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McMurray Posts Career-Best Richmond Finish

JAMIE MCMURRAY – No. 26 Crown Royal Ford Fusion (Finished 7th) – “They made really good adjustments to our car and we finally got back on the lead lap.  We got caught up in the wreck on the frontstretch and just barely got beat by the first car, and then I got caught speeding on pit road, so I had to go to the back. It was a really long day, but they did a good job and we had some really good pit stops when we were a lap down that put us in a position to be able to get the lucky dog.” YOU GOT THE FREE PASS WITH JUST OVER 100 TO GO, BUT WAS THE KEY STAYING OUT FOR TRACK POSITION AFTER THAT? “Yeah. I was really preaching that we needed tires. I was like, ‘I don’t think we can hang on,’ but when you’re on the pit box and you’re watching lap times, you see more than what just the drivers do, so Donnie did a good job making us stay out and we had a good enough car to hang on.” WAS IT EASIER TO STAY UP FRONT WITH ALL OF THOSE RESTARTS AND NOT BEING MIRED IN TRAFFIC? “Yeah, but when we were up in second or third we weren’t as good as we were at the end. At the end our car was just the best it was, but, certainly, clean air is just huge.” DID ALL OF THE CAUTIONS LATE PLAY INTO YOUR STRATEGY? “I joked around and said, ‘I don’t want to have bad luck. I want to have some great luck,’ and tonight we got to have some great luck with the way the cautions fell. It couldn’t have went much better for us.”

 
DAVID RAGAN – No. 6 UPS Freight Ford Fusion (Finished 23rd) – “For a while there at the end I thought we were gonna sneak a top-10 out of it. I’m real proud of our UPS team. We made good adjustments on the car, but track position was just so important. If we had a good pit stop and we were on the right cycle as far as pitting, we were a top-10 car, but if we had a goof on pit road or if I made a mistake on a restart and we lost a few spots, we just couldn’t seem to go anywhere. It was typical short track racing. It’s all about track position and that’s ultimately what won the race for everyone and that’s what cost us a top-10 finish. I feel like we had a car with good enough speed. Maybe if it was a 500-lap race we could have got back to the front, but when those guys all pitted for tires behind us and we were right there on the tail end of guys with no tires, we just didn’t have the speed to stay with those guys with fresh tires.”