- Brad Keselowski’s runner-up finish behind Chase Elliott in double overtime at Terxas was the fourth time Ford has finished second this season in NASCAR Cup.
- Through nine of 36 points races, Chevrolet leads among the manufacturers with six wins, while Toyota has three.
- It’s been 14 years since Ford hasn’t won within the first nine races of any season.
The good news for NASCAR’s legion of Ford fans is that a Mustang Dark Horse was second in last weekend’s Cup Series race at Texas Motor Speedway.
Ironically, the bad news is that a Dark Horse Mustang was second in Texas.
Brad Keselowski’s runner-up finish behind Chase Elliott in double overtime was the fourth time Ford has been that close this year. The others: Ryan Blaney at Atlanta, Chris Buescher at Phoenix, and Joey Logano at Richmond. All told, Fords have 10 top-five finishes and 16 other top-10 finishes through Round 9 of the 36-race season.
Still, that’s 0-for-9 on the only stat line that really matters to the folks in Dearborn.
There was “cautiously boundless” optimism around FoMoCo during its huge mid-2023 rollout of its Dark Horse Mustang for NASCAR in 2024. But things haven’t gone well for the 14 full-schedule entries from Team Penske, Roush-Fenway-Keselowski, Front Row, Stewart Haas, Wood Brothers, or Rick Ware.
“It’s definitely been a tough start to the season,” said Mark Rushbrook, global director Ford Performance Motorsports. “You can’t deny that and it’s something our teams, our drivers and all our engineers supporting them take very seriously. We’ve had some reasons to have confidence in terms of poles, but poles don’t win races.
“I’m very confident as we’ve developed the Mustang Dark Horse with our teams that we have a better body this year than we did last year. It’s better for drag. It’s better for downforce. We also shifted the balance for it, but with those improvements it’s still new and what we’re all working through now is to make sure we’re optimizing that potential. I think there are definitely some opportunities for us to really maximize that and ultimately translate into results.”
Former driver Kyle Petty blamed some of that on Ford Performance during the “Go PRN Live” podcast leading into the Texas race. “I think Ford thought this car was gonna be a step forward,” said the long-retired, eight-race winner on one of his many analyst appearances. “Remember, they had that other body style (Fusion for many years). You work and you get it and you understand it. Even if it’s bad, you understand where it’s at.
“Then all of a sudden you get another body style and you think it’s gonna pick up where this one left off. But it didn’t; they’ve gone backward. So now they’re having to build back again. (The Ford teams) aren’t in the same place. They’ve got a different car and had to go to a different place and start again.”
Maybe so, but it’s not like the new piece is a nag losing every weekend to Secretariat. Indeed, the Dark Horse has run well at times—just not quite well enough at just the right times. Ford had two top-five finishers at Atlanta, another at Las Vegas, three at Phoenix, and one each at Bristol, Richmond, Martinsville, and Fort Worth.
Meanwhile, Chevy’s battle-tested Camaro and Toyota’s new SXE model have divided the first nine victories, six wins for Chevy, three for Toyota.
Travis Geisler is the long-time competition director for Team Penske’s stock cars. A Vanderbilt University graduate, he’s smart enough and experienced enough to know that a 36-race season is mostly peaks and valleys, and both highs and lows are fleeting.
“It’s not like we need to turn it around,” he said during the recent race weekend at Martinsville. “If you look at the (preseason) Busch Clash, Joey Logano was in good shape to win. At Daytona, we were on pole, ran some really good laps, and got wrecked. We go to Atlanta and Ryan Blaney arguably ran the best laps at the end, and we lost by a couple thousands.
“We haven’t racked up the wins and COTA was maybe a little weak. Yeah, I hear the ‘Ford sucks’ thing regularly. That’s fine; that’s okay. But I’m not in panic mode. There are a lot of little things (like) getting comfortable with the new body and making sure we understand where we need to be. It’s a game of really small stuff. You’re not racing huge changes, so you really have to focus on the details.”
Some history:
• It’s been 14 years since Ford hasn’t won within the first nine races of any season; usually, it’s won at least once within the first five.
• Twelve times in the past 13 years Ford has won the season’s first, second, or third race, including 10 victories in the Daytona 500 or the very next weekend.
• In an uncharacteristic 2010, Chevrolet, Toyota, and Dodge won the first 20 races. Ford’s first victory came at Pocono in August, when Greg Biffle got the first of Ford’s four victories.
Overall, Mustang has enjoyed great success since coming to Cup in 2019. Buoyed by 18 victories, it won the 2020 Manufacturers’ Championship for only the fourth time since 2000. With a combined seven victories and 35 top-10 finishes, Logano and Blaney won the 2022 and 2023 Cup titles. Among Mustang’s 52 victories: two Daytona 500’s, a Southern 500, a Brickyard 400, four Talladega 500’s, two Coca-Cola 600’s, and a summertime Daytona 400.
More from Geisler:
“I want to focus on running well,” he said. “Across all of our cars, have we been where we wanted to be? Absolutely not. I want to win all the races, so we’re never going to be there. That’s how we have to focus on it. We’ve been competitive at times and could have won some races. As long as you’re in a spot where you feel like you’re competitive, I’m not too concerned.
“We’re always working as hard as we can, but we need to look at whether we’re working in the right direction. Stay the course, be on the right path. We’ve got to find a little more, but we’re not in the wrong building. We just have to get in the right room.”
Unemployed after three years as an Army officer and Vietnam vet, Al Pearce shamelessly lied his way onto a small newspaper’s sports staff in Virginia in 1969. He inherited motorsports, a strange and unfamiliar beat which quickly became an obsession.
In 53 years – 48 ongoing with Autoweek – there have been thousands of NASCAR, NHRA, IMSA, and APBA assignments on weekend tracks and major venues like Daytona Beach, Indianapolis, LeMans, and Watkins Glen. The job – and accompanying benefits – has taken him to all 50 states and more than a dozen countries.
He’s been fortunate enough to attract interest from several publishers, thus his 13 motorsports-related books. He can change a tire on his Hyundai, but that’s about it.
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