MATT KENSETH – No. 17 DeWalt Ford Fusion – YOUR THOUGHTS ON THE LAST FEW RACES GOING INTO THIS WEEKEND? “Not too good. We’ve not had a very good last three races. It’s been pretty challenging to say the least, so I always feel like this is one of my worst places. I seem to struggle here, but as bad as things were last week, I don’t think they can be much worse. So I’m looking forward to getting on the track today and forgetting about last week.” 

 

CAN YOU TALK ABOUT THE BUSCH BROTHERS STREAK AND IF IT CAN LAST? ARE THERE PERSONALITIES A GOOD THING FOR NASCAR? “The last part I have no idea whether it’s a good thing for NASCAR, but I think Kyle proved last year he can win at any race track every week, and I think everybody has known Kurt can do it. When Kurt was at Roush and was in real good stuff with Jimmy Fennig, their personalities worked so well together. That was kind of the magic, in my opinion, and he’s taken awhile to get that back going to Penske, but, certainly, if he can get that relationship going with Pat and they can get their stuff running good enough, Kurt is more than capable of winning every week, too. So they certainly could keep winning.” 

 

HOW MUCH DO YOU WATCH THE WEATHER LIKE THIS WEEKEND? AND YOUR THOUGHTS ON COMING TO A SHORT TRACK? “You pay attention to the weather somewhat, but there’s really nothing you can do to change your plan. The only thing that would change it a little bit was if you had a pretty strong feeling it was gonna rain tomorrow and not today, then maybe you’d work on race setup longer today instead of working on qualifying, but, other than that, you’re not really gonna do anything about it on Friday and Saturday. If you run if you run, if you don’t, you don’t. As far as being at a short track, I like coming to short tracks. This hasn’t necessarily been one of the very good ones for me. It’s been frustrating, but pretty much everybody grew up racing at short tracks. Everybody had to start at a smaller track before they moved up here.   There are a few people the just jumped right into it, but most people have short track backgrounds, so it’s not like you really have a big advantage or something different really going on, but it’s always fun to come back to little tracks.” 

 

HAS THERE BEEN A POINT WHERE YOU FEEL YOU’RE GETTING IT AT THIS TRACK OR ARE YOU STILL WAITING FOR THE SWITCH TO TURN ON? “I don’t know. I think there’s certainly some truth to being better at some places than others. Some people just come here and run really good and other people don’t, but it’s also about getting your car to run fast. We’ve run good here before and we’ve had some good finishes here before, but we’ve run bad here before. For me, it’s just a particularly frustrating race track. It’s hard to be patient. It seems like you’re always getting run into or you’re running into somebody, or there’s not enough room. So it’s just kind of a frustrating place. I think my biggest problem probably all the time here has been giving the right information to the crew. I feel like if my car is as fast as the 48, I can drive with him here. It’s not really a very tricky place to get around. It’s pretty basic. I mean, there’s a curb so you can’t go any lower and it’s pretty slow. It’s not that hard of a track to drive around, but it’s really hard for me to dissect the car with what it’s doing and what I need to change to make it feel like I want. I seem to have a hard time that if I go out there and it’s not just how I want, getting it how I want it and giving Drew and Chip and the guys the right information to give me what I need to run good here.”

 

LOOKING AHEAD TO TALLADEGA. IS IT A PROBLEM THAT DAYTONA HAS YOUR CAR? “No, not anymore. I think with these cars they’re so similar and so close to the same that it’s not like the old days with speedway cars when you would spend so much time in a wind tunnel with them testing and fine-tuning them and doing all that stuff. They’re all really close to the same, so I’m not really worried about losing that car at all.” 

