KASEY KAHNE – No. 9 Budweiser Ford Fusion (Finished 36^th) – “We had a fast Budweiser Ford. It was nice to drive, but we just had another mechanical failure. It’s tough. We’ve been doing pretty good points-wise and that hurts again, but we can keep going for it.” IS IT SOMETHING YOU WOULD EXPECT WITH THE NEW ENGINE? “No. It’s been out for a while as far as preparing it and being prepared and ready. When you put it on the track, they’re not supposed to break. I don’t care. That engine could have broke. One of the old engines could have broke. It’s probably just something small inside that happened, but when we brought it here we had no idea that it would break. It’s ready. It’s prepared. It’s ready to go on the track.” ARE YOU GOING TO TALK TO MENARD AND KENSETH ABOUT THE WAY THEY RACED YOU BY TRYING TO STAY ON THE LEAD LAP? “Yeah, I understand what they’re doing. I don’t care what Kenseth’s doing. He’s racing hard and trying to stay on the lead lap. That’s fine. Menard raced me super-hard and then Kyle Busch gets to him and he lets him go in the first corner that he gets to him. One corner and he lets Kyle go, so that’s what made me mad. What Matt was doing, Matt’s just trying to stay on the lead lap. That’s racing. That’s what we do. Paul just needs to do the same with each guy and not just with me for some reason. That’s all I said.”

 

AJ ALLMENDINGER – No. 43 Berlin City Auto Group Ford Fusion (Finished 10^th) – “It seems like most of the time the 39, when he just wants to run into you he will, but that’s how tight this racing is because there’s 20 to go and it’s basically near a green-white-checkered so everybody is gonna get after it. I roughed some guys up to, so you can’t really complain that much about it. It’s just one of those racing deals. It’s what everybody gets excited about. If you would have told me at the beginning of the day we were gonna finish 10^th, I would have said, ‘Perfect.’ When you kind of run top five or top six all day and you finish 10^th, it doesn’t feel quite as good. I’m just proud of everybody on this 43 race team. Thank you to Ford, and we had Berlin City Auto Groups on the car today – the car looked good – Insignia, Best Buy and Valvoline, PVA – we’ve got them on the car next week – so everybody that supports this race team, thank you. It was another solid day, another top 10. We’ll take it. We always know it could be a little bit better, but I’d rather be complaining about 10^th than complaining about 30^th, so we’ll move on. It’s another good points day. I think that probably got us closer to the chase because a couple guys ahead of us fell out, so we’ll just keep working on it and getting this race team better.” WHAT DOES THIS SAY FOR THE TEAM AS YOU TRY TO MAKE THE CHASE? “I look at the Chase as one of those things that would just be a bonus. I look at it if we can be top 15 or top 16 in points, being a first-year team together and our first year with Ford. Ford Racing has pumped this organization up so much, so the Chase is still the goal, but we just have to keep running inside that top 10. Today was a big day. This is probably one of my worst race tracks, so I felt like a real race car driver out there today and that’s always a good thing. To run as well as we did and still get a top 10 out of it, I’m excited to move forward. We’ve got a fast car in Daytona this year. We’re going back with the same car, so I don’t see why we can’t win that thing.”

 

GREG BIFFLE – No. 16 American Red Cross Ford Fusion (Finished 16^th) – “We were just chattering the front tires. We can’t get our cars to turn very good. I don’t know what it is, but we’ll just keep working at it. It’s pretty frustrating. In the middle part of the race it was like somebody flipped a switch because we just got super, super-tight and I don’t know what the heck it was. We just did the best we could and that was 16^th.”

DAVID RAGAN – No. 6 UPS Ford Fusion (Finished 20^th) – “I felt like at times during the race we were a little better, but even at our best, we were a top-15 car. When that last caution came out, it took a few laps for our UPS Ford to get up to speed. We made that call to stay out and there were a couple of others also that stayed out on our lap. We beat a couple of them, but we also let a couple of them get around us. If we had to do it all over again, I still think that was the right call, but we had a 15th to a 20th-place car today and that’s where we ran. It’s a little better than what we’ve run here in the past, so hopefully that means something when we come back here later in the season. As a company, we’ve still got to keep working on it, but, again, a little better than what we’ve been in the past.”

 

KEVIN CONWAY – No. 34 ExtenZe Ford Fusion (Finished 32^nd) RAYBESTOS ROOKIE OF THE YEAR CANDIDATE – “We really struggled a lot because within the first five laps we broke both throttle return springs, so that made for a long day. Everytime you mashed the gas, it would go all the way to the floor. You’d have to pick it up with your foot and when you’d try to roll back into it, it would just fall to the floor. That long green run made it really, really tough. Once we got it fixed, we were running really good lap times, but we dug ourselves such a big hole that it was a pretty miserable day overall.”