KELLY BIRES – No. 47 Clorox Ford Fusion (Finished 33rd) – “I’ve got to first apologize to all the guys on the 9 team. I had no clue that he was inside of me. The first clue I had was when he got into my left-rear. I didn’t mean to tear him up and didn’t mean to tear our car up at all, either. I just had no clue he was there and when I did it was too late and I just tried to keep the thing off the fence. But we had a great Clorox Ford Fusion all night. We were running solid. It was gonna be a top-12 run and that’s what we came here to do – just have a nice, solid run. It was gonna be a good night. The guys worked real hard on the car all weekend and it was gonna be good, but there was nothing we could do there.”
DAVID RAGAN – No. 6 Discount Tire Ford Fusion (Finished 9th) – “We needed to be good during the night and average during the day, but we lost a little bit of track position. We had a little bit different strategy, not entirely different, but the Nationwide cars just get tight when you get back in traffic. We were pretty good out front, a little to the free side, and then toward the end of the race it just got tighter and tighter. We just needed to be better in certain areas. I think we had a car that could have won if it would have been in the right situation, but we’ll have to learn from it. But it was good to have a fast car with a lot of speed. The Discount Tire pit crew did a good job, it just wasn’t our night.” IT MUST HAVE FELT GOOD TO LEAD A LOT OF LAPS. “Yeah, certainly it feels good to lead some laps and to be a contender. We qualified good, we practiced well and we just need to build on nights like this. It’s tough to win these races and I think that we just have to have a perfect night to win a race. Tonight we made a couple of mistakes and were just a little bit off. We still finished in the top 10 and it’s a good points night, but it’s always just a lot more fun when you can be up there battling for the lead.”
CARL EDWARDS – No. 60 Scotts Water Smart Ford Fusion (Finished 13th) – “It was really frustrating. We were just not fast at all and it was very frustrating. It was just a long, long night. We just couldn’t go. I thought we were pretty good in practice. I think we had the wrong shocks on it or something. We were just slow all night. We got up there all right and then we ran over a piece of debris and had to get tires and that was so frustrating because we would have probably been top 10, but 13th is all right.”
MARCOS AMBROSE – No. 59 Kingsford Charcoal Ford Fusion (Finished 14th) – “It was a really good night for us. We’ve made big inroads here on the one-and-a-half-mile program and we had a really conservative race. It was good, really good. I was really proud of my guys and it shows that we’re making progress. We’re not just talking the talk, we’re actually starting to walk the walk a little bit. We’re much more competitive and we were racy all night.” HOW DID YOUR PIT STRATEGY WORK AT THE END? “We just had a really conservative deal – major conservative. We didn’t really have a strategy apart from just being safe. We just wanted to keep working on our car, finish the race intact and then go from there.”