 

WHAT’S YOUR TAKE ON THE NO-TESTING POLICY AFTER FIVE RACES? IS IT A GOOD IDEA OR A BAD IDEA? “It depends on the week for me. I think though, seriously, overall, I think it’s a great idea. I think with the amount of practice we have here with this car that’s been the same rules for two years – a full year-and-a-half of racing going on the third season without moving splitter heights or changing any of the aerodynamic balances – none of that stuff we mess with anymore, so I don’t think it’s a big deal. We’ve all been working with the car and everybody has a basic idea of where to start and I think the practice at the track is really adequate. It’s not like the old car where you could put two totally different bodies on the cars and go to the track and test and say, ‘Oh yeah, this one drives way better than that one.’  I mean, those days are kind of gone, unless they ever open the rulebook back up again. All of the cars are pretty close to the same, so you just bring a car to the track and start working on it.” 

 

ALL OF THE FORDS STRUGGLED AT BRISTOL? WAS THAT A BRISTOL PROBLEM OR SHORT TRACK IN GENERAL PROBLEM? “Since we’re at Martinsville, I hope it was a Bristol problem. Really, it was our problem. All of the Ford teams are really kind of the same. We all use the same engineering and the same engineering and the same information and all the same stuff to get to a point, so our cars were all somewhat similar and it seems like we all kind of missed it, although if Greg wouldn’t have blown up, he was running all right and Greg probably would have ran in the top five. But, other than that, we all seemed like we were off. I don’t know where we would have finished. I hit the wall early, which messed up my front end a little bit, so I took myself out of the race. I don’t really know how we would have ran, but it did seem like we struggled more than normal there.” 

 

IN 2010 THE SUPER BOWL WILL BE THE SAME SUNDAY AS QUALIFYING AND THE BUD SHOOTOUT WILL BE OVERSHADOWED BY THE PREVIEW OF NFL STUFF. WHAT CAN NASCAR DO TO CREATE ITS OWN BUZZ? “I don’t know. I didn’t know they moved it, so I have no idea. I’d have to give that one some thought. I don’t know. We all try to help out wherever we can, but I don’t really sit and spend a lot of time about how to promote a race. I spend more time about trying to get better than running 34^th like we did last week. That consumes pretty much all of my time and all of my thoughts. I haven’t really thought about that. I didn’t even know they moved the game. I think the 500 this year was sold out again, or close to it, so that was good. The only thing that I can’t really control, either, but I think the product on the track is one of the most important things – to make sure that the rules are such so we put on a good race.”

 

 

CARL EDWARDS – No. 99 Aflac Ford Fusion – HOW IS YOUR CAR? “We spent most of practice working on race trim. We’re watching that radar thinking that it might rain qualifying out. I haven’t really seen what’s supposed to happen tomorrow, but they say it could rain all of practice out, so we wanted to make sure our race setup is good. I’m glad we worked on it because it’s not that great and we need all the time we can get.” 

 

WHAT DO YOU THINK ABOUT THE ALL-STAR 10-LAP SHOOTOUT FORMAT? “A 10-lap shootout for about a million bucks, that should be really interesting. I know I’m gonna drive like hell. That’ll be fun. I think the fans want to see that. I think a shootout like that will be really neat. Hopefully, it’s exciting for the fans. That’s what that race is about. It’s a fun event. It’s no points, a million dollars, and a lot of excitement.” 

 

IT WILL BE THE FIRST TIME TO DO THAT WITH THE NEW ASPHALT. “Yeah, hopefully that asphalt has aged a little bit and hopefully it’s getting better and better. Nobody wants to see a breakaway, where the guy in the lead takes off and I think the older that asphalt gets and the better we set these cars up, the better the racing will be there. Let’s hope it’s a track where you can run right by the fence or right down by the bottom and get some good action.” 

 

ARE YOU TRYING SOMETHING WITH YOUR SHORT TRACK PROGRAM THAT IS DIFFERENT? “As a group, Roush Fenway had a terrible week last week performance-wise. Greg Biffle was pretty good, but, other than that, I thought we were all just mediocre.  I don’t know exactly how different this car is from the last time we ran here. The last time we came here we were real fast. It was a second or third-place car all day and finished third, so, hopefully, we’re as good as we are, but we haven’t specifically gone off on a path saying, ‘Hey, we’re gonna try all this new stuff.’ We’re just trying to make sure we’ve got this setup so at the end of the year when it really matters, we’re fast at these places.” 

