Colin Braun, driver of the No. 16 3M Ford Fusion was the fastest Ford in Friday’s happy hour practice and second quickest overall. Braun (88.109 sec., 102.882 mph) was one-hundredth of a second off the pace set by leader Scott Pruett (88.097 sec., 102.896 mph). Qualifying is scheduled for 10:35 a.m. on Saturday morning.
COLIN BRAUN – No. 16 3M Ford Fusion – THERE ARE A LOT OF HAPPY FACES IN THE NO. 16 GARAGE. “Yeah, it went really good today. My crew chief Eddie Pardue and the guys, they worked through a lot of good changes here. We got a lot of good stuff tried that we wanted to get done on our test plan and I think we have a pretty fast car. I think everybody did mock runs there at the end and unfortunately we only had one lap on our mock run and we had the red flag come out and a few other guys got in the way there right at the end. I felt we could have been a little bit faster than that, I’m sure everybody does, but I’m real happy right now. We should be in good shape for the race.”
WHAT DID YOU LEARN TODAY? “Today was just about learning how to drive a stock car here. I’ve been quick in the cars that I’ve driven here in the past. It was a little bit different driving the 3M Ford Fusion car. It’s still basically the same thing, though. You’ve got to get it to turn and put the power down well and that’s something the guys worked really hard on today and our car does really well. I think we’re quite good on old tires and I feel like we’ll be pretty good this weekend.”
IS YOUR CAR BETTER ON LONG RUNS, SHORT RUNS OR UNIVERSALLY GOOD? “I think our car is pretty universally good. It’s good on a long run, it’s good on a short run. We did a couple of race runs before on new tires and went out. Our first lap on race runs were on brand new real fast right off the bat and we’re also good as the run goes on.”
