GREG BIFFLE – No. 16 3M Ford Fusion (finished 3rd) – ON PIT STOP DECISIONS. “Whether to take two tires or four tires on that one stop. We lost just a little bit of track position on that. We gained some of it back. And then, unfortunately, we had some lug nuts fall off or something on a pit stop, and lost a lot of track position. It’s really, really hard here to fight your way back on track position. It’s difficult when start 12th or 13th, because you really start 26th, because you’ve got all the cars on the inside, a lap down, as well. It just takes time to get back up through all that traffic. We worked our way all the way back to fourth, third – 15 more laps, would’ve passed the 48 and then a little while longer we could’ve gotten then 24. But, I just ran out of time, lost track position, and weren’t able to capitalize on it. Had the fastest car today, it looked like, and not always does the fastest car win.”

 

THERE WERE LONG GREEN-FLAG RUNS WITH A NUMBER OF GREEN-FLAG PIT STOPS. HOW DID THAT FACTOR INTO YOUR RUN OVER THE COURSE OF THE DAY? DID THAT CAUSE YOU TO ALTER YOUR STRATEGY? “You know, we didn’t. we just kind of kept chipping away at it. The car kept getting better and better, we kept working on it. I kind of liked those long green runs. The car kind of stayed handling well and going pretty fast. I just had it set perfect today. I really concentrated in practice on Saturday, and our car was pretty close, and so I was able to dial it in on something that I really liked, and just wished I would’ve had the opportunity to race with the 24 for the win. I was hoping for caution in the last 10 just to bunch that field up and see what happened. It would’ve been a great shootout.”

 

ARE THERE SUCH THINGS AS MORAL VICTORIES? IS THAT WHAT YOU’LL TAKE OUT OF HERE? “Yeah, it is. The car just handled extremely well today. I wasn’t probably as good in traffic as I needed to be – that’s probably one thing that I needed a little bit of work on. I could get by lapped cars pretty quick; it looked like other guys had trouble. But, when it was side by side and kind of jumbled up a little bit, I had just a little bit of trouble. Yeah. In California we had an extremely fast car, I stopped on the air hose and screwed that up. Here today we had some lug nuts pop off, weren’t glued up properly or something – I don’t know what happened.”

 

YOUR PIT CREW WAS ON TODAY, BUT THAT WASN’T THE CASE LAST WEEK, AND YOUR TEAMMATE HAD TROUBLE AT THE END. WHAT DOES THE ORGANIZATION HAVE TO DO TO GET THE PIT STOPS BACK GOING IN THE RIGHT DIRECTION? “That’s a good question. There’s two things about it. The guys did a good job in the pits today, stops were really good, it’s just that the two stops the lug nuts fell off. It’s kind of contradictory, but the other stops were very good. The other pit stops were excellent. And it’s not really the jackman or the tire changer or the tire hanger, it’s not actually the guys doing the physical work, the seven guys doing the work over the wall, it’s the prep of the guys that glued it up. It either got glued up too early, too late. There’s some technique to it that I know nothing about. It’s hard. The guys get down because the fingers get pointed to them for a slow stop or the lug nuts falling off, and ultimately it’s really not their fault, the seven guys that are over the wall. It is our fault we didn’t have it glued properly. It’s hard to point the finger. I stopped on the air hose at California and we had some lug nuts fall of today, so just go on.”

 

BEFORE THIS SEASON, SOME PEOPLE WERE SAYING THAT JEFF GORDON WAS PAST HIS PRIME. WAS THERE ANY DOUBT IN YOUR MIND THAT HE NO LONGER WAS GOING TO COMPETE FOR CHAMPIONSHIPS? “No, there was never a doubt in my mind whether Jeff Gordon would win races again. The guy’s a phenomenal driver, he knows what he needs his car to feel like, and there’s about 10 of us that do, and it’s just a matter of getting it right. We don’t always know what to do to the car, but we know what we want it to feel like and do, we’ve just got to figure out a way between us and the crew chief and the engineer to get that accomplished. That’s a tough deal to get it right. We got it right today. Whether we’ll get it right at Phoenix, I don’t know. But, I’m pretty happy that we had it right today.”