 

YOU SAID LAST WEEK YOUR MAIN GOALS WERE WINNING THE TITLE, WINNING AT MARTINSVILLE AND WINNING A ROAD COURSE. CAN YOU EXPAND ON THAT? “The three goals for me this season, I mean, this season would be the perfect season if we won two races and a championship and those two races would be a Martinsville race and a road course. I think for me as a driver those have been the two most difficult things to master. I’m far from being a master here at Martinsville and I feel like I’m getting better at the road courses. The wins at those two places would mean the world to me.” 

 

WHAT MAKES THIS PLACE SO DIFFCULT? “What makes this place so difficult is it’s the small things, the very tiny things that make you faster. When you say, ‘It’s loose in the center,’ it’s only loose for a second-and-a-half or seven-tenths of a second. Where if you go to a place like Atlanta or California, they’re a lot simpler to diagnose your car because you’re sliding through two or three seconds of it being loose or tight and it’s really easy to relay that to your crew chief, so here it’s very precise – everything happens about twice as fast as it normally does and that’s what makes it tough for me.” 

 

IT’S JUST REPETITION COMING HERE? “Yeah and then getting into a groove. Bobby Hamilton gave me some great advice here about just trying to get into a groove and using all your senses to not make mistakes and then relax. I’ve been working on that everytime I come back.” 

 

YOU’VE GOTTEN PROGRESSIVELY BETTER HERE THE LAST FOUR RACES. WHY? “I felt like I won the last race. Jimmie won and I think Dale Jr. was second and we were third. I was so pumped about that. That felt really, really good. It felt like a victory, so the things I’ve been working on are just the little things. I always tell everybody that it appears like this is what I grew up on, this size race track, but a dirt track this size drives like a mile-and-a-half pavement track. Everything happens slow. There’s a lot of moving around in the corner. This short track pavement racing is something that I hadn’t really done until I got here to this level of the sport, so it’s been really difficult to master.” 

 

ARE YOU AWARE OF THE NFL POSSIBLY BUMPING UP AGAINST THE DAYTONA 500 WITH THE SUPER BOWL? “I don’t know if they would do that, would they? That would probably split the marketing dollars, plus I like watching the Super Bowl so I hope they don’t do that. We’ll see. I doubt that would happen.” 

 

ARE YOU INTO MARCH MADNESS AND YOUR MISSOURI TIGERS? “I let my Dish Network card expire. They sent me a new one and I haven’t put it in yet, so my dish wouldn’t work last night. I spent forever on my phone trying to find the game. I was calling my wife and she was giving me updates and although I feel asleep, they were ahead by 13 or 14. So we play Uconn and that’s crazy. To be Big 12 Champions, if we made it to the Final Four it would be crazy. I can’t even imagine what it would be like if we were national champions. I’ve followed it more this year than ever. I got to go to the MU-KU game that was at MU and that was so cool. It was a last-second shot. The place went insane. That’s a huge rivalry. Clint (Bowyer) wouldn’t text me back after that, but, other than that, everything was good.” 

 

DID YOU FILL OUT A BRACKET? “I didn’t fill out a bracket. My wife filled one out. She had a big group and she’s like 26^th right now, so she’s pretty proud of that. I’ll fill one out next year. It’s fun. I never watched any sports. I was always racing. I didn’t pay attention to anything and now I can watch it and I understand more of what they’re going through, I understand the focus it takes, so it’s more fun to watch.” 

 

ARE YOU GOING TO GIVE BURTON A HARD TIME WITH DUKE GOING OUT? “I’m a Mizzou fan. I barely know what they’re up to. I don’t even know where Duke is at.”

