By Caleb Whisler, Staff Writer
With seven races complete in the Monster Energy NASCAR Cup Series, Trevor Bayne heads to his home track, Bristol Motor Speedway, assessing where his team is to kickoff the season.
According to Bayne, the main issue for his No. 6 Roush-Fenway Racing team is having pure execution on race weekends. Bayne has only two finishes inside the top-5 through the first seven races.
Although some of those finishes have been through things they cannot control like mechanical issues, Bayne knows that there are things his team can control.
“Just pure execution hasn’t been what we want it to be. Some of the things have been our fault and some haven’t. You look at some of the mechanical issues we’ve had with tires or different components. Those have been things we can’t control. Things we can control are loose wheels and different things like that have taken us out of the running,” Bayne stated on Friday.
Despite the issues, Bayne understands that his team shows up to the track each week fighting and hungry to do better each week.
“It gets tough when you’re been digging deep for four or five years trying to turn things around when you don’t get the fruit of that and don’t get the results that you want. It can be real easy to lay down on a tough week, but we’re trying not to do that,” Bayne continued.
When it comes to overall speed at Roush-Fenway, Bayne stated that they were comparable to the middle point of the 2017 season. Despite being in mid-season form on speed, Bayne does not recognize any gains, but also doesn’t see any loss from the off-season.
“I don’t know that we made gains, but we didn’t really lose as much as I might have thought we would in the off-season, just with different things happening in our sport with manufacturers and different things. I didn’t know where we were gonna stack up honestly into this year and, surprisingly, without many changes Ford is still on top and that’s really cool to see,” Bayne said.
At the end of the day, Bayne believes that there are no excuses as a whole because of Fords performance in 2018.