Ford got off to a decent start in the 2022 Nascar Cup Series season, opening with a bang as Austin Cindric’s No. 2 Mustang nabbed the Daytona 500 victory. Since then, though, The Blue Oval’s stock car racing efforts have posted mediocre results, accruing just four wins as the regular season draws to a close, trailing behind Toyota’s five wins and Chevrolet’s 13 victories. Understandably, this is not ideal, and Mark Rushbrook, global director of Ford Performance Motorsports, is not pleased.
“Four wins is not enough. It’s not acceptable,” Rushbrook said, according to a report by Racer magazine. “We need to get more wins. We need to have drivers further up in the standings and hopefully at least four if not more drivers in the Playoffs.”
As of this writing, only three drivers from the Ford racing stable have won at Nascar’s top level this year: Austin Cindric and the No. 2 Mustang at Daytona; Chase Briscoe’s No. 14 Mustang at Phoenix; and the No. 22 of Joey Logano at Darlington and World Wide Technology Raceway. Several notable drivers are in danger of not making the championship. Kevin Harvick, driver of the No. 4 Mustang and 2014 Cup Series champion, must win if he wants to participate in the postseason Playoffs. His last win was in November 2020. Meanwhile, Ryan Blaney, driver of the No. 12 Mustang, has shown strength this year and even won the exhibition All-Star Race at Texas, but is in danger of being bumped from the Playoffs grid without a points-paying victory.
“We’ve seen a lot of success with speed at different tracks where we have understood it, but we still didn’t bring the win home,” Rushbrook said. “So, there’s a lot of work to do, but that’s racing. We always need to make all elements of the car better – the engine, the aerodynamics, the chassis, the setup, the tire model, our simulator model – and that’s what we’re working on. We have a lot of meetings and advancements with our teams to try and do better every week.”
All hope is not lost, though – if Ford can continue to get a handle on the new Next Gen race car, another next Nascar Cup Series victory could be on the horizon. The Blue Oval didn’t perform too badly at Indianapolis, with three Ford rookies scoring top five finishes. The Nascar Ford teams will just have to find a groove and stick with it to take down Chevrolet and Toyota in the latter part of the 2022 season.
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Comments
They need to get off there Duffies and get to work that is if they know how.
Maybe nascar has stock in Chevy. I remember when ford won most of the races and Chase somehow still won the championship. Nascar should change car to Chevy in nascar.
nascar has the racing just the way they want it , no ford power in the truck series all LS based power , same with the arca series , so far no ford in the winner circle in the xfinity series this year , and sometime when watching the cup race they get a gift of a stage win , 4 wins in the cup series and if joey hadn’t booted the 24 car at Darlington he would just have 2 , hard to count the talladega and daytona restrictor races its a crap shoot for anyone to win there , and can’t hardly stand to watch nhra with their heavy hand also , but i have the perfect solution its spelled N.M.R.A
First question in racing – ‘how fast do you want to go’? The answer – ‘how much do you want to spend’?
I just wonder what the Ford Performance Director thinks about the WRC Ford Puma… it only won once, by luck and ever since, it has been a follower, overshadowed by all competitors 🙂 My advice: STOP investing even one penny in M-SPORT!
that’s because nascar is run by General Motors !!!!!!
Ford should leave nascar and just have the Hendrick bunch go around chasing their on tails.
I was a nascar fan for well over 40 years and now they can count me out!
And this is surprising to who? I’ve been a fan since the very late 70’s, mostly the Wood Brothers and Bud Moore, but I really got into it with Bill Elliot. Since then there’s been one constant, every time Ford would get an advantage, there’d be a rule change, starting with Elliot’s heads I believe. I could go on and on but that would take a book. Remember Mark Martins bs 25 point penalty that handed the championship to Earnhardt? More recently when the Ford engine had better cooling and could stay locked in the tandem longer or run less tape on their grilles? How fast was staying locked up banned and a minimum size opening mandated? More recently, the front splitter pan that seemed to give Fords a little advantage, was deemed illegal but no penalties were given. It’s funny how the Camaro couldn’t win a race and now is almost impossible to beat, in 1 year, really. Did Stewart Haas even win a race last year, I know Harvick didn’t. Now this year, just before the season starts, after over a year of testing with no issues, they take downforce away from the Fords. What has been the Mustangs biggest problem, fading after a small amount of laps. That’s caused by tire wear that is worse on cars with less downforce. I knew this was going to happen, it happens every time Fords catch up, never mind have any advantage. Any Ford fan that’s been paying attention would know this. I’ll even throw this in, Carl Edwards or one of his teammates would’ve, without a doubt, won the Championship in the 2nd or 3rd year of the Chase, so what does nascar/gm do, expand the chase so Tony Stewart could get in because he was the hottest driver at the end of the year and the only person that could beat Roush. People wonder why Edwards quit.
You nailed it, Ford has always had the edge and NASCAR/GM cry babies always find away to ban it. Nascar sucks
Let’s be honest here, GM has a lot more money than Ford, including the $55 billion they never repaid to us. They don’t just use it to engineer the cars, they use it to buy race series, through advertising and who knows what else. Look at what Imsa did to the Ford GT. There’s no way the old Corvette stood a chance against the GT without help. Right way the GT got hit with boost restrictions, fuel limits, weight added and so on to the point of making the car useless at the end. GM lobbied imsa to even make the Porsche and BMW losers until Porsche moved the motor forward to get a larger diffuser. When they didn’t have anything that could blow away the GT350, they stopped running the Camaro. They don’t want a fair fight and spend so they don’t have to worry about one
GOING TO GE WORSE WHEN STWEART-HAAS SWITCHES TO MOPAR. THAT IS NOT TOO FAR AWAY.
Ford should stop wasting money here. The series is practically owned by Toyota.
Ford has historically had stupid racing management. They will jump into a series for a few years and then back away. No wonder a owner would be reluctant to team with Ford. Same for drivers. Look at the drivers they let get away: Waltrip, Earnhardt, Gordon (since Gordon found Johnson I will include him), Busch (both of them), Edwards. When they get a chance, they don’t even attempt to get top drivers like Larson and Busch.