California native Cole Custer returns to his home state for this weekend’s NASCAR Xfinity Series race at Auto Club Speedway, an event he’s won two of the last three times it’s been held. Custer, who is coming off a ninth-place finish last Saturday at Daytona, answered questions from media members earlier this afternoon.
COLE CUSTER, No. 00 HaasTooling.com Ford Mustang – WHAT’S IT LIKE GOING BACK TO YOUR HOME STATE? “I always look forward to Fontana. It’s always been a good track to me and we’ve obviously won two races there in the Xfinity car, so it’s always been good to me. It’s always been one of my favorite tracks because it’s fast, it’s worn out, you’re slipping and sliding around. You have a lot of options as a driver, so you’re able to figure out something better than the next guy, and how to get around them. It’s always been a fun track to me and coming back home means a ton, too. Obviously, this year with the Xfinity cars there’s a little bit of a rule change, so we’re taking that in and trying to figure out what we need for this weekend, but we’ve done a lot of digging. We’ve worked really hard on it and we’ll see how everything unfolds.”
HOW DID THE FIRST WEEK GO WORKING WITH RILEY AND THE COMMUNICATION BETWEEN YOU TWO? “It went really good, honestly. This year, working with Riley has been a lot of fun so far. I think we’ve worked really well together and communicated very well. We honestly have a pretty good atmosphere as a team right now, where we work as one group. We communicate a lot. We’re able to really bounce ideas off each other and it’s one of the best environments I’ve seen with that. We’re able to work together a lot, so we just have to keep digging throughout the year. This is really the first race of the year you’re able to really see what everybody’s got for the season. It’s a big racetrack, where aerodynamics and handling and pretty much everything comes into play, so you find out a lot coming into this weekend. We’ve just got to adapt fast and work as a team to make everything better and see what we have when we unload.”
SHR ADDED AN XFINITY TEAM, SO WHAT IS THE MAKEUP OF YOUR TEAM? “Riley’s team is pretty much intact from last year with Richard Boswell as the crew chief, and then my team had a lot of new guys. It was actually really good to go to Daytona. We didn’t have any problems. We had good speed. As a new team with new guys all working together, it’s really nice to have a smooth weekend and have things work out good. Everybody worked together great, so I have JT as my crew chief this year. I really love JT. I’ve worked around him for a long time. He’s been at Stewart-Haas Racing and Haas CNC Racing before that, so I’ve known him since I was a little kid, and he’s just a no ego, super laid back guy, super easy to talk with and I think it’s gonna be really good for us this year to work together and figure out how we can get the speed in the cars.”
DOES THE WEATHER CHANGE HOW YOU APPROACH THE WEEKEND? “The biggest thing about that is you maybe don’t have any time to practice with the rain, so you’ve really got to put emphasis on your notes and look back on where we need to start setup-wise and make sure I’m as ready as I need to be just to make sure I hit lap one as hard as I can. But, it makes it a little bit more nerve wracking because you don’t have that practice time to dial your car in, so with this new rule change it’s gonna be a little bit of an educated guess. It’ll be interesting, for sure.”
WHAT ARE YOUR THOUGHTS ON A POTENTIAL RECONFIGURATION OF AUTO CLUB SPEEDWAY? “I hate to see it. It’s been a good track for me and I think it honestly has put on some of the best racing that we’ve seen in NASCAR the last five or six years. I hate to see it maybe go, but obviously this week I think we could get a reminder of what difficulties it has with weepers and stuff like that. Hopefully, we don’t have to fight them too bad, but it’s one of the best tracks we go to, so it’s gonna be hard to say goodbye.”
WHAT KIND OF TRACK WOULD YOU LIKE TO SEE? “Everybody has a different opinion on that, so it’s hard to say, but, for me, I think they have some good short tracks around there. They have Irwindale and Kern County, so they have some good short track racers over there. When you look at some of the best racing we put on, it’s honestly the track it is right now – it’s worn out, it’s fast, people are able to move around the whole race track and it’s exciting, but it’s really hard to make that kind of racing with a repave. It usually takes about 10 years or so for the pavement to wear out, so it’s hard to say. I think if you can go down the route of trying to get a mile-and-a-half that has some character to it that makes it a lot of fun and you can move around the track and run the wall and make something different happen.”
