Carl Edwards, driver of the No. 99 Aflac Ford Fusion, has had an eventful week after Sunday’s last-lap accident at Talladega Superspeedway. First, he drove the milestone leg of the Ford Fusion Hybrid Challenge on Monday in which he hit the 1,000-mile mark on one tank of fuel. Second, he made the national media rounds that included stops with Larry King and Ellen DeGeneres to talk about Sunday’s accident. He spoke about all of that during his Q&A session Friday afternoon.
CARL EDWARDS – No. 99 Aflac Ford Fusion – IT WAS A BUSY WEEK. “Yeah, we got to do a lot of media this week but not for the reasons I wanted. I’m just happy I didn’t have to use my Aflac insurance and I’m good. I’m glad to be at Richmond.”
HAVE YOU LOOKED AT THE VIDEO AND YOUR CAR SINCE THE WRECK? “I didn’t get a chance to look at the car. They got it all apart before we could really take a better look at it, so when I walked away from it Sunday that’s the last I saw of it.”
WAS A HEADACHE THE ONLY LINGERING EFFECT YOU HAD FROM THE WRECK? “Yeah, no worse than any other wreck that I’ve been in as far as physical pain or anything like that, so everything in the car did its job and I’m real glad for that.”
WAS IT QUIET WHEN YOU GOT AIRBORNE? “Yeah, it was a little strange when I realized I was off the ground. It surprised me when I hit the fence. I didn’t realize I was going towards the fence at that sharp of an angle, so that surprised me when I hit it. That got my attention.”
ANY THOUGHTS ABOUT HOW TO KEEP THE CARS OUT OF THE AIR? “Yesterday, I went down to Daytona with Jack and we talked with a group of folks from NASCAR and it was really a good talk, and I think that we’re all on the same page and that we want to do whatever we can to make these races as safe as they can be for everybody – the fans and the drivers and all that. We’ve come a long ways in the last however many years, but there’s still stuff that can be done. All we did was talk about things that really needed to be done and they’re working on ideas of things to be done, so I’m real excited about seeing what they come up with and, hopefully, it’s stuff that keeps wrecks like that from happening.”
WHAT DID YOU SUGGEST? “I’m not an engineer, so I didn’t tell them, ‘This is how it has to be,’ but the bottom line is unless you take the banking out of that race track or we don’t go race there, you’ve got this big problem trying to keep the cars apart, keep them slow, and that’s the battle. There’s history there and the fans enjoy that, but there’s also the real problem of having a group of cars run like that, so it’s something they’ve worked on for a long time with restrictor plates, and they’ve worked on the safety stuff, but there are still things to be done. I don’t know exactly what it’s gonna be, but I’m hoping that there’s something we can do.”
HOW WAS YOUR CONVERSATION WITH BLAKE? “My conversation with Blake was great. I talked to her mom first because Blake’s jaw is wired shut, so she couldn’t talked much, but her mom was real cool and she just thanked the Lord for shining down on her and thanked everybody for their support and their prayers, and then I talked to Blake and she was upbeat about it. She was mumbling a little bit, but she seemed really cool. She’s a 17 year old girl and I hope she comes out of this alright in all ways.”
YOUR COMMENTS ON SUNDAY WERE VERY STRONG. ARE YOU GLAD YOU EXPRESSED YOURSELF THAT WAY? “Yeah, for sure. That’s how I felt and that’s what I believe. I also believe that there are things that can be done. We’re all in this together – NASCAR, me, the owners, all the other drivers. No one wants to see anybody get hurt, but I think what I said needed to be said and that’s how I felt at the time, and I hope people respect that.”
DID YOU LEARN MUCH WITH THE NASCAR MEETING? “Yeah, I learned a lot, and hopefully they learned a little bit about me and the driver’s perspective. They said they would talk to some other drivers, which I think that would be really good, but I definitely learned about where they’re coming from in trying to make the sport the best it can be. We all shook hands and understood, so, hopefully, something comes out of it.”
