Inside the Garage: M. Ford (cont'd)

Q: But even so, you haven't lost anything with the COT -- you're just as good as you were -- so you've got to be happy with that?

Ford: I mean, it's still a racecar. It's still equipment, and you have to work on it. But communication is far more important than the equipment that you're working on, because communication leads you to do what you do.

So the communication is far more important than the equipment that you've got.

Q: You made some changes recently on your over-the-wall pit crew. What was your thought on that and after a couple of races, how's it working out?

Ford: My thought on that was, we'd lost several races because of it. The guys were fast, but they made a lot of mistakes. No matter how hard we tried, those mistakes kept happening -- even though we tried to slow it down, to not have the big mistake, it still happened.

So it was something that wasn't a knee-jerk reaction by any means. It dated back into the middle of last year, where we were dropping positions and even possible wins.

Last year, we weren't in a position where the whole world saw it. You know, we'd be running eighth to 10th, completely drop the ball and come out [of the pits] running 15th.

Now, we're leading races and drop back to 10th to 12th. So it was something that went unseen by a lot of people last year, but it was still there.

So that was something that was a major concern going into this year and once it started happening we knew we had to stop the bleeding, no matter what. We made some changes and they were changes that were premeditated.

But the Darlington race was the final straw. That was the one at which we said, "This has got to change and it's got to change now."

We did it early enough in the season to where we can get the bugs worked out by the time it's time for the race team to peak. We've got the summer months to improve that.

We're working very hard on that and if more changes have to happen, they have to happen. But we're working very hard on it and we're very serious about improving the pit crew -- not necessarily the speed, but the reliability of it.