CARL EDWARDS – No. 99 Aflac Ford Fusion – RAIN DELAY COMMENTS DURING RED FLAG AFTER 73 LAPS. WHAT ARE THEY TELLING YOU GUYS? “I’m here for the duration. I don’t care when we race. It’s really up to NASCAR and the fans and what’s best for the show. I’m fine with racing at four in the morning or any day of the week, so we’re here and we’re gonna race no matter what they say.” IS THE MAGIC NUMBER 201 RIGHT NOW FOR YOU GUYS? “Yeah, lap 201 is looking like where you want to be leading right now because you just don’t know what’s gonna happen. We’re a day behind the scheduled event and I don’t know if we get to 201 and it rains, I don’t know how long they’ll go to try and get the rest of the laps in, so that’s a good question.” DOES THIS CHANGE ANYTHING YOU DO? “I’m gonna go eat something (joking). Really, I don’t know. As a fan, just sitting and watching this is frustrating and irritating, so as a competitor, I have to be real careful not to get frustrated. The guys are doing a great job out there on the race track. All of the drivers are taking it easy. The crazy thing is that you drive down in turn one and for about 10 or 15 of our laps so far it’s been sprinkling a little bit so you drive down there and think, ‘I hope it’s not raining real hard when I get there,’ so that’s a little nerve-racking.” DRIVERS ARE COMPLAINING ABOUT GETTING THE CAR TO TURN. IS THAT A PROBLEM FOR YOU? “I just can’t get mine to handle well overall. It’s not just one thing. I was out there driving around thinking about it and a year ago it seemed like there was a little more disparity and a little more variation between the cars. There were slow cars and fast cars and now it’s like a slot car race. You’re out there and you just can’t slip up and I do believe part of that is the race track and another part of that is the race track is green. I think once it rubbers in a little bit, there will be more racing like we saw at the end of the All-Star Race, but for right now it is follow the leader, do not mess up, and keep your position.” HOW DO YOU KEEP YOUR FOCUS? “It’s tough to sit around and wait for it to dry. It’s not tough to do that, it’s tough to not sit there and think about racing the whole time and wear yourself out, so I try to turn it off and then turn it back on right when I get in the car.” WAS GETTING THE CAR TO TURN AND PASSING A PROBLEM IN THE ALL-STAR RACE OR DO YOU THINK BECAUSE THE SUN IS UP AND THE CARS ARE SET FOR NIGHT. “I thought at the beginning of the All-Star Race, ‘Boy, this is not gonna be a good show,’ and then it proved me wrong because by the end of the race they were three-wide racing all over the race track. So I think it’s a function of the way the pavement and the tire interact and I think as we get rubber down that will change. That’s my guess.”
DRIVER QUOTES DURING RED FLAG AFTER 227 LAPS
DAVID RAGAN – No. 6 UPS Ford Fusion (Finished 24th) – DOES IT FEEL LIKE ALL YOU’VE DONE IS SIT IN A RACE CAR THIS WEEKEND? “Yeah, absolutely. We sat around the Lowe’s Motor Speedway last night in a couple hours of traffic and got back up and it seems like that’s what we’ve been doing all morning. Our UPS Ford is decent at times. I think we’ve just been chasing the track more than anything. It seems like once we get it close to being dialed in another rain shower comes and we kind of have to start over again. I would like to at least get another 50 or 100 laps in. I think we’ve got a better car than where we’re sitting now and I know all the fans out there want to see some more racing, so maybe another quick run here and hopefully we can have some excitement in the Coca-Cola 600 under green instead of yellow.” IS THIS ONE OF THE MORE FRUSTRATING WEEKENDS? “Indy was pretty frustrating. Michigan wasn’t bad because you just sat around until it stopped and then you went green and it was all right, but running the 30 or 40 laps and then having another rain shower you just can’t plan anything, and once you get a little momentum, it seems like you’ve got to start all over again. So, this is up there with Michigan and Indy. It’s something different, but I just like the good old normal races.”
GREG BIFFLE – No. 16 American Red Cross Ford Fusion (Finished 20th) – “I don’t know where to start. We’ve been tight and loose all day. I’m a little bit loose in the corner and then tight in the center and loose off. We can’t get the balance right. We keep working on the Red Cross car, and I think we’re gonna make bigger swings at it here as we’re getting closer to the end as long as this isn’t the end.”