DO YOU REALISTICALLY EXPECT TO SEE ANYTHING DIFFERENT A YEAR OR TWO FROM NOW AT THOSE TRACKS? “Time will tell. We’ll see what comes out of it. I’ve just got to have faith that something will be done.”
WHAT WAS GOING THROUGH YOUR MIND WHEN YOU GOT OUT OF THE CAR AND DECIDED TO RUN ACROSS THE FINISH LINE? “Well, I just wanted to finish the race. That’s it. I wasn’t really sure, but I thought there might be a small chance it could count for something. I don’t know. At least I’d have something I could argue later, but you’ve got to get all the points you can one way or another.”
PEOPLE WERE IMPRESSED YOU HAD ENOUGH THOUGHT TO WANT TO FINISH THAT WAY. “That’s the first thing, after I got in the wall and I was sliding I thought, ‘Damn, I’m not gonna make it to the finish line,’ and then I heard some cars go by and I thought, ‘Well, maybe I’ll make it there. I’ll just be punted by someone.’ So, yeah, you can’t stop that close to the finish line and not go across it. I can’t.”
ANY REASON YOU DID LARRY KING AND ELLEN? “No. I’m a fan of both of theirs and it was cool to be able to be on both of those shows. They’re a lot of fun.” HOW IS YOUR CAR HERE? “My car is absolutely terrible right now, so we’ve got an hour-and-a-half to get it better and I hope we do because it’s embarrassing bad right now. We’ll get it though. We’ll get something. Bob always pulls something out of his hat.”
WHAT ABOUT BUMP DRAFTING AT TALLADEGA? WHO HAS TO POLICE IT? NASCAR OR THE DRIVERS? “You can’t. If you take all the bump drafting out of the deal you’re still gonna have wrecks and stuff like that at Talladega because everybody is together. It puts everybody in a tough position. We’ve given the fans something that’s so exciting and so entertaining, but there’s more risk there. We talked in depth about it yesterday. We looked at it from all different angles. The coolest part is NASCAR has an open mind. It’s not like the got me down there and yelled at me for saying bad things about the racing. We sat down and we talked about it, and I think that’s all we can do is do the best we can to deliver the best sport and the safest sport to the fans and that’s good.”
Matt Kenseth, driver of the No. 17 DeWalt Ford Fusion, remained in 12th place in the NASCAR Sprint Cup Series point standings after last weekend’s 17th-place finish at Talladega. Kenseth held his weekly Q&A session after practice on Friday afternoon.
MATT KENSETH – No. 17 DeWalt Ford Fusion – HOW IS YOUR CAR? “The practice session was OK. I guess we got it better. The first practice wasn’t very good and we were able to get it a little better there. I’m not sure where we are for qualifying. We seemed to get it a little bit better, so, hopefully, we can improve on it a little bit.”
HOW ARE YOU FEELING AFTER THE WRECK? “I feel good. I felt fine to go race the next day. I felt fine that night. I was good. I didn’t really hit anything very hard. It kind of looked spectacular. I’m glad it landed on its wheels because it would have been tough to get out there, but it never really hit anything very hard. I mean, those guys that hit the wall hard where you blow a right-front or that type of deal always hurts a lot worse.”
DID YOU TALK TO GORDON ABOUT WHAT HAPPENED IN THE CUP RACE? “Not yet. From my perspective, what I saw, me and Jeff were going up the middle the whole time and we were working together. He was hitting me real hard and pushing me real hard and we were halfway down the backstretch and I cleared the guy on the bottom. Me and Jeff were in the middle and there was somebody outside of Jeff and, to be honest with you, I was looking forward and I felt my car slow down, so I looked up to the right rear and Jeff was about an inch off my quarterpanel. He must have decided to pass me, which, technically almost made us four-wide, although there was nobody on the bottom at that instant. So we were three wide, but the whole time we were in the middle and there was only room for one more up there. I never moved the wheel. I kept going straight and then I was just ready to turn down in the corner and give him extra room and let him be in the middle and I was gonna be on the bottom and the spotter said, ‘Inside,’ so I looked to the inside and there was a car in there, so I had to move up a little bit for that car and he was just so close to me trying to get the air off my side when I moved up those few inches that he hit me in the right rear and when he did my car shot right because if you hit somebody back there, it’s gonna move the car that way and we just ran out of room. The 71, I don’t think, knew we were four-wide. I don’t think Jeff knew we were four-wide, so I moved up to be the second guy in line and he was more thinking he was the third guy in line and we just all ran out of room. If the 71 would have known it, he would have been up higher and Jeff would have been closer to the 71 and we would have had enough room to get through there, but to go in there four-wide that early, there wasn’t enough room to all get through there without touching each other and you don’t need much of a touch to start it all off.”