 

YOU AND CARL EDWARDS BOTH HAVE HAD PROBLEMS WITH LUG NUTS FALLING OFF. WHEN THAT HAPPENS MORE THAN ONCE, IS THAT BAD LUCK OR IS THERE SOMETHING THAT’S NOT GETTING DONE? “No, it’s not bad luck. You know, when you leave a wheel loose or you stop on the air hose or you do something else, that’s not bad luck, that’s school of hard knocks, that’s making a mistake. That’s the way it is. We’re all human and we all make mistakes. You make your own luck a lot of times. You get a flat tire, that’s bad luck. When you have problems – when you slide over the line or it falls off the jack or you have something else – that’s not necessarily bad luck. It’s something wasn’t done normally, it boils down to something wasn’t done right or a guy made a mistake or I made a mistake. I say you make your own luck, and things happen.

 

MATT KENSETH – No. 17 DeWalt Ford Fusion (finished 5th) – “The result was good. I didn’t think were very good at all yesterday in practice. We qualified really well, but we just didn’t practice very well, so Drew [Blickensderfer, crew chief] and Chip [Bolin] and these guys did a good job of not giving up and try to salvage something out of nothing. It was just a different kind of racing today. You can look at the scoreboard and after everybody’s done pitting, whoever re-starts in the lead is probably going to win. You just can’t pass in these cars like you could, and it’s all about having perfect pit stops, and qualifying and doing the right things for track position. We just got ourselves behind.”

 

WHAT IS IT ABOUT THE DIFFICULTY IN PASSING HERE? “It’s most places. This car is just pretty tight, you know, and it really likes clean air. There were some guys that could do it. Greg [Biffle] really drove through there good today, and [Tony] Stewart in the beginning drove all the way up through there, but it’s pretty important to be positioned in the front.”

 

EARLIER THIS WEEKEND YOU TALKED ABOUT THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN PERFORMANCE AND RESULTS. SO, IS THIS CONSIDERED A GOOD DAY? “This is a great day. We’ve just been pathetic since California, I think our average finish was 27th, so to come here and get a top-five and get a little momentum going, that’s what we needed to do.”

 

CAN YOU TALK ABOUT FIGHTING BACK AFTER SOME PROBLEMS IN THE PITS? “You can’t really do much about it. We just got to the back and it was extremely tough to pass, and we just kind of stuck back there racing with them guys. And then the last stop we had a good pit stop and the guys redeemed themselves good and picked me up three or four spots – I think got us up to sixth – and we were able to move our way to fifth. That was about the best I could do.”

 

CARL EDWARDS – No. 99 Aflac Ford Fusion (finished 10th) – “We missed the set-up, so from the beginning of the race we were struggling to get the balance, and then Bob [Osborne, crew chief] got it balanced, we had that one good pit stop, passed Jeff for the lead, and I thought, ‘If we can have just one more, we’ll be all right,’ and then we went in leading and came out 11th, and that’s what cost us the race. My guys are trying real hard, we’re all in this together, but we can do a better job than that and I’m sure we will.”

 

ON HIS UNDERSTANDING REACTION TO THE DIFFICULT FINAL PIT STOP. “The way this works is that I don’t anybody to tell me when I’ve done something wrong, they don’t need anybody to tell them. Those guys want to win this race just as bad as I do. We’re all in this together. They don’t yell at me when I hit the wall, so it’s not my position to be mad at them, we just have to do whatever we can to fix it. Hopefully, that’s good enough. I think we’ll get better. They can do it, they had one pit stop, we passed a ton of people and put us in a position to get the lead. I know they can do it, we just got to figure out how to do it every time.”

 

DAVID RAGAN – No. 6 UPS Ford Fusion (finished 37th) – “I feel like we had a top-five car. Our UPS team did a great job on pit road today. It’s just, you know, something that was out of our control is what put us out. We got some trash on the grill and tried to get it off on the track before our last resort, which was pitting. We pitted and lost a lot of water and then ultimately blew up. Just by chance, something like a hotdog wrapper cost us a top-five finish. But we had good speed and a good car. It’s something to build on, but absolutely not the finish that we needed. Just a disappointing finish to a really good day.”

 

JAMIE McMURRAY – No. 26 Crown Royal Ford Fusion (finished 38th) – ANY INDICATIONS THAT THERE WERE GOING TO PROBLEMS? “No. We made our green-flag pit stop and I got about halfway down the backstretch and it popped out of gear and then it wouldn’t go into any gear.”