CARL EDWARDS – No. 60 Ortho Ford Fusion (Finished 2^nd) – It was a lot of fun. We needed a couple of more lap. We got off sequence; we had those tires. I just appreciate all of the fans coming out here and supporting our sport. We have the greatest fans in the world. And I’m just proud of Ford Motor Company. I’ve got to say congrats to Kyle and those guys. We finished second to them in the championship, but those guys have really been a classic deal. I was just telling them that I didn’t have the heart to run into them. It was the only way I was going to get by them by the finish line. I dove down there and got a good look at it, and I was thinking right about here, ‘No, I better not.’ But that’s racing. We had a good time racing with these guys and I’m pretty excited to go to Daytona. I hope to see some of these fans at Daytona in February.” CAN YOU DESCRIBE IN THE CLOSING LAPS STAYING OUT AND NOT GETTING TIRES WHEN MOST DID, AND THEN COMING IN LATER WHEN THE LEADERS DIDN’T? “Well, Mike thought we were fast enough to race with these guys with the tires we had, but we weren’t, but we had a set of tires left, and it ended up working out. You know, we almost got to him. I just raced a little too hard and burned up my tires and didn’t have enough for him there at the end. I’ve just got to thank Ortho; they built a better mousetrap. It’s a great deal. And our car is a good mousetrap, we just didn’t get it right tonight. We’ll get ’em next year.” YOU’VE TALKED ABOUT HOW DIFFICULT IT’S BEEN ON THE CUP SIDE, BUT THE NATIONWIDE SERIES HAS BEEN AN UPLIFTING PART TO THE SEASON. “Yeah. People ask me why I run the Nationwide Series, and yesterday in practice I was thinking, ‘This is why.’ I’m having a blast, we’ve got fast race cars, I’m proud to represent Ford in the series. We didn’t win the championship, but ran second to a team that’s really unparalleled in their performance. So, I’m ready to go next year. We’ve got some great sponsors. We’ll go at it again.” ON FINISHING SECOND. “This was a good run. I would’ve loved to won tonight, but this is good. We performed the best we could.”

 

JASON KELLER – No. 27 USPS Ford Fusion (Finished 13^th) – “It was a good run for us on this mile-and-a-half track. We get close to that top-10 and that’s good for us. I felt like our car was a little better than that. We just couldn’t get track position. It was a consistent night, not a great not, but it was just consistent. I thought we had put ourselves out of sequence with the leaders to capitalize, if the caution would have fell our way. We tried everything we could to put ourselves in a position to get a top-10 finish but we were just a little short.”

 

MATT KENSETH – No. 16 CitiFinancial Ford Fusion (Finished 10^th) – “We stayed out when everybody else pitted and that got us behind. We had a good car on the long runs, but no matter what we did for tires in a 10-lap shootout we weren’t gonna look very pretty. So it was really good on long runs, but we couldn’t get going on the start for some reason. We just had a real tough night on pit road. We didn’t get tires when everybody else did, and then we got tires and came out last on that pit stop – 15^th – and with 10 laps to go it was just hard to go anywhere.”

 

PAUL MENARD – No. 98 Richmond/Menards Ford Fusion (Finished 14^th) – “I learned a lot for tomorrow night. The track kind of changed and didn’t do what I thought it would do as far as changing the balance, so I definitely learned some things for tomorrow night and we can adjust accordingly. We did the best we could do as far as strategy goes. You’re kind of damned if you do and damned if you don’t, so I think we played that the best we could. We just got behind on some adjustments and over-adjusted one time.”

 

CARL EDWARDS PRESS CONFERENCE – “It was close. We tried really hard. I drove my heart out there at the end and I wasn’t gonna be able to catch him and pass him the right way, so we got second. My guys worked really hard and the best thing is we had a good race car for the first time at a mile-and-a-half in a long time. We had a car that could win and that was a lot of fun.  There was one point in the race when me and Kyle and Joey and Jeff were racing really hard. It was really fun. That was really fun to be a part of, so I had a good time.” CAN YOU TALK ABOUT THE LAST LAP? “I was closing at a rate that was gonna take about three more laps to really get him, so there in the last corner I just dove her way down in there just to see what that looked like and how close I could get. I couldn’t get by him without probably touching him. I just didn’t have enough time, but I thought it was pretty fun trying to come – we restarted eighth and got to race a little bit and made a good charge.” WHAT ABOUT THE DECISION TO PIT? “It was the decision not to pit the first time that really put us in that position. Mike Kelley thought we were going to be faster, so he decided not to pit. Everybody else pitted, but the good thing we had there was we were the only ones with a set of tires left. So I think if it would have gone green we would have finished third, and as it was we got to put tires on and finished second. If we would have pitted with these guys the first time, I don’t know, we maybe would have been able to win, but I still thought we had a shot at winning. I thought we were gonna win the race on that last restart, but the 18 car was just too fast on those tires.” ON KYLE WINNING THE TITLE. “My championship means a lot to me. At the time I was so caught up in it that I don’t think I valued it as much as I do now, and I have for the last year-and-a-half or so. This race this year, it’s like Jeff says, those guys really earned it. They performed well. They did not back into this. They overcame a lot at the beginning of the year and I hope they enjoy it. It was enjoyable racing with them and the highlight of it for me was all their crew guys thanking me after the race. I thought that was pretty nice of them. They didn’t have to do that. It’s a hard-working group of guys that deserve that championship, that’s for sure.” ON THE KESELOWSKI-HAMLIN INCIDENT. “There are two sides to every story and sometimes things get painted a certain way and you never really know. I can’t take sides on that. I’ve been wrecked by Brad, but we worked that out. I think there really is two sides to everything and you never really know who is in the right.” HOW DO YOU CATCH UP TO JGR? “Just recently I felt like our engines were comparable to theirs because that’s been something that they’ve done really well at. Our guys have been working hard, though, and we’re closing that gap. I was talking with some other drivers even tonight about how well their cars handle. They seem to build really nice stuff and they put a lot of effort into it, and I think it’s the whole package. Initially, for a long time I thought it was just the engine and I’m starting to realize that our cars could be better and that car tonight was a good example of a car that was better. I was more competitive with them and I feel like we’re catching them, but from the drivers to the tire pressures they seem to have things figured out over there.”