For the second straight season, Team Penske is leading the charge for Ford in the NASCAR Sprint Cup Series.
Joey Logano gave the blue ovals a victory in the season-opening Daytona 500, and a Team Penske car has been the highest finishing Ford in each of the first three races of the year.
That fact has not been lost on the other Ford teams in the Sprint Cup garage.
Making his full-time return to Sprint Cup this season with Richard Petty Motorsports, Sam Hornish Jr. knows the other Ford teams have work to do to keep up with Roger Penske’s two-car operation.
“We know that there is work to be done and the biggest thing is being able to try to figure out how we do everything in the right way,” Hornish said Saturday at Phoenix International Raceway.
“How do we figure out what the Penske guys are doing that is making them better than us? That is their job: To go out there and beat us, and ours is the same way, as well as the rest of the competition.
“Obviously we would like to have Ford be one through 10 or whatever the number is, but we have some work to do to catch up to the Penske guys, and that is what we are trying to figure out,” he said. “While Ford would like us all to be right up there, they can’t go, ‘Hey, you guys have to share everything you are doing.’ Because it doesn’t work that way.”
While Hornish understands Team Penske cannot open the doors of information wide to the competition, he believes pointing other Ford teams in the right direction could go a long way toward improving the overall performance of Ford Racing.
“They don’t have to divulge all the secrets,” Hornish said of Penske. “If you show us where the end of the tunnel is, we might get there a little faster than if we are working our way through a maze, but it is a hard thing to do. If we were ahead, we wouldn’t want to have to share too much of our stuff, either. I think that is part of the interesting aspect; even though the cars look very similar on the racetrack, there is a lot going on underneath them that is very different.”
Through the first three races of the season, Hornish has a best finish of 12th — which came in the Daytona 500. Hornish’s Richard Petty Motorsports teammate, Aric Almirola, has two top-15 finishes and was 26th last weekend at Las Vegas Motor Speedway.
With a ban on private testing in place for the 2015 season, the former IndyCar champion and Indianapolis 500 winner has had a tough time judging his equipment against that of some of his fellow competitors.
“I feel like we are actually doing pretty good, but it is not as good as what we want to be doing at this point in time,” said Hornish. “We feel the more that Aric and I can work together to make Richard Petty Motorsports better, the better it will be for the rest of us over here. I feel like we have had decent speed. We haven’t had a lot of luck at this point in time.”
For Hornish, there is no better place to get the season back on track than Phoenix International Raceway. Before becoming a driver, Hornish and his family would visit the track to watch races from the stands.
Once behind the wheel, Hornish scored his first IndyCar victory at PIR, made his Sprint Cup Series debut here and earned his first XFINITY Series victory and first Sprint Cup top 10 at the flat 1-mile track.
“This has been a place that I always enjoy coming back to,” said Hornish. “It is the type of track I enjoy because both ends are so different. It is kind of a compromise. You have to work really hard to get your car really good on one end and then kind of carry it around the other one. I have always loved coming back here.”