MATT KENSETH – No. 17 R&L Carriers Ford Fusion (Finished 10th) – IT LOOKS LIKE YOU’RE GOOD ON SHORT RUNS AND THEN FALL BACK ON LONGER ONES. “No, it’s been both ways. Twice we had it too tight, where we were real fast on the short run, and then it just went tight and was junk at the end of the run. The rest of the time we’ve really been too loose and not that good on a short run, but real good at the end of a run. The track tightened up on us a little bit and then we ran all of those caution laps on that last longer run that we had. We weren’t really quite adjusted for that and just got too tight on that last run and lost some of our track position. Hopefully, they’ll restart it. If they restart it, I think we’ve got a car that can run in the top five. We just have to get it restarted and do the right things. Right there, I guess we could have took two and gambled to get some track position, but we’re thinking it’s gonna quit raining. It’s been off and on all day.” A FRUSTRATING WEEKEND? “Yes and no. It could be worse. I mean, we couldn’t be halfway yet and we’d have to come back tomorrow. It could be like Michigan that year we raced on Wednesday or whatever it was, so it could be worse, but, yeah, whenever the weather interferes it’s always a little bit frustrating, but we really can’t do anything about the weather.
BILL ELLIOTT – No. 21 Motorcraft Ford Fusion (Finished 15th) – SAFE TO SAY YOU’LL ALWAYS REMEMBER YOUR 800TH START? “I told them it sure was nice of them to throw in a few ‘old man cautions’ in there with those red flags to let me get out and rest a few minutes (laughing).” HOW HAS YOUR DAY BEEN? “I tell you what, that thing is good on a long run. If we would have run all day, I feel like we would have been good. We might not have won the race, but we’re competitive. It doesn’t start out very good, but I’m telling you, once we get about 25 laps on the tires, that thing comes on.”
JAMIE MCMURRAY – No. 26 Irwin Ford Fusion (Finished 21st) – “I don’t have any front brakes. It’ll run like 10 laps and then it seems like they go away, so that’s not a good thing to have.” A FRUSTRATING WEEKEND? “Yeah, I guess, but it’s not that big of a deal. It’s not a lot of fun to get in and out of the car like that. If you have to do it once or twice, that’s OK, but it’s like we’re running for 30 minutes and then stop. I’m full right now. I don’t think I could eat anything else because I got so paranoid earlier that I kept eating.” BRAKES ARE AN ISSUE? “Our car doesn’t drive that bad, it’s just that the brakes are terrible. It’s hard to make your car drive well when you’ve only got 50 percent of what you need.”
CARL EDWARDS – No. 99 Aflac Ford Fusion (Finished 4th) – “I think Bob made the right call here. We don’t know what’s gonna happen. If we finish fourth, that’s a good run for us. That’s probably as best we deserve to be with the car we’ve got and that’s progress. I’ve been through this before. They could fire this thing off and we could have a problem and finish 40th, so we’re not counting anything right now. We’re gonna focus.” YOU’VE BEEN ABLE TO KEEP YOUR TRACK POSITION ONCE YOU GOT UP FRONT. “We have. The track position is huge right now. We’re not getting the rubber in the track and the lines aren’t changing, so it’s pretty much single-file right now. Track position is huge.”
POST-RACE QUOTES
BOBBY LABONTE – No. 96 Ask.com Ford Fusion (Finished 12th) – “We were better the first part of the race and then we got too tight and kind of backed up. Then they had that caution and we made some changes to it and were getting better, but we just couldn’t get the track position to go with it, so Ben made a good call to get two tires and we picked up six spots from where we were. That’s definitely a better finish than what we ran, but if we could have just got a little bit more earlier, maybe we could have been up there anyway.” HOW DID YOU HANDLE THE WEATHER ISSUES? “I think as a group we practiced pretty good the first practice. The second practice we were getting better, so the whole weekend, as far as the team, I think we were getting stronger, so I feel good about that.”
PAUL MENARD – No. 98 Menards Ford Fusion (Finished 29th) – “When the race started I was real happy with the car and after the first rain delay we came in and adjusted on it. We didn’t really do a whole lot, but the track was a lot different and a lot slicker. I don’t know if it was all the jet dryer fuel or whatever, but it just lost a lot of grip and we were pretty loose from there out. We tried to adjust on it from that point and got it a little bit tighter and we could never get any drive off the corner. The last round of pit stops when we lined up on the inside we made some changes and it took off pretty good, but then it rained again.” A FRUSTRATING WEEKEND WITH THE WEATHER. “Yeah. You like to have a big weather system that you can see that was either gonna come through and make it wet or just go away, but it just kept popping up and you couldn’t predict it. I wish we could have finished the race because I thought we had a pretty good car.”
