NASCAR: Ford’s four Cup wins ‘not acceptable,’ director of race teams says
The NASCAR Cup series heads to Michigan this weekend, where Ford’s have always dominated. And not soon enough, as Ford is in dire need of more victories.
“Four [NASCAR Cup] wins is not enough. It’s not acceptable,” said Mark Rushbrook, global director for Ford Performance Motorsports.
“We need to get more wins. We need to have drivers further up the standings and hopefully at least four if not more drivers into the playoffs.”
So far, in 2022 Ford victories have been achieved by Austin Cindric, Chase Briscoe and Joey Logano, who has two in the first season for the Next Gen race car.
Those three drivers will likely represent Ford in the playoffs, which begin after the next four races that start with the FireKeepers Casino 400 at MIS on Sunday.
“It’s certainly going to be hard with where we are with only four regular-season races left, so it’s been a struggle with the new car, the new package with getting our head around it and how to set it up properly going to the track and optimizing it,” Rushbrook said.
“We’ve seen a lot of success with speed at different tracks where we have understood it, but we still didn’t bring the win home. So, there’s a lot of work to do, but that’s racing.”
We’ve had different strengths across different cars at the different tracks,” Rushbrook said. “I think that’s part of the struggle is this car is so sensitive that even when one team is taking four cars or two cars to the track with very small differences, you’ll see one near the top of the board and two or three or four down at the other end of the board. So, that’s part of it and just understanding how sensitive it is and making sure we can really find the optimum spot for these cars to run.
“We always need to make all elements of the car better: the engine, the aerodynamics, the chassis, the setup, the tire model, our simulator model, and that’s what we’re working on. We have a lot of meetings and advancements with our teams to try and do better every week.”