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.

Q: I'm assuming there's nothing drastic that occurred from last year, when Denny and you guys finished third in the championship, to this year -- that it's just been a natural progression?

Ford: Yeah, the second half of last year we really started coming together as a team and Denny was gaining more and more confidence in himself and with the team.

That really started to come together during the Chase [for the Nextel Cup] -- and it was even coming together before that. At the start of this year, it just seemed to pick up where we left off.

On some things we've improved and on some things we haven't improved as much as we would have liked to. So it's all a learning process, and you never stop learning.

Through all of last year, we had more than most to learn and we're continuing on with that and trying to work at the same pace we did last year, to get a leg up. Even though we have run well, we haven't gotten any wins this year and we're working probably harder than most to try to get better at every racetrack that we go to.

We're looking forward to trying to peak with 15 races to go or so, so we can go into the Chase and give a strong run for a championship.

Q: Do you know what tire you're going to have at Pocono, and how it compares to what you guys won on last year?

Ford: We do know what tires we'll have there, but as far as making a comparison, we'll start that [by Tuesday morning]. That's usually what we do for each race, and [for Pocono] we haven't really pinpointed those issues yet.

We have run on the tires, but not as a package. We have run on the left sides, at Richmond, and the right sides, at Bristol -- but not together, so we'll start looking into that a little closer [Tuesday].

I don't know what those differences are, yet.

Q: You guys seem to have hit it off with the Car of Tomorrow real well, so is that a Gibbs team effort, and where do you feel it's come from?

Ford: If you go back to last year -- and this is something I've tried to explain to everyone, because everyone has that same visual, if you will -- the Car of Tomorrow has made the 11 team better.

I don't think that's accurate, at all -- even to say we have a better Car of Tomorrow program. If you look back to the races that we've run it at so far -- Darlington last year we had a top-10 run and ran in the top five a good portion of the day.

We had a really good run there, the first time that Denny had ever been there.

At Richmond, the first race last year, we had a shot at winning that race. At Bristol, we ran good all day in the second race. At Phoenix we ran top-three and had a good, strong run -- so everywhere you've run [the COT], those are our strong racetracks.

We had a shot at winning Martinsville last year with the old car. So the racetracks we've been to with this car are the racetracks we run strong at [anyway].

Dover, I thought would be a tell-tale with the Car of Tomorrow and the 11 car because I thought it was probably one of our worst racetracks -- we came out of there ninth and 11th last year -- but that was just survival, and we didn't run well.

What we did at Dover [fourth-place finish], I think, paints a little better picture of if it fits our team well or not, than what we've done so far at those other tracks.

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.