HOW MUCH PRESSURE DID YOU PUT ON YOURSELF TO START THE SEASON? “There are a lot of expectations this year. We want to go out there and run good and compete for wins every single race. We thought about everything that would go on at Daytona, making sure we had everything checked and everything going right. It was nice to hit the track and have a solid weekend and not have anything go wrong, and have good speed in the car. Obviously, Daytona you have to have a little bit of luck on your side and sometimes you don’t get the finish that you want, but I feel like we had a solid weekend and now we’ve just got to keep that going into Fontana. I think we’ve got a good group that really wants to work together and really wants to just communicate extremely well. If we can do that and make sure we get everything checked and cross all the t’s and dot all the i’s before the weekends, I think we’ll have many shots to win races.”
HOW DO YOU GAUGE THE LEVEL OF COMPETITION ON THE XFINITY LEVEL? “I think the biggest thing is just the competition level. On a bad day in Xfinity, you’re probably gonna run around 10th. In Cup, on a bad day you’re gonna run 25th to 30th. There are fewer guys out there that are competing for wins, but, at the same time, the top five guys are still just as good as guys in the Cup Series, so it’s not easy. It’s never gonna be easy, so we’ve got to make sure that we’re doing everything we can to be prepared for the weekend because all those other guys aren’t just gonna lay over. It’s not easy to win races and we’ve got to make sure that we’re doing everything in our power to put ourselves in that position.”
HOW MUCH HAVE YOU STEPPED IT UP YOURSELF WITH THAT PRESSURE? “It just goes back to the group around you. I think it’s been really nice working with JT because he has the same kind of mindset. This is his first time being a full-time crew chief and I think we’ve worked really well. We’re communicating and just really being honed in on what we need to do this year, which is go and compete for wins every weekend. I’ve never probably asked as many questions to a person in my life, just making sure that we’re prepared and every little detail has been thought of and it’s been a great relationship so far. We just have to hit the ground running in Fontana.”
ARE YOU TAKING ON MORE OF A LEADERSHIP ROLE AS A VETERAN DRIVER? “I think so, a little bit for sure. Now I guess I’m the experienced guy, which is kind of weird because I don’t think I’ve ever been that in my career, but it’s interesting to be in more of that leader role and it’s something I can probably work on and get a little bit better. It’s been fun so far, and at the same time is that part of it is you want to be super involved and you want to make sure everything is right, but you have to let people do what they are meant to do, also. I’m not an engineer. I’m not a crew chief. I can give a little input of what I’m looking for and things that have worked and not worked for me in the past, but, at the end of the day, you’ve got to let the people around you do what their specialty is.”
YOU TALKED ABOUT THE RULE CHANGE. DID YOU TEST AT CHARLOTTE AND WHAT WAS IT LIKE? “Yes. It was a big shock to everybody, I think. We looked at it before the season and it was just a skew change and it really shouldn’t have been that big of a deal it seemed like, but we went to Charlotte and I think just about everybody had the same comment about the cars being harder to drive. They’re a little bit more on edge, so we’ll see if that’s just a Charlotte thing or how the whole year is going to progress. Three might be a lot of changes that we have to make throughout this year to make the cars handle how we want to, so we’re limited on track time and practicing and stuff like that, so we’re gonna have to adapt at the racetrack as much as we can and week to week really dig deep on what we need to do.”
SO WILL WE GO TO SOME TRACKS AND IT WILL BE EASIER TO GO OVER THE EDGE? “It seemed like that at the test. It’s hard to say. We still don’t know if it’s a Charlotte thing or not. It’s really hard to have tests at Charlotte at times. Even though it’s nice and it’s right in our backyard that track changes so much with weather and temperature, so we have to go to Fontana and figure out what’s going on. It seems like it could have that characteristic of being a little bit more on edge and we’ll have to figure out how to manage that.”
