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Notes of Interest |
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● Southern California native Cole Custer returns home to race for the second time in three weeks as the NASCAR Cup Series returns to Auto Club Speedway in Fontana, California, for the first time in two years for Sunday’s Wise Power 400.
● Returning to Custer’s No. 41 Ford Mustang for Stewart-Haas Racing (SHR) for the first time since that February 2020 race at Fontana is Production Alliance Group (PAG). Tustin, California-based PAG is a premium live-event and creative development company. Its creative works can been seen at concerts, award shows, sporting events, and corporate events. From the lights to the sound and everything in-between, PAG is the creativity and execution behind it all.
● Custer and his fellow Cup Series competitors first ventured to his Southern California stomping grounds Feb. 5 and 6 for the successful debut of the long-anticipated NextGen car that saw its first racing action in the non-points Busch Light Clash at the Coliseum. The native of Ladera Ranch, California, and 2020 NASCAR Cup Series Rookie of the Year had a solid weekend on the purpose-built, quarter-mile asphalt oval in the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum, qualifying sixth and then finishing fourth in his heat race to advance to the 150-lap main event. He completed every lap and took the checkered flag seventh.
● In last Sunday’s season-opening Daytona 500 at Daytona (Fla.) International Speedway, Custer overcame early race fueling issues and brought home a 20th-place finish. He started The Great American Race 31st after starting 15th and finishing 16th in his Duel qualifying race Thursday night. He was 29th in Wednesday night’s single-car time trials.
● Sunday’s race marks Custer’s 77th in the Cup Series and his second at Fontana. The 24-year-old started and finished 18th in his previous start in February 2020.
● Custer will make his return to the Xfinity Series in Saturday’s Production Alliance Group 300 behind the wheel of the No. 07 for SS GreenLight Racing. He has three NASCAR Xfinity Series starts on the 2-mile oval, the most recent resulting in a victory in March 2019. Custer qualified his No. 00 SHR Ford third and beat runner-up Kyle Busch by 1.927 seconds, leading 29 laps along the way. He started fourth and finished sixth in the previous year’s Xfinity Series race at Fontana.
● Coincidentally, it was in victory lane after the 2019 Xfinity Series race that the PAG-SHR relationship began. The race was called the Production Alliance Group 300, and that is where Custer first met company president and CEO Dale Sahlin. The two kept in touch, and PAG ultimately decided to increase its presence within NASCAR to SHR’s Xfinity Series program that year, and to SHR’s Cup Series program in 2020.
● That 2019 Xfinity Series win at Fontana was also Custer’s first with crew chief Mike Shiplett. The two went on to win seven more times that year – one less than Christopher Bell’s series high – en route to second in the driver championship. Shiplett scored a previous Xfinity Series victory at Fontana in 2017 with driver Kyle Larson while the two were with Chip Ganassi Racing.
● The NextGen is the seventh version of the stock car NASCAR introduced in 1949. Its most notable features include a sequential shifter, 670-horsepower engines, a single center-lock wheel nut akin to Indy cars and sports cars, and car numbers just behind the front wheels, as well as carbon fiber-reinforced plastic body panels, a carbon-fiber floor that covers the entire underneath portion of the car, and a rear-end diffuser – all of which are in place to reduce dirty air. Its rack-and-pinion steering replaces the archaic recirculating ball used in its predecessors, and an independent rear suspension is a drastic upgrade from the full-floating axle first championed by 1950s-era Detroit products. Most importantly, the NextGen car is much more in line with what manufacturers sell and consumers want to see.
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Cole Custer, Driver of the No. 41 Production Alliance Group Ford Mustang for Stewart-Haas Racing |
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After your solid result at the Busch Light Clash at the Coliseum to open the year, it seemed like Daytona was headed in the right direction. Your thoughts? “Man, that was a heartbreaker. I thought we did a pretty good job at the start of the race. We had good pit stops, we got off pit road well, things were looking pretty decent at the start of the race. We came down pit road the second time and it wouldn’t take fuel, so it’s just one of those things with this NextGen car. It’s one of those things we learned from for the next time how to make it better. You want to go out there and race for the win in the Daytona 500, but we still brought home a clean racecar. Man, I wish we could’ve raced for the win, but we’ll be all the more hungry when we get back to my home track at Fontana.”
How do you like racing on your home racetrack? “I love it. It’s a great racetrack because you’re moving around so much, slipping and sliding, and there are so many different racing lines you can use depending on what your car wants. We’ve won there in the Xfinity Series and that’s when we first met our sponsors from PAG, so that was all very cool. I’d love to bring them another win there this weekend.”
Now that you have a couple of races under your belt with the NextGen car, what kind of expectations have been set for you and the team? “I think the biggest thing is getting back to what we do best at SHR, and that’s just competing up front and going for wins. Last year, for every single one of us, it was not the year that we wanted. We wanted to be able to run up front more and have more competitive races where we got to compete for wins. This year is the perfect year to rebound from that and show people what we can do. We showed at Daytona that we’re headed in the right direction with a couple of top-five finishes. And who knows how things might have turned out differently if we wouldn’t have had the fueling issue, and if Kevin (Harvick) didn’t get caught up in that late wreck. We want to get back to multi-win seasons and get to victory lane a lot more. We put a lot of work into this NextGen car, the guys have been working extremely hard trying to figure out every single little piece, and I think we’ve hit the ground running in trying to get back to victory lane as soon as we can.”
What are the most significant differences you’ve noticed so far about this new car, as far as sitting inside the car and some of the nuances as far as its driveability? “One of the biggest things is probably the mirrors, especially at a track like Daytona. You can’t see quite as much in the rearview mirror, and you also have the digital mirror, so it’s totally different and is taking some getting used to, trying to be sure of how far away somebody is behind you. You know, we’re working in inches, so if you get that wrong, bad things can happen. As for the way it drives, I think the biggest thing is the tires. The tires are wider. And the brakes are better. You don’t have as much wheel hop, I feel like, with the independent rear suspension. So it’s a lot of little quirks here and there that we kind of have to relearn and then also figure out how to push it to its limits.”
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