JACK GAVE YOU THE NATIONWIDE CAR. “He said, ‘You can have that piece of junk.’ Those were his exact words. I’ll take it.”
ANYTHING TO KEEP THE CARS OUT OF THE AIR? “In the Nationwide thing, if I wouldn’t have got hit so hard from behind and had the rear tires off the ground, I would have never spun out and the car would have never went in the air. I think if the car that hit me, the 6 car, would have used his head a little bit we wouldn’t have crashed. And, also, when I did get turned back to the inside, if I would have kept it left and let it spin out, it might not have gotten the air but it was gonna hit the inside wall real hard, so, really, what happened is when I tried to catch it, it went back the other way and got air underneath the left rear and flipped it over. Really, when you’re going that fast, if you get backwards, there’s a pretty good chance you’re gonna get airborne.”
WHAT’S THE MOST SURPRISING THING TO HAPPEN SINCE THE FIRST TWO RACES? “Just how hard we’ve struggled. We’ve been really far off at a lot of places. Some other places we’ve been pretty good and just had dumb, bad luck. Last week I kind of got ran into under caution and got a flat tire with eight laps to go while we were running second. When we have run decent and put ourselves in position, we’ve had other problems. We’ve had pit road problems and stuff like that, which is very uncharacteristic for our team and kind of surprising, and when we haven’t had any problems on pit road and things have gone smooth, we haven’t run good enough to be a contender since week two, so it’s been a little frustrating.”
DOES DAYTONA AND CALIFORNIA SEEM LIKE A YEAR AGO? “Yeah, actually. It does seem like a long time ago.”
HOW HAS TIRE TESTING AT INDY GONE? “Just been doing laps. It seems like we still have some work to do up there.”
THEY RUBBERED IT IN AND THEN THE TIRES BLISTERED. DO YOU ENVISION THEM BRINGING TWO DIFFERENT TIRES? “I hope not. That would be a little bit tough to probably police and tough to watch and tough to set your car up around two different tires. They’ve been working really hard and I’m sure they’ll come up with some type of solution, but it’s been a challenge. The soft tires rubber the track up, but then they blister when you get running too fast. For some reason, the hard tires don’t have enough stick to them and they don’t stick to the track and they just turn into dust. So it’s been a little bit of a struggle. I’m not a tire engineer. I’m sure they might have something right now that will run a fuel run, I don’t know – just looking at the stuff that we’ve been putting on and off our cars. They’ve been working hard at it and we’ve been working hard at it, too, trying to help them.”
WHERE CAN YOUR TEAM GAIN GROUND? “I think at most tracks out performance has been off a little bit, so I think it always starts with performance. When your performance is good or above average, it makes the rest of it a little easier. When your performance is above average, you can afford to maybe slip up a little on pit road or maybe not get in your pit stall exactly like or a flat tire and still recover from it. But when your performance is average at best, you have to be absolutely perfect on pit road, getting on and off pit road and on the track – all that stuff – to get any kind of good finish out of it. Our performance has been average at best and our performance on pit road and the rest of that hasn’t, overall, been very good the last month or month-and-a-half either. So that combination, that’s why you run 25th and 27th and 24th. You’ve got to have it all going on.”
WHY HASN’T CALIFORNIA CARRIED OVER MORE? “I don’t know. Probably the closest thing to California that we’ve been to so far is Texas and, as a group, we all ran really good at Texas. We just had those lugnut problems. Greg had by far the fastest car there and should have won the race easily on performance, and we probably had a top three or four car and still finished fifth, so I thought our stuff at Texas actually ran pretty good.”
