Inside Ford's 2023 Cup Series struggles: 'We have to be perfect all the time'

There appears to exist a perfect recipe for Ford teams to race competitively this year when they visit the majority of NASCAR Cup Series tracks.

They have to have a perfect or quite close to perfect performance.

Ryan Blaney winning the Coca-Cola 600 last week at Charlotte Motor Speedway provided proof that a Ford can win on the typical “intermediate” oval 1.5 miles-2.5 miles in length.

But it isn’t easy.

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When NASCAR allowed manufacturers to tweak the bodies of their cars for 2023, Ford’s changes helped the car at the superspeedways where NASCAR limits horsepower. But at recent wind tunnel tests, the Fords appeared to have less downforce than the competition of Chevrolet and Toyota when it came to NASCAR’s bread-and-butter intermediate ovals.

NASCAR indicated that the Fords were still in the target range of downforce numbers that NASCAR uses in order to have parity among manufacturers. But Ford teams left the test knowing what they already could tell on the track — they needed to find ways to find speed.

“We’re lacking downforce,” said defending Cup champion Joey Logano prior to the Charlotte race. “There was a comparison done a few weeks ago and everybody got to see it, so that’s the situation.

“It doesn’t mean we can’t make up that difference on car setup and maximizing what we have. If we do a better job than everybody else, we can make up that difference.”

A decade or more ago, NASCAR would often allow a manufacturer to make a change to its body style or other technical elements in order for it to become more competitive. But those days are long gone as NASCAR knows that any change increases costs on the teams.

Teams know that except in rare instances, any changes during the season would be done to all cars and primarily those changes would be for safety reasons. The next change coming to the bodies would come in 2024 as both Ford and Toyota are expected to have additional tweaks while Chevrolet is expected to keep their current specifications.

Logano won in March 2023 at Atlanta, one of six races at three tracks (Daytona, Atlanta, Talladega) where NASCAR reduces horsepower to keep cars from getting airborne and the cars run in tighter packs. 

Blaney is the only other Ford to win this year.

“It’s no secret that we’ve struggled a bit on the intermediates just searching for speed and figuring out the new nose we have,” Blaney said. “It’s been a little bit of a struggle. … We’re all working around the clock, trying to get better.

“Hopefully what we found at Charlotte, to have the speed we had to contend with the cars that have been really good on the mile-and-a-halves, hopefully we can carry that forward to other mile-and-a-halves, and maybe even everywhere else.”

One of those “everywhere else” tracks comes this weekend at Sonoma Raceway, the second road-course race of the year. At the first road-course race of the season at Circuit of the Americas, no Ford finished in the top-5 but Ford took six of the positions 6-to-15.

After a week off, the series then heads to the 1.33-mile Nashville Superspeedway before the street course at Chicago, an Atlanta race and a short-track race at New Hampshire (1 mile) before back-to-back races at intermediate-type tracks at Pocono (2.5 miles) and Michigan (2 miles).

The Fords will continue to try to find speed, but it is more difficult in the Next Gen era. With the Cup car that debuted last year, all teams are issued most of the parts and pieces from a single-source supplier instead of making their own.

So how do they make gains?

“Downforce, drag and horsepower — when you’re off, that’s usually the things that will bring the speed in and, really, these days that’s all you’ve got,” Logano said. “There’s not going to be a new spindle or something like that.

“You can’t make those anymore. What you’ve got is what you’ve got for parts, so if you’re off on speed, there’s only three things you can look at to get faster, and we need to maximize our setups and stuff like that and understand the balance of mechanical grip versus aero grip.”

While they might not have winning speed week-in and week-out, the Ford teams know they can take advantage of the mistakes and misfortune of other drivers. Blaney currently leads the Cup standings and Kevin Harvick is third.

But then you have to go to 11th and Brad Keselowski to find the next Ford. Logano follows in 12th, Chris Buescher sits 13th, Austin Cindric 19th and Michael McDowell 20th.

“We understand where we’re off and we’re working on it, and we’ve got a little bit of time before the playoffs start,” Logano said. “We may not go into the playoffs with the most playoff points, but it doesn’t mean we can’t win the championship.

“That’s our situation and until then we have to be perfect all the time.”

Blaney crew chief Jonathan Hassler said since the first intermediate race of the season at Las Vegas, they have made gains.

