MONSTER ENERGY NASCAR CUP SERIES
HOMESTEAD-MIAMI SPEEDWAY
FORD ECOBOOST 400
TEAM CHEVY OEM PRESS CONF. TRANSCRIPT
NOVEMBER 16, 2019

JIM CAMPBELL, CHEVROLET U.S. VICE PRESIDENT OF PERFORMANCE AND MOTORSPORTS, met with members of the media as part of an OEM panel at Homestead-Miami Speedway to discuss the 2019 season, the anticipation of the debut of the Camaro ZL1 1LE in 2020, and more. Transcript:

THE MODERATOR: Good morning, everyone. If we could have your attention. We’re going to go ahead and get started in the media center at Homestead‑Miami Speedway with representatives from all three of our manufacturers. As you face the stage sitting from left to right, joining us today are Jim Campbell, U.S. Vice President of Performance and Motorsports for Chevrolet; Mark Rushbrook, Global Director of Ford Performance Motorsports; and Ed Laukes, Group Vice President Marketing for Toyota Motor North America.

Jim, I’ll start with you. 15 Chevy drivers made the playoffs across all three-national series, the most of any manufacturer. Today you’ve got two of the four teams competing for the Xfinity Series title. Can you talk about Chevrolet’s 2019 season and your thoughts heading into 2020?

JIM CAMPBELL: Well, thank you. It’s great to be with you guys. This is a tradition here with the three OEMs. Yeah, 15 Chevy drivers, obviously five made it into the playoffs on the Cup side, seven in Xfinity and three in the Truck Series, and so that’s a good sign.

We certainly want to drive more people to the championship Final Four, the Championship 4, and so that’s really the focus of what we’re doing here on truck and Xfinity. The season has been pretty good. Obviously didn’t bring the championship home last night. Congratulations to Matt and Mark, to you guys. It was a heck of a fight.

Xfinity is going to be terrific today. We’re looking forward to that. And on the Cup side, always hurts when you don’t have anybody in the Championship 4, but we’re clearly focused as our Chevy teams and our division on preparing ‑‑ obviously want to run a great race tomorrow and obviously going for the win. It’s an individual win, not a championship win, and then focus on 2020, and we have some good things coming at us next year.

Happy to be here. Looking forward to the race today, and obviously good race tomorrow to try to go for the individual win and then looking forward to ’20 and ’21.

THE MODERATOR: We’ll go ahead and open it up to the media.

Q. Gentlemen, obviously we all know 70 percent of sales are SUVs. I don’t anticipate ever seeing a RAV4 series or a race in SUVs, and we all know NASCAR is going hybrid. How long do you think what we term stock car racing with the shorter attention spans and everything that’s going on, how long do you think that motorsports could actually be relevant in America? Is it forever or could there be an end point?

JIM CAMPBELL: If you look at the history of motorsports, there have been turning points all the way through. And the technologies have changed, the vehicles we race have changed, and that will continue. And it’s as much about the technologies that go into the vehicles that we race and how we relate those technologies and the tools we use to prepare the race cars to our production side of our business, either in the showroom with similar technologies in our cars, trucks and crossovers, or the tools with which we prepare to race get honed and refined and improve so that when we go to apply them to the production side, they’re even better.

What’s going to happen going forward? You know, we just came out of SEMA, and that’s the aftermarket parts convention or trade show, if you will. We have 41 internal combustion engines that are great engines. We have the most of any OE in the industry. However, we also are trying to look forward, and so we brought a 1962 C10, which we call the E10, and what we did is a concept crate electric propulsion system. It’s the second one we’ve done in two years to really look forward. 41 internal combustion engines, we’ve got that covered, but what could be next.

Racing gives you the same opportunity. You’re going to continue to leverage what you have but you also have to look forward, and you do that with the series but also with the other OEMs, and I expect that in every series.

Q. Jim, it wasn’t that many years ago that Jimmie Johnson was winning another championship, but in the last three years, your guys have not made the Final Four. Haven’t won that many races in the last three years. To put it simply, what happened? What is happening maybe?

