DAVID GILLILAND – No. 38 freecreditreport.com Ford Fusion (Finished 41st) – “It looked like the 10 car got turned around somehow and there was just nowhere to go. It’s a shame. Our freecreditreport.com Ford Fusion was running really good. We had a terrible qualifying run, 40th, and worked our way up. We were in the top 15 and right there we were 13th or 14th and were just biding our time. We had a great car and it’s just a testament to how hard this team has worked so far this year. We’ve come a long ways. I’m disappointed, but we were running good and we’ll learn from it and go from there. Hopefully we can get it fixed and go out and make a couple more laps and gain some points.” IT HAD TO FEEL LIKE A TALLADEGA WRECK. “Yeah, it did. I was telling the guys that it was the big one here at a three-quarter-mile track. It’s unfortunate. Like I said, we came from 40th and I think we were in the top 15 there. I had a great run going, but that’s the way it goes sometimes. We’ll learn what we can from tonight and go on and try to go get ‘em next week.” KIND OF SURPRISING TO HAVE THAT MANY CARS IN A WRECK AT A TRACK LIKE THIS. LIKE TALLADEGA? “Yeah, that’s what it felt like inside the car, too. Everybody is so close with this new car. You can see it in qualifying and everybody is running so close together that it produces the same thing on the race track. Everybody is on top of each other and when something happens like that on a track like this, there’s just nowhere to go and everybody gets a little of it.”
CARL EDWARDS – No. 99 Office Depot Ford Fusion (Finished 7th) – “It ended up a lot better than I thought it was going to. That wreck on the backstraight was terrible. I wish that wouldn’t have happened. He moved to give me the outside and then it looked like he got turned a little bit by the 22 and it was kind of a worst-case scenario. That put us back. I think we had a car that could compete for the win, but to come back from that to finish seventh was great.” IT WAS PRETTY WILD OUT THERE TONIGHT. “The reason it was so wild is the tire is real slippery. It’s real hard to drive, first of all, and everyone is so competitive and all the cars are so close that’s it’s just really, really ultra-competitive. It’s fun, it just makes the room for error virtually nil.” WERE GUYS WAITING FOR THE LAST 100 LAPS OR SO TO KICK IT IN AND GO? “There wasn’t any waiting. It might have looked like that, but the way it works is I could drive at 99 percent and run great. If I went 101 percent, I’d lose everything I had gained over the last 10 laps, so I had to really, really focus. To me, that’s a really fun way to race. I like the new car. The harder the tires, the better, but with that is gonna come wrecks and accidents because it’s just a little harder to drive.”
DAVID RAGAN – No. 6 AAA Ford Fusion (Finished 17th) – “It certainly could have been a lot worse, but it could have been a lot better. We were just a little off at the beginning and we got that lap down, and then we got what we asked for running back there in the back. A guy spun in front and I thought I was slowed down, but I wasn’t slowed down quite enough and got into the back of the 38. That might have been a blessing because we might have been in that other big wreck if we would have still been running where we were supposed to have been, so, anyway, it was a long night but we kept working on it. We were pretty good there at the end, but we needed to have about 50 or 75 more laps and maybe we could have gotten a little better finish.”
GREG BIFFLE – No. 16 Dish Network Ford Fusion (Finished 14th) – “It was a long night. I had a really good car. I probably had a top-five car, but I lost my brakes. About halfway through they started fading and then three-quarters of the way – the last 50 laps – I had no brakes. I just got back off the gas, coasted in the corner and that’s all I could do. I just ended up where I did and ended up 14th, so I can’t complain.”
MATT KENSETH – No. 17 DeWalt Ford Fusion (Finished 38th) – “We didn’t run very well at all even before the accident. We were running in the back and everybody was doubled up. We were two and three-wide back there and everybody was trying to stay on the lead lap and they all wrecked. I got run into from behind and kind of got pushed into it, but that’s part of it.”
TRAVIS KVAPIL – No. 28 Discount Tire Ford Fusion (Finished 16th) – “Just like I said the other day, we were gonna try to keep our nose clean and get a good finish and that’s exactly what we did. We just fought our way up through the field. The car was really good the first half of the race, but after we got our lucky dog, it was just really tight and we just fought it from there on and we never could really get it to where we were the first half of the race. We just kind of hung on the last 100 laps or so, but we kept our nose clean, stayed out of trouble and got a decent finish out of it.”
