Australia’s Marcos Ambrose has finished the only Friday pre-race practice for this weekend’s Finger Lakes 355 at the Glen at Watkins Glen International in seventh.
Ambrose has returned to the site of his breakthrough win in the NASCAR Sprint Cup, and after the opening practice was cancelled due to rain he spoke with Ford Racing about coming back to Watkins Glen and other topics.
“I remember the rain from last year and we had to wait until Monday to get it in, but it is good to come back,” said Ambrose.
“It’s been a good track for me and I’m ready to get started. I think the weather is blowing through, which is good for Sunday, but what do we want more – start 18th or 19th in the line-up and get no practice, which is probably good for us to stop people from catching us because we know we’ve got a good setup here, or do we want to practice and go for the pole. We’ll see how this afternoon goes and what NASCAR does with the scheduling.”
Talk about how important the win was for you and Richard Petty Motorsports? “RPM has been doing fantastic. We’re not a super-team, but we’re a really strong two-car team, probably one of the strongest out there right now. We’re proud of winning the race here last year and we’re pleased with how we’ve gone this year. As a company we had the front row at Charlotte and three pole positions in the company and we’re looking for more wins and top fives and all that good stuff. It feels good to be part of this team, but we keep looking towards the future and the future is more performance like we’ve got going and more results. We feel like we’ve had a good year, but not a great year and we need to finish off really strong in 2012.”
How much are looking forward to Sunday given the disappointment of the other road course in the series at Sonoma? “Well, it wasn’t disappointment; we just missed it for the race. We got the pole out there, it was my first pole position so we had a lot of car speed, but we couldn’t find a happy medium for tire life. We could run really fast for three or four laps, but we weren’t very good for 30 or 40 laps and we paid a price. We learned our lesson there. This track is completely different and I think the package we had last year worked well. We refined it and thought a lot about it and hopefully we’ll be even faster this year.”
Does Dodge pulling out of NASCAR impact RPM at all? “RPM is still looking at all their options as far as manufacturers go. I think for the sport, Dodge pulling out was not a great thing. It’s been really healthy to have four manufacturers in the sport, so as a fan of NASCAR I’m disappointed that Dodge made that choice, but I understand it. For us, we’re building to the future at RPM and I look forward to playing my part and helping them make good choices here. I think it’s exciting times for RPM. They’ve got a lot of options.”
How do you feel about that because of you have been a Ford man? Would have you gone to Dodge? “As we sit here absolutely nothing has changed, so until something is presented to me you have to look at it under its merits. The whole Dodge thing, it didn’t come through so there was nothing to look at.”
Qualifying for the Finger Lakes 355 at the Glen will be run tomorrow ahead of the 90-lap (355 km) race early Monday morning Australian time.
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