JAMIE McMURRAY – No. 26 Crown Royal Ford Fusion (qualified 8th) – “It was really good. It seems like the tires that we have here, at least the way the track is right now, if you drive too hard, the tires chatter and you lose a ton of speed. So I probably didn’t drive my car quite hard enough. It had a lot of grip. When the lap is over you’re like, ‘If I could do it again, I would have driven it a little harder,’ but it was a pretty solid lap for our car.”
WOULD YOU HAVE LIKED TO HAVE HAD FOUR LAPS? “No. Absolutely not. It’s hard to hit all four corners here, and I can’t imagine doing that for four laps, so I’m pretty content with just the one and done.”
YESTERDAY JACK LEFT YOUR NAME OFF A LIST OF DRIVERS THAT NOBODY COULD TAKE AWAY FROM HIM. ARE YOU THE ODD MAN OUT WHEN THEY GO TO FOUR CARS? “I don’t know. They haven’t discussed that with me and I don’t think that’s really even been discussed. I can’t control what Jack says and sometimes Jack will go off a little bit and it maybe gets out of control, but it’s not that big of a deal. It’s been a tough season for sure and this is a performance-based business and the 26 team, if you look at the results, hasn’t been as good as the other four teams, so Jack is just kind of stating the obvious. We’ve got to get our performance better. It’s not where I want to be, the team or Roush Fenway or Crown or Irwin, whoever – we’ve got to get better. The good thing about our team is that our cars have been really fast, and I think the hardest part in this sport is to have fast cars week-in and week-out, and when happy hour has been over every week we’ve had good cars. At Sonoma, running second with a few laps to go and we got run into, and cut a tire down at Chicago. I can give you a long list of things that if it would have been just a little different, we would have had some really good finishes. So I’m optimistic with all that, so we’ll just have to move on.”
DO YOU THINK JACK WAS TRYING TO SEND A MESSAGE? “You’re asking me to speculate and I’m not into speculating.”
ARE YOU CONFIDENT YOU’LL BE BACK AT ROUSH? “I tell you what, if you guys want to print the truth, the truth is I’ll be there with Crown Royal. There’s not a question. It’s 100 percent. I know there’s been some reporters that have speculated again on where I’ll be and who the sponsors will be, and certainly everyone is entitled to their opinion, but I wish that for all of the media that they would just base it on facts. If they’re gonna say they have a source, then they should reveal that source, but, 100 percent, I will be here with Crown and with Irwin and at Roush Fenway.”
WHAT ABOUT THE RUMORS OF YOU AND THE FOURTH CAR AT CHILDRESS? “There’s no truth to that. Richard is looking for a driver and I’m somewhat flattered to have my name on a list that another owner would want you, but I will be in this car and not at Richard Childress Racing.”
CARL EDWARDS – No. 99 Aflac Ford Fusion (qualified 9th) – “That was pretty good. I think I could have gone a tick faster, but I was being kind of conservative because I’ve messed up here a lot in qualifying. I’m building up a strategy that works. I hope that will hold on for a top 10. I think our car is gonna be really good in the race.”
HOW WAS YOUR CAR IN RACE TRIM? “It was real good. We’ll see here this afternoon when everybody is in race trim, but I felt like we were the best car that was in race trim yesterday, but I don’t know if that will mean anything today.”
MATT KENSETH – No. 17 DeWalt Ford Fusion (qualified 10th) – YOU’RE NOT KNOWN FOR QUALIFYING, BUT, WITHOUT CATCHING ANY CLOUDS, THAT WAS THE 10TH-FASTEST LAP. “That was really good. That was faster than we probably expected to run. So, I thought the car drove really good. We had to sit there a little bit with the sun on the track, so for where we drew and what we did, I think that’s a great qualifying lap. That’ll give us a really good starting spot.”
SO, YOU ARE VERY PLEASANTLY SURPRISED? “Yeah. I mean, I wasn’t shocked when I saw what the 99 and the 26 and those guys ran, and they got some pretty good speed, and we did a lot of little extra stuff to try to qualify good, but, certainly, it was as good as I could’ve expected.”
