This Week in Ford Racing: Bill Elliott

Talladega, Ala. — Bill Elliott recorded the fastest lap ever in a stock car when he drove a Ford Thunderbird 212.089 miles per hour in a qualifying effort at Talladega Superspeedway in 1987. On Wednesday, driving a Hajek Motorsports E-85 powered Ford Mustang FR500C, Elliott will try to surpass that mark and establish a new closed course speed record for an E-85-powered car. Both Elliott and Brent Hajek discussed this week’s attempt.

BILL ELLIOTT – NO. 21 MOTORCRAFT FORD FUSIONWHEN DID YOU FIRST GET CALLED ABOUT DRIVING THE E-85 POWERED FORD MUSTANG?“It’s probably been about six months—actually, Bud Moore contacted me, because Bud was working with Brent, trying to put this deal together, so that’s kind of how things progressed from there.”

WHAT WERE YOUR THOUGHTS ABOUT THIS WHEN YOU FIRST HEARD ABOUT IT?“I didn’t know what it was all about. I just kind of listened to what he had to say and then assess it from there. Kind of anything is a record, I mean you want to run as fast as you can, but for what they want to do, it’s a pretty neat concept. It ought to be fun to do, and we’ll see how it goes. I kind of had mixed emotions about it. First, I didn’t really know those guys; now that they’ve been to the shop this past week and they’ve had the car on the chassis dyno and it had run at Bonneville with Danny Thompson and all of the stuff that they’ve done. So I’m getting more comfortable with what they’re trying to do, and understand it more as we continue to have more dialogue.”

YOUR LAP OF 212.089 MPH AT TALLADEGA HAS STOOD AS A RECORD FOR MORE THAN 20 YEARS. HOW IMPORTANT IS IT TO YOU TO HAVE YOUR NAME ATTACHED TO THAT MARK?“At the point in time, for us, it’s been a pretty nice thing. I think it just shows how far we were along at the point in time we did that. For us to run that fast in that era when nobody else had was pretty amazing. Of all the accomplishments we’ve done, that’s one of the ones that really stands out and continues to hold up through the test of time. I know that with NASCAR changing—now they run restrictor plates on the car to limit the horsepower, but still, at the point in time that we ran, that was a pretty amazing feat.”

HOW ARE PREPARATIONS GOING FOR THIS ATTEMPT WITH THE E-85 POWERED MUSTANG? THE E-85 POWERED MUSTANG HAS BEEN AT YOUR SHOP IN DAWSONVILLE, GEORGIA, SINCE LAST WEEK.“Everything’s going well. I think today they’re in the wind tunnel. They ended up leaving last night. Like I said, they had it on the chassis dyno for quite a while. They had a few little glitches they worked out, and then we put one of my seats in the car, then they went back through their wiring issues and re-did some stuff and, I think, re-did the computer stuff, and they had it back on the chassis dyno yesterday, and I guess it was in the wind tunnel this morning, and we’ll kind of go from there.”

To read the rest of the interview please visit: http://www.fordracing.com/news/detail/?article=36353