WHAT WOULD YOU DO TO CHANGE AT TALLADEGA IF ANYTHING? “I don’t have any idea. I’m not an engineer. I’ve got my hands full trying to make these cars go fast and get good finishes. I don’t have any idea. It hasn’t been a hot topic the last two or three years because there hasn’t been any super-major bad wrecks. There have been a lot of multi-car wrecks, but compared to the Talladega of old they’ve been somewhat mild, so that conversation hasn’t come up. But even before I started doing this Cup deal in 2000, it’s been 10 years, every year twice a year we’d have this same discussion we’re having right now. There would be people flying on their lids and flipping over and all kinds of crazy wrecks going on and you’d have this conversation everytime at least twice a year, maybe four times, talking before the race and after it about the big one and how you could prevent it and how you could make the racing different so it’s not like that. But the bottom line is fans love to see it and there’s great ratings for this stuff. I’m not saying they like to see the bad wrecks, but they like to see the action at Talladega.”
DO YOU AGREE WITH CARL’S POST-RACE COMMENTS? “I think that’s a natural reaction after you go into the wall at 200 miles an hour or upside-down in the fence and almost in the stands, so I think that’s probably what everybody would say. And I’ve heard that quote a lot of times leaving Talladega, maybe not the last three or four years, but if you go back in the archives, I’m sure you could find that quote a lot of times from a lot of different drivers. It’s just part of that kind of racing. Yeah, we’ve got to keep trying to make it safer and try to keep the cars on the ground, but it’s part of that kind of racing. When you put all of those cars together in a big wad and the way the rules are and all that stuff, you’re gonna have accidents now and then.”
IS THERE FRUSTRATION AT THIS TRACK? “My car hasn’t been as bad today. We seem to have made a little headway on it, but whenever you don’t run good, if you’re competitive, you’re gonna be frustrated. We’ve been awful, since really California, so, yeah, that’s frustrating.”
HOW HAD DREW HANDLED THIS ADVERSITY? “He’s been working at it. He’s been working hard and everybody has been working together and trying to make stuff better. We realized it wasn’t gonna be like it was the first couple of weeks. We realized it wasn’t gonna carry on like that all the time. Things just don’t go that smooth all the time, but we probably didn’t realize it was gonna be this difficult to get some consistency back, either.”
Greg Biffle, driver of the No. 16 3M Ford Fusion, moved up four spots after last week’s fifth-place finish at Talladega and now sits 10th in the NASCAR Sprint Cup Series standings. Biffle spoke about his team’s recent resurgence before qualifying on Friday.
GREG BIFFLE – No. 16 3M Ford Fusion – “I think the second practice we got our car going better than we were in the first practice, but still when we switched to qualifying trim, we couldn’t get a handle on it. We couldn’t get it to go like we wanted it to, so I’m not real sure how we’re gonna end up qualifying, but I think we’ll be good for tomorrow night.”
WHAT DO YOU THINK ABOUT TALLADEGA? ANY SUGGESTIONS? “I think we’re all glad that last Sunday nobody was seriously hurt. You think about the fans sitting in the stands with no protection, but also Carl up in that fence. We’ve seen injuries in the past with fence posts or things coming through the windshield or side window coming inside the car, so, first of all, I’m just thankful that nobody got hurt. Secondly, we continue to push the envelope as drivers about bump drafting and about pushing each other. We always talk about it. NASCAR always talks about it in the driver’s meeting. We don’t want you bump drafting in the tri-oval, so we start pushing on the straightaways and then we start pushing real lightly in the corner, and then we start pushing a little bit harder and, ultimately, that’s what ends up causing an accident. And blocking. We’ve seen it over and over again, when you block somebody or pull down, NASCAR said they’ll penalize us for going below the yellow line, so you have to do a good job about knowing whether you’re clear or not in order to move down in front of a car because that car is no longer gonna move below the yellow line because they don’t want to be penalized. One, we need to police the bump-drafting a little bit more and say, ‘If it’s physically making contact with the car around the corners,’ maybe you should be penalized possibly. And then the other thing is they always say if you force a guy below the yellow line you may be penalized. If you pass below the yellow line, you will be penalized. We need to probably change that verbiage a little bit to where the ‘will’ is in both of them. If you force a guy below the yellow line, he’s inside of you and you just turn to the left and run him down onto the flat, then you get penalized for that. That’s not gonna fix all the problems. Restrictor plate racing is a great thing and we’re always gonna be bunched up, we’re always gonna do that, but there has to start being some consequences for the bump-drafting and chopping a guy off when he’s inside of you. Last year, a perfect example, a year ago the guy elected to go below the yellow line and not turn Tony Stewart around and flip him upside-down, and they took the race away from for passing below the yellow line. This year, the guy knew not to go below the yellow line and we had an accident. Both cases were trying to block or force that guy below the yellow line, and maybe we’re gonna have to be harder on that guy for trying to force a guy down there.”