JIM CAMPBELL: Yeah, it’s a good question, and we obviously spend a lot of time on our competitiveness on the track. I think a couple things. One, if you look at the ‑‑ we’ve had long‑term relationships with the big three teams. 50 years with Richard Childress, 35 plus years with Rick Hendrick, 10 plus years with Ganassi, and a lot of the affiliates have been with us for quite a while.

If you look at the drivers, we’ve had some amazing young drivers that turned into winning drivers that turned into championship drivers that then retired, and so we have a younger crew. If you take Jimmie Johnson and Kurt Busch out of the average age, our average age is like 26 years old. So, what’s exciting is at one-point Jeff Gordon and Tony Stewart and Dale Earnhardt Jr. were the young guys. We’ve got the young guys now. It’s an amazing thing to watch how they’re progressing. Some of the drivers have been to these tracks one, two, three times, four times. So, every time they go, they’re learning a lot more.

Secondly, we switched the car from the SS to the Camaro ZL1, and I think we were hopeful we had done a great job on that. I think the car is actually like at the back half of the season ‑‑ the last half of the season, six of our seven races were won in the back half of the season, so I do see improvement there, and I don’t know if you’d call it a press release, but next year we’re going to come out with a ZL1 1LE, and in the production side of our world, that’s our highest performing production car. Similar to the ZL1, but it has kind of higher performance elements to it from aero to chassis, and so we’ve incorporated those into the 2020 car that we put the release out and the rendering on.

And then I would just say we can continue to bolster the tools we have from our simulation, driver in the loop, the sim that we do as well as how we’re preparing with our teams. The aero work we did on the 2020 was done together with those three teams and our affiliates, and I’m excited about what that can be for the future.

Listen, we’re a performance sport, so there’s no excuses here. We’ve got to do better. We expect to do better. If you look at the history of Chevrolet, 39 manufacturer’s championships, 31 drivers, but that’s all history. We’re interested in the next chapter, and that’s what we’re focused on.

Q. Jim, your 2020 Cup car, you talk about improvements; where do you think you’ll improve the most? It looks like it’s a little bit less pointed, maybe a few fewer aero pockets on the hood area, and I guess a potential rear change?

JIM CAMPBELL: Yeah, first of all, when we introduced the ZL1, the ZL1 1LE on the production side wasn’t quite out yet, so this gives us a chance to align with our top Camaro in terms of the street production side. You saw the rendering; we did kind of soften the radius of the front fascia, so that will help on pushing, when the guys are pushing. That will help. There’s also some aero elements that are related to the production car that are in the race car, and so I think that we went to the tunnel, we did our submission with NASCAR, and in the submission, Ford and Toyota are in that when we do those submissions, and so we got approved, and we’ll be racing that this coming year.

And I think on the rear, we didn’t do the rendering of the rear of the car, but it does have ‑‑ it looks more like the production car, which I like a lot, and so ‑‑ but again, it’s a performance sport. It’s a new car, it’s all about how we perform, and so that’s our focus.

Q. Does it look a lot like the Toyota, the rear?

JIM CAMPBELL: We will put a rendering out on it, but no, it does not. (Laughs.)

Q. From what you know about the 2021 car and what you’ve seen and what you’d like to see, what are your thoughts on it?

JIM CAMPBELL: I would just add, when you see the proportions of this car, it fits the production vehicle even better, particularly in the rear plan view. It matches up to where the Camaro is, and we’re really quite excited about that. Obviously, you’ve got ‑‑ finally we’ve got symmetry between left‑ and right‑hand side. We needed that so it looks more like the street car, independent rear suspension. We’ll have a rear trans axle, and then on the wheels we’ll have a wheel that really mirrors a little bit closer to what you see on the production side in terms of size. So those are some of the things we’re excited about, and it has been a collaboration ‑‑ NASCAR has been pulling us together to meet on this on a regular basis with the three OEMs and our partners, and it’s been a really productive kind of journey and happy to say it’s going to happen in ’21.

Q. I’ve got a question for all three of you and then a quick follow‑up for Ed. Talking about this sport and all three of you sit here as far as the championship is concerned, how important is it each year to sit at that table, regardless of which of the three series it is, that competition and fighting for a championship, how important is it for you guys from a manufacturer’s standpoint to keep bringing these big trophies home?

