Hornish tries to shake off slow start

Blame some of it on an organization that's still trying to play catch-up with the fast and powerful.
 
Hornish, 35, says he isn't sure where his Richard Petty Motorsports team stacks up after just a handful of races, but admits, "we're not where we want to be."
 
"Really if we want to look at where we have been trending compared to the people that have the closest race cars to us, I don't feel like we are doing a bad job. I feel like we are actually doing pretty good, but it's not as good as what we want to be doing at this point in time," he said.
 
Hornish replaced former RPM driver Marcos Ambrose when the latter chose to return to Australia after a nine-year career in NASCAR. Hornish hasn't competed full-time in Sprint Cup since 2010 and his last full season in any series came in 2013 when he drove for owner Roger Penske in the XFINITY Series.
 
His 135 Sprint Cup Series starts is more than only a handful of others running the full schedule this season.
 
At RPM, Hornish is paired with teammate Aric Almirola. The two have similar driving styles, a bonus for an organization that's posted just five Cup wins since 2009 with a variety of drivers.
 
"He's capable of winning races, capable of racing (up front)," Richard Petty said. "So far this year we've not given him anything to run with car-wise.
 
"It's just one of those deals where the combination has got to come together, fate and all that stuff. But the ability of helping us with sponsors and things, he's good with people, good with sponsors and I think he's a pretty good race car driver if we give him something to run.
 
"If you go back and look, he drove for different people and when he had a good car, he ran good. Nobody can run good in a bad car. He was always capable of getting everything that was in that car that day. We've got to give him something. Right now ... the only Fords that have done anything at all are the Penske cars. We've done as good as the Roush cars and we've done terrible. ... It's going to take time."
 
Team Penske's two-team effort of Brad Keselowski and Joey Logano has been the cream of the Ford crop in recent seasons, winning 14 times since becoming teammates in 2013. Roush Fenway Racing has five wins since '13 while RPM has one.
 
Crew chief Drew Blickensderfer likens Hornish to Matt Kenseth, with whom Blickensderfer won the 2009 Daytona 500. He also guided Kenseth to a win at Auto Club Speedway, and won with David Ragan in the summer race of '11 at Daytona.
 
Both Hornish and Kenseth have "a feel from the seat that can focus on what they need for Sunday afternoon or what they need to go faster for qualifying," he said. "Their personalities are fairly similar, too. They're both pretty low key, quiet guys that care about their families and race cars. ... Sam is also similar to Matt in that respect where he can filter the outside noise.
 
"Sam has told me that when he first came into the sport that was hard to do, filter all the stuff that's coming to him. He used the analogy 'it was a fire hose spraying water at me when I first came in the sport. Now it feels like a garden hose. Now, if this is how it's going to be, how can you help me get better?' "
 
Like his team owner, Blickensderfer knows there's still plenty of work to be done. Almirola is 14th in points but has yet to crack the top 10. Hornish has yet to top his 12th-place finish in the season-opening race.
 
"We don't expect to take cars that were 20th-place cars last year and make them race winners," Blickensderfer said. "But we expect to take 20th-place cars and make them 15th-place."
 
Almirola made his first appearance in NASCAR's Chase for the Sprint Cup last season. Having Hornish as a teammate, he said, has been beneficial in part because the two share similar driving styles, something the teams discovered while testing at Nashville before the end of '14.
 
"Me and Marcos were total opposites," Almirola said. "Marcos has a very unique driving style because of all of his road course racing experience … and it made it very difficult to match his setups when he was better than us and vice versa.
 
"I think Atlanta was a great example. I think (Hornish) qualified eighth and his car was really good on Friday, so starting Saturday we kind of transitioned more of our setup towards his setup. We didn't copy it exact, but over the winter we understood what the differences were that we needed to have in my car versus his and we had a good Saturday at Atlanta. That translated into a good Sunday. We ran top 15 all day and finished 11th, and I think a large part of it was due to the 9 car being so competitive off the truck."
 
Hornish has seven career starts at Auto Club, site of Sunday's Auto Club 400 (FOX, 3:30 p.m. ET), with a best finish of 12th on the 2-mile track. It will be an opportunity to halt the early-season slide and perhaps begin moving back in the right direction.
 
In the meantime, he said, he's happy to be back in the series and working for RPM.
 
"I feel like I couldn't ask for a better group of people," he said, "and what they are looking to do within the company and what we are trying to do with the pieces we have at this point in time. I think we are doing a good job. We just need to continue to evolve on that to make the program better.
 
"It will be worthwhile no matter how it turns out. It has been a lot of fun to get to know these people and we are all working in the same direction. I think we will continue to progress and get better and better."

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