DAYTONA BEACH, Fla. — Austin Dillon, who used a push from Chevrolet teammate Bubba Wallace to win last year’s Daytona 500, says more of that type of teamwork will be needed for Chevy to win Sunday’s race.
Dillon’s triumph last year is Chevrolet’s only victory at Daytona or Talladega since 2016. Fords have won nine of the last 12 restrictor-plate races and Toyota the other two. Before the era of teamwork at the plate tracks, Chevrolet had better results. From 2013-15, Chevrolet and Ford each won five restrictor-plate races and Toyota the other two.
Last fall, Stewart-Haas Racing’s four Fords dominated Talladega and Aric Almirola won after teammate Kurt Busch ran out of fuel on the final corner of the last lap.
“If we get our tails kicked in like we did at Talladega, it’s going to look bad,” Dillon said Wednesday at Daytona 500 Media Day. “Daytona is a little bit different in the fact that handling is more in play more often. What they did (at Talladega) was so impressive. They led the whole race. I don’t see that happening again. Penske did a really good job the other day, I felt like, of leading that pack (in the Clash), so that is kind of scary.”
Although Sunday’s Clash was disjointed by rain delays, the Fords of Team Penske and Wood Brothers Racing, which is aligned with Penske, dominated. Paul Menard’s Ford led 51 of 59 laps and was in front when contact with Jimmie Johnson’s car sent Menard into the wall and Johnson to victory lane.
“I do think it’s a good idea for us to get together to make some sort of game plan,” Dillon said of Chevy teams. “We do a pretty good job of trying to pit together and stay on the same pit strategies. So that is something that will probably be talked about more and more as we get closer to the race. We need to get together, I think, and work on that if that is how the race is going to go.”
Hendrick Motorsports might have its own plan. The organization took the front row for the Daytona 500 and its teams had the four fastest qualifying laps.
“Hendrick, I think they’ve got a game plan,” Dillon said. “I feel like they spent a lot of time in the wind tunnel this offseason for this race specifically, seeing what Stewart-Haas was able to do at Talladega and they took over the first four spots. Our job, we have two cars in the top 10, that was really great. We’ll go race the (Thursday’s) Duels and see how it plays out and link ourselves with them or together we just put ourselves in the right position.”
“Sometimes being the odd man out is not a bad thing because you get to play off of everybody else’s strategy. We’ll just see how it plays out.”
The challenge, though, is how well Fords work together and control the front of the field. Fords led 72.7 percent of the 756 laps run in the restrictor-plate races last year, winning two of those four events.
Denny Hamlin, who won the 2016 Daytona 500 after Toyota teams worked together and controlled the race, says Fords have taken their plan.
“I think that’s really been a lot of the success that Team Penske has had and Stewart-Haas at Talladega,” Hamlin said. “Their cars were just extremely fast and they just stayed in line together. That’s something that we displayed in 2016 with our Toyota teammates and really haven’t been able to replicate since.
“Other manufacturers have more cars. Us five cars can stay all in a line all we want, but if there are nine Fords or 10 Fords that stay in a line, that’s going to be faster. So once we kind of put the blueprint out there of how we work together, it’s been impossible for us to replicate since simply because of numbers.”
