Inside the Garage: M. Ford

As a Nextel Cup Series rookie in 2006, Denny Hamlin wasn't expected to win, but in No. 11 Chevrolets fielded by Joe Gibbs Racing and prepared by crew chief Mike Ford, Hamlin not only won twice, he also contended often and qualified for the Chase.

The 2006 season brought much greater expectations for Hamlin, Ford and their team -- and while they've stepped up their performance across the board, through the first third of the season Hamlin was unable to make it to Victory Lane.

Hamlin and Ford return this week to Pocono Raceway -- a track at which Hamlin scored a virtually unprecedented sweep of both victories and both Bud Poles in 2006 -- for this weekend's Pocono 500.

Q: Mike, momentum is often a factor when you're going back to a track at which you've previously run well, but this season you've run better just about everywhere; so what's your thought going back to Pocono?

Ford: We have run better, pretty much everywhere we've went, than we did a year ago -- but going to Pocono it's kind of hard to duplicate what you did a year ago.

So we're just focusing on trying to get better equipment each week. We feel like the intermediate stuff hasn't been as good as the short-track stuff for us this year -- so we're working real hard.

We've got some things coming together with our downforce program that we're real excited about. How it's going to work out at Pocono, I'm sure we're going to end up running a different setup than we did at both races last year.

We didn't run the same setup at those two races, so we're really not that concerned. We know Denny's got confidence going there because it's his style racetrack.

It's fast and flat and we feel like if we just keep our same thought processes that we had last year, we should be able to get him comfortable and try to tie the three corners together like we did a year ago.

So we're looking forward to it, but we also realize that what we did last year was spectacular and it's hard to duplicate that, so you can't go in expecting anything, but we're going in with confidence and knowing that we can run well there. (Continued)