“We went there with some changes [for 2023] to all the manufacturers earlier this year, and we weren’t nearly as competitive,” Hassler said. “So we’ve had to go to work. If you look at all the different tracks, we’ve had tracks that were our strengths last year, we have been a little bit weaker.

“Tracks that we were not as strong as last year, we’ve been a little bit better. We’re just kind of focused on continuing to make our stuff better week-in and week-out and kind of let the results kind of take care of themselves.”

Cup veteran Aric Almirola indicated that the Fords are more mercurial when it comes to changes in the cars.

“If you talk to all the Ford drivers, I feel like our window is pretty small,” Almirola said. “If we hit it, we hit it. And if you’re slightly off, you’re really off.

“It does seem like the competition has a little bit bigger of a window to be closer to hitting the setup.”

Almirola said the biggest challenge is traffic.

“We have potential in our cars — Blaney at Charlotte showed that,” Almirola said. “I still think that our cars are really aero-sensitive in traffic compared to the other manufacturers.

“Blaney did a great job of executing for all 600 miles and never really lost his track position, so when you look at that I think that’s a key component of it.”

Logano, who won the Cup title in 2018 and then again in 2022, knows that it is “only” June and with his win, he’s in the playoffs. He can keep telling himself that the way the playoffs are structured, a team doesn’t have to be truly great until the final four races.

There are 11 races left in the regular season and 10 more races in the playoffs — so there obviously is time to get better.

“It’s going to be kind of grind-it-out type races, and it doesn’t mean that when the playoffs come around we ain’t going to be in the hunt,” Logano said. “We are every year and I expect to be in the hunt again this year.

“I’ve been through these situations before. And 2018 always comes to my mind when I ended up pretty damn well.”

What To Watch For

Sonoma Raceway will be the second Cup race on a road course where there are no cautions at the stage break. That will change the strategy — making it much more simple — for Cup teams as they won’t have to make a decision whether to stay out for stage points or pit near the end of the stage for track position.

This will return the event to a more traditional road-course race where teams make the decision to pit based on fuel mileage and when they should schedule their minimum of two spots during a race where they can go about 45-to-48 laps on fuel.

As far as drivers, defending winner Daniel Suarez will be one to watch as well as two drivers who ran strong at Sonoma last year but had pit-road mishaps — Kyle Larson and Chase Elliott.

Both of those drivers had loose wheels, with Larson losing his on the track and Elliott trying to back up into his box but the team changed it with the front end of Elliott’s car beyond the box, resulting in a pass-through penalty.

Elliott returns after a one-race suspension and now faces a significant hurdle to get into the playoffs on points, meaning a win is needed.

One other driver to watch: Tyler Reddick, who won a couple of the road courses last year as well as the first road-course race of 2023 at Circuit of the Americas.

Thinking Out Loud

NASCAR opted not to issue any penalty to Austin Cindric for the contact with Austin Dillon at WWTR Gateway.

Dillon and his car owner/grandfather Richard Childress felt Cindric wrecked him on purpose. 

That led NASCAR to look at the data and determine that it fell under hard racing and not worthy of the penalty. Dillon’s team, looking at the same data, views it differently.

The hard part for NASCAR in this situation is that Cindric’s actions didn’t look egregious. It looked like he was trying to squeeze into a hole that maybe wasn’t there, but it didn’t look like a retaliatory hook.

In reality, no matter what the data said, NASCAR would have been hard-pressed to penalize Cindric. And that’s because the “eye test” didn’t have the appearance of an egregious act. 

NASCAR can’t be digging into data after every crash. To penalize someone, it needs to view the crash as intentional and then use the data to support that view. To view it as quite possibly unintentional and then change based on data seems to be a slippery slope because public perception would view it as too much of a judgment call with the potential of playing favorites.

Weekly Power Rankings

They Said It

“People change. People grow up.” —Kyle Busch on his evolving relationship with RCR boss Richard Childress

Bob Pockrass covers NASCAR for FOX Sports. He has spent decades covering motorsports, including the past 30 Daytona 500s, with stints at ESPN, Sporting News, NASCAR Scene magazine and The (Daytona Beach) News-Journal. Follow him on Twitter @bobpockrass, and sign up for the FOX Sports NASCAR Newsletter with Bob Pockrass.

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