JIM CAMPBELL: Yeah, listen, this is the goal. You’ve got a number of goals as a manufacturer, one is a manufacturer’s championship, but equally important and I think from a consumer standpoint even more so is driver’s championship, so the goal is to get here in the Championship 4. So, for us in Truck and Xfinity, excited about the fact we got here. Obviously didn’t win last night, have a chance with two really talented drivers going up against two other really talented drivers to go for a championship to add potentially to the history of Chevy in terms of driver’s championships.

On the Cup side, to be up here is painful to not have a championship driver. This is racing. If you have highs and lows, it’s all about how you respond. We’re in six series with our company with three divisions. We’re obviously here with Chevrolet but we have two other divisions, and when you are winning and vying for championships, you focus on how you keep the momentum going. When you don’t, it’s all about digging in and getting back on the trajectory of success.

That’s racing. We’ve been in this over 100 years. Louis Chevrolet was a co‑founder of the company. Him and his brothers, they raced. They happened to race at Indy, performance in racing, and that spirit is alive and well in our company today.

With that, happy birthday to Ed, 40 years at TRD.

Q. Jim and Mark, most years there are various rule changes, and it allows teams and manufacturers that are behind to kind of work ahead and kind of catch and close that gap. Next year obviously there aren’t those types of rule changes. What is to keep from happening you guys being here a year from now and the same manufacturer dominating with wins and potentially the Championship 4 because there aren’t that many rule changes. I know, Jim, you’ve got a different car, but still, what is the key to keep what happened this year from happening next year?

JIM CAMPBELL: Yeah, I would just say it’s all about optimizing all of your testing time and your simulation time to give the drivers a best chance of unloading quick, adjusting quickly and then executing in the race. I think that’s really what it’s about. There’s limited on‑track testing, so it really comes down heavily to simulation, driver loop activity. There is some aero testing. We’re limited, so we have to make sure every minute of those aero tests is productive, so that’s what we’ll do as a team. We have three major teams and we have a number of affiliates that we’ll use that to our best advantage. But it’s going to be about execution.

Q. You talked about collaboration on the 2021 car. Can you explain in your own terms what the hybridization model will look like or have y’all come to an overall agreement or are you all three on different platforms at this point?

JIM CAMPBELL: Well, we’re working with NASCAR on it. I mean, the details of that are still yet to be finalized. I think it would be more oriented to a spec system than unique R&D for every system. But the final decision on that is yet to be made, and obviously that would be the vehicle in ’21 would be package protected for that, and then the following year is kind of the target time frame. But more work to do there, and a lot of those details we’ve got to still work out.

Q. To kind of follow up on that, I remember a conversation with Doug Duchardt when he was with GM at Bristol in, I want to say 1999. He said if we want to common templates Chevrolet would pull out. Well, of course they didn’t, but my question is if we go down the road and go to a crate engine similar to what we’re seeing in the Truck Series, what is the interest of the manufacturers at that point?

JIM CAMPBELL: There’s no crate engine for Cup Series. We will be racing a Chevrolet engine.

Q. Period, going forward?

JIM CAMPBELL: Yeah, as far as I can see, we will be on a Chevrolet engine, as we are today. So that’s where we’re at, and I don’t see that changing. But listen, that’s why we meet with all the stakeholders in the sport, to make sure we’re healthy going forward. But I know there’s been a lot of talk in radio and in the articles around, is it going to a spec engine in the Cup Series, and it is not. So, I’m not sure if that answers that question, but that’s where we’re at.

Q. You guys were talking about commonality. I just wonder if we ever got to a point where we might see that ‑‑

JIM CAMPBELL: Yeah, obviously we’ve got ‑‑ we have a lot of young drivers at Chevy that come from a variety of different places. I remember when Rick Hendrick called me, and this was like in 2010, and he says, I just signed a 14‑year‑old named Chase Elliott. Obviously coming from a family from the sport, I got that part, but still, that’s a big bet for 14 years old, and there are some really talented young drivers. And some have links to the sport and some have sponsor money and some don’t. In our driver development program, you’ll probably see a little bit of each. I do think in the end, it’s a performance sport, what I said earlier. The top performers will rise. That’s kind of the way I see it.

THE MODERATOR: Gentlemen, thank you for your time this morning, and good luck the rest of the weekend.