do our job as a race team. There is no excuse why we can’t pull the belts tight, make our car have some positive changes and get some good speed out of the thing and contend for a top-10 for sure. It’s different than a speedway. A lot of luck goes into a speedway, and a little bit of luck is going to go into this event just like any race, but you know generally speaking I am riding around waiting for everybody to wreck and then two laps to go jam it in there if we finish sixth then great. Not very fun as a racecar driver riding around hoping everybody wrecks and if they don’t you run 28^th like we did spring Talladega. This is the only the first event where me running to our maximum ambition gives us a chance that we know we might see some fruit on the backend because we are going to have a lot better relative speed than we probably had last year or years previous.”

 

“I definitely obviously favor short tracks. It is what I grew up cutting my teeth on, you know had some success there with second and first at Bowman Gray the two times we have been there. That is the closest track that is similar to. I have been to Columbus, Ohio and run well there. It is a quarter mile, more round than the LA Coliseum, so I feel like on paper I’ve got as much stock car experience running quarter mile small tracks that is of anybody in the field as well as our team building solid racecars to have good speed at the last couple Next Gen tests. I think to it’s a little bit of myself like eventually, you know I tweeted this the beginning of the year, I have been paying dues for five years in this thing. It’s like when you play NASCAR 08 career mode and you get in with the crappiest team and then you go to the next team and you keep progressing one team at a time to ultimately where you want to go. Then eight years later you are winning races and championship, that is literally how my career has been and it has been eating a lot of crow and learning a lot of lessons the hard way on LIVE television each and every Sunday that a lot of guys would learn on a Saturday afternoon with a lot less expectations. I think now I have just been telling myself like you belong here. You know I think that now the competition side has to match what I feel like off the racetrack with the podcast and fans understanding my story and the work I have been putting in on the backend. Hopefully with this Next Gen car and the people we have in place at Spire Motorsports we can continue to match the competition graph up to the off-track momentum that I have behind myself. A lot of this is about confidence and if you don’t believe in yourself to get the job done, nobody else will believe in you. So, I know I can get the job done. This the best chance I have had in my Cup Series career and Xfinity Series career probably in the last decade to be competitive and race for not just a win but a top-10 or just be competitive and rub fenders with guys I usually don’t. I know that is a long-winded answer, but I’m confident now until we get really get beat back into submission a couple of weeks into the year. We still have realistic expectations, but you know the longer I get into this and the more I am racing around guys that I respect, I keep telling myself right, wrong or indifferent I’ve paid the dues and I belong in the Cup Series. Hopefully we can start pairing some good runs and good finishes together to enhance that.”

 

“I just keep thinking about the AT&T Stadium, home of the Dallas Cowboys. It all depends on the footprint right. I don’t know about footprint of the field and how big it is. That is a state-of-the-art facility down there in Dallas, but if it works here which it will, there’s a couple things that could happen early to derail it but I think everything in NASCAR control has been over and above what has been expected. I think they have done a bang-up job with how the track looks and the pavement of it and everything. The marketing of it has been a homerun as well. I was watching FS1 this morning and there was a little ticker across the bottom talking about it. Talking about Floyd Miller team, so I think that there’s as much momentum behind the sport as ever and I think this event is really going to capture it. Without getting into the details too much about what side of the track would be better or if it could work, AT&T stadium would be pretty slick. If this model works, it could open a lot of doors for the sport for the future.”

 

“It is not the great equalizer. It at least makes a Spire Motorsports race apples to apples with a Hendrick Motorsports. Before it was an apples to bananas or oranges or whatever tastes terrible. Asparagus. We weren’t even in the same ballpark. We might have had a car that was a couple of phases old, but we are not getting trinkets that actually makes feet. So, just off raw speed of Charlotte if we had taken our Gen 6 car out to a test like that, we would be wide open and we would be 1.2 to 1.3 seconds off the fastest guy. Nothing I could do behind the wheel to make that thing go any faster. Now when we go back with this Next Gen car, we are trying taller spoiler, shorter spoiler, more horsepower and they land on the package and now we were a fourth to sixth place car out of the 22 or 23 that were there. You are on the edge of sliding around, you are on the edge of busting your ass and you know finding the grip and putting a little bit of that courage back behind the wheel, you can see the gain on the speed chart. Just the bigger teams with the collective minds will probably get to a better baseline quicker than a smaller team with two or three engineers with not a lot of teammates to bounce information off of to compare and then go down a particular path that might work. With that being said, the bigger teams that have four teammates that can try a, b, c package and land on one and continue in that progression will get to a place of their cars are a little bit quicker earlier than a place like ours I believe. We’re still in a place where a Spire Motorsports can hit on a set up and race with any of the guys any given Sunday. Now we don’t expect to do that every Sunday, but our potential races from where we hit on Martinsville or Bristol or Darlington, if a great day previously was 15^th or 18^th, I feel like we can run top-10 on a good day for us. So, I think that gives me a lot of confidence and optimism going into the year.”

 

“Well, fun’s relative. I can assure you Kyle Larson had a lot of fun last year. (inaudible) Granted he got on the wheel and got after it and rightfully so got the job done. Got the big trophy, but I’m having a lot more fun even when I am running 30^th than I would be welding seats back here at Lajoie seats. So fun is a perspective and what kind of perspective you are looking at. Now Kyle Busch running 30^th no matter what day it is and no matter what the particular circumstances are is not having fun running 30^th. Fun I think is a loaded question. At the end of the day, I’m doing what I love and what I dreamed of when I was a little kid that I have been working hard my entire life to get to and I am doing it with a team I love going to battle with each and every weekend.”

 

Team Chevy PR