GREG BIFFLE – No. 16 Dish Network Ford Fusion (qualified 12th) – TRADITIONALLY, AN EARLY DRAW IN QUALIFYING IS GOOD. YOU WENT FIRST. “I think early is good, but the thing is, you want to go out when it’s cool, and it almost feels like it’s cooling down since when we went. And, the sun came out about five minutes before we went, and maybe heated the track up a little bit. It’s overcast, and if it stays like this, the track really won’t slow down any; we need the sun to stay out, and, for sure, it’ll slow down. But, it’s unfortunate. Maybe that sun will peek out and warm it up a little bit.”
DAVID RAGAN – No. 6 AAA Insurance Ford Fusion (qualified 16th) – ON GOING OUT THIRD. “Hopefully, that will help us out a little bit. I feel like our AAA Ford was pretty close. I’d like to do it all over again. I felt like I hit my marks pretty good, but we were just a little bit off. But, really, this is the first time we’ve had this early of a draw, and we’ll learn from experience for years on down the road. But, it was a solid lap, and hopefully it’ll wind up in the top 15 somewhere and we can have a decent pick for pit road, and just go and get our car driving good driving under race conditions.”
DAVID GILLILAND – No. 38 freecreditreport.com Ford Fusion (qualified 20th) – RACE TEAMS LOOK FOR A CLOUD HERE DURING QUALIFYING AND YOU DIDN’T GET ONE. SO, THAT SEEMS NOT TO BE A BAD LAP. “No, it’s not. It’s a great pick-up from where we were yesterday. The car felt good. Cully [Barraclough, crew chief] and the guys made some great adjustments on our freecreditreport.com Ford Fusion, and we were definitely better than we were yesterday. So, I’m happy. We knew going out for qualifying that the draw wasn’t on our side, but you know you just do with what you’ve got. I’m proud of the guys and I’m proud of that lap.”
MARCOS AMBROSE – No. 47 Little Debbie Snacks Ford Fusion (qualified 24th) – “I’ve never been so anxious and nervous and apprehensive in all my life. Two laps on the race track here at the Brickyard, which is so famous and so intimidating as well, I just had to suck all that up and let her rip. We gained 1.1 seconds from the two laps I did yesterday to make the show, so I’m just happy for these guys. It’s a big weekend for us to make this race. It gets us off on the right footing and we’re showing them we can do it.”
A LOT OF PEOPLE DIDN’T GIVE YOU A CHANCE OF MAKING IT AFTER YESTERDAY. “I didn’t give myself much of a chance either, but you’ve got to trust yourself and forget what’s at stake and just drive the race car. You’ve got six corners to worry about, the two getting up to speed and the four on the race track to get the lap done and that’s it. I just held on.”
YOU QUALIFIED FOR A CUP RACE EARLIER THIS YEAR, BUT IT WAS ON A ROAD COURSE, WHICH IS YOUR SPECIALTY. IS THIS THE CULMINATION OF A DREAM TODAY? “To do it with these guys – a brand new start-up team. Frankie Kerr has come on board and he’s just been a miracle for us. We’re racing against the big boys and we qualified ourselves in on merit. We’ve done it our own way, the hard way. It means an awful lot to me. I feel like today I’ve made it. I feel like we’re in the Brickyard. We’re gonna have a great day tomorrow no matter where we finish just because we’ve made it in. I just feel so elated for these guys and everyone who has supported me and gave me the confidence to try and do this. It’s just amazing.”
TRAVIS KVAPIL – No. 28 Hitachi Power Tools Ford Fusion (qualified 28th) – NOT BAD, CONSIDERING YOU BRUSHED THE WALL. “Yeah, that was bad. We were just really tight. I drove it in there like I was going to make it through there, and it I just couldn’t get it to turn off of turn one. Then after that I started backing my corners up a little bit, and got it to turn there pretty good. I expected a lot a lower lap than that because we were bouncing off the wall and using a lot of brake off of one to try to keep it off the wall. It was disappointing. I think our car is fine. It felt okay, besides that. But, we’ll work on it and get it ready for this afternoon.”
BILL ELLIOTT – No. 21 Motorcraft Ford Fusion (DNQ) – “We just fought everything. It’s just a bad deal with the way we ended up. I don’t know. I think these guys have got a lot of good ideas, but until you go test and figure some of this stuff out, it’s just hard to unload. We lost 30 minutes of practice yesterday and sometimes you’re better off not to know – just go.”