KURT BUSCH SAID AT PENSKE THEY HAVE AS MANY TRACK SPECIFIC CARS WITH THE COT AS WITH THE OLD CAR. IS THAT TRUE FOR YOU GUYS AS WELL? “No, it’s not. I was listening to him, maybe that’s why they’re running better this year. He’s right up there, but, no, we’re not. We don’t have as many track specific cars. We do have some short track cars that are a little bit lighter that we’ll try and get as light as we can, and certainly have speedway specific cars and then you have road course cars. You’re always gonna have that, no matter what we race, but we don’t have as many cars as we did have. This car allows us to go more places with the same car.”
CAN YOU TALK ABOUT YOUR DRAG RACE LAST WEEKEND? “I’ve got a 2007 Shelby GT500 Mustang and it’s a secret what’s under the hood. It’s a stock Ford engine that I just changed the super-charger on it. It comes factory super-charged and I’ve changed the super-charger and put an exhaust on it. I’ve got a computer guy that works on all my cars with the computer deal, but, other than that, I’ve never taken a valve cover off it. It’s pretty amazing that a street car or a car from the factory will run 10.00-flat quarter mile close to 150 miles an hour. It’s a pretty amazing car. I drive it to the race shop. It’s got a navigational screen. I can shut the air-conditioning off and race the guy next to me. It’s full wheel-tubbed, trans-brake. He’s got it on the trans-brake on the rev-chip leaving the line and all that. It makes probably low 800’s with the rear tires. It’s a pretty cool car.”
CROWN ROYAL 400 QUALIFYING
JAMIE MCMURRAY – No. 26 Crown Royal Ford Fusion (Qualified 27th) – “Our car is actually pretty good in race trim and it wasn’t bad in qualifying trim. I just think going out too early is probably not gonna be good. Richmond has been notorious for being a place that you just want to go out at the end. With the weather the way it is, it wasn’t quite so bad because we got a cloud there, but just going out too early I think.” DID THE WIND WREAK ANY HAVOC ON YOUR LAP? “I didn’t notice it. You’re going so much slower here than what you do at some of the other places and you’re kind of in a tunnel with the stands and everything around you, so it didn’t seem bad.”
GREG BIFFLE – No. 16 3M Ford Fusion (Qualified 20th) – “It’s been a little bit rough today. We usually run really good here and we’ve struggled a little bit. It’s no secret that we’re off just hair and we don’t know why. It’s about the same as Phoenix. We’re having that same kind of issue, but I think that lap time is pretty decent for us actually.”
DAVID RAGAN – No. 6 UPS Ford Fusion (Qualified 22nd) – “I feel like we’re just average at best. We’ve tried really hard to put a lot of effort into all the race tracks this year, but we just seem to struggle a little bit at the short tracks. I feel our UPS Freight Ford is pretty close. If we could get just a little bit more, I think we’d be a top-10 car, but we’re just right outside of that and we know that we need to make a couple of improvements. I feel like Jimmy and the team will make a couple small changes and 400 laps is a long race here at Richmond and, hopefully, we can be a top-10 car by the end of the night. We’re not quite there yet, but, hopefully we can get there.”