 

 

JAMIE MCMURRAY – No. 26 Crown Royal Ford Fusion – “I went to the Walter Reed Hospital in January. Crown Royal and Diageo actually invited me to go to President Obama’s inauguration and before we went to the inauguration on Sunday we went up and Crown Royal took the showcar over to the Walter Reed Hospital and we got to go through the hospital. If you guys have ever been there, it’s very touching and it’s remarkable when you talk to the injured troops, you really don’t know how what to say when you first walk into the room. I was just amazed how every one of them would tell you that they want to get better so that they can go back and go overseas and fight for our country. When that was over, Christy and I were on our way home and I was talking to my agent and we talked that we would like to do something to give back to everyone. There are a lot of drivers that do things and we just felt like it would be a really good idea to get the foundation involved in this and to try and give back. So we kind of went over different ideas of what we could do and then when we made the announcement for the Your Name Here 400 in Daytona, I met Russ and it was the same thing over again. As soon as they told Russ that he would have the race named after him, which is a once in a lifetime opportunity, he immediately wanted to figure out a way to give back to all the other soldiers. It reminded me of meeting everyone at Walter Reed, so I met with Crown Royal and what we decided to do to try to give back is we’re gonna give away 80 tickets at each race to soldiers and we’re gonna give a total of 400 tickets away, so ti’s gonna be 80 tickets for each race leading up to the race at Richmond. On top of that, we’re going to have someone from a local unit serve as an honorary member of the Crown Royal 26 pit crew. This weekend it is Sgt. Ashley Ayers is gonna join us in the pits and hopefully see our car go to Victory Lane. This is just a way for the Jamie McMurray Foundation to give back to our troops. Again, it’s hard for me to explain how inspiring it is to meet the troops and then when I met Russ, he had the same initial reaction and it just made you want to do something nice. So I have to thank Crown Royal, obviously, and the foundation for doing all of this.”

 

RUSS FRIEDMAN – “First off, I have to thank Crown Royal and Jamie. I can’t thank them enough and tell them how much this all means to me, getting my message out there that this is all about the troops. When I entered the contest, it took me a couple of days to be OK with it because I wouldn’t be OK with it if I won for myself receiving the purple hearts, so I kind of said, ‘If I do it can I do it about the other men and women?’ And that sat right with me, so I went ahead and did it. When you’re over there, morale is everything. I can’t tell you how important that is. I’m sure it’s kind of similar with the drivers if you’re having a low couple of weeks, you’ve got to get your spirits up. Crown Royal, Jamie and everything they’ve been doing really helps the men and women overseas. They feel inspired because they know we’re all behind them and that’s what this is all about for me – making sure they know that we are still behind them. They’ve gone above and beyond my expectations. I can imagine what’s ahead for everything they’ve done. In addition to the tickets that Jamie mentioned, they’re gonna be giving to local men and women from other local units, as you see behind me we have some stuff here. We have a hood with the race replica on it, ‘Crown Royal Presents the Russ Friedman 400,’ and we also have this gigantic card over here. So what’s gonna happen is the drivers at Richmond are gonna be able to sign this hood and it’s gonna be sent overseas to the troops to boost their morale, and this card over here is gonna be opened at every track from Martinsville to Richmond and fans, media, everybody is gonna be able to sign it and maybe say a little something just to say thank you, and then we’re gonna ship that all overseas to them. I know their efforts won’t go unnoticed, what Jamie and Crown Royal are doing, because once this gets over there, it’s definitely gonna be a big boost in morale. I can’t thank them enough.”

 

JAMIE MCMURRAY CONTINUED --HOW MANY TROOPS DID YOU SEE AT THE HOSPITAL? “I think we met a total of about 12. Some of them were not in their rooms when we would show up. It wasn’t a tremendous amount, but we spent maybe 15-20 minutes with each of them. Most of them had their families there and it’s amazing when you go there how all of them are fans of NASCAR. There were lots of racing questions.”