CARL EDWARDS – No. 99 Office Depot Ford Fusion – “Everything’s good. My car’s real fast. It’s real good in race trim, we ran a couple of laps in race trim, and qualifying it was real good. I like this race track a lot.”
YOU’VE DONE WELL ON CONCRETE RACE TRACKS. “I really do like coming here. I feel like every time we come here we’ve got a chance to win. Bob [Osborne, crew chief] does a really good job. I just like racing here. It’s real fun. It’s fast. It’s just a lot of fun.”
HOW DO YOU MAINTAIN YOUR SANITY DURING THE CHASE? “For me, it’s real easy to maintain my sanity. I just go back to Missouri and spend a little time with my brother, and my mom and dad, and my girlfriend in a normal environment. Yesterday, I got to spend a bunch of time with my dad and had a really good time, so that’s how I kind of maintain my sanity. No matter what happens out here, I still have a real good group of people back home.”
HOW DO HANDLE THE PRESSURE? “I don’t know, real pressure – to me, this isn’t real pressure. That’s something my dad and I talked about a little bit. This really is fun, when it’s all said and done. The goal is amazing, to be able to win the championship, that would be spectacular. The fun is the effort that goes into it. The only real pressure I’ve ever felt in my life where I was real nervous and felt pressure was right around 1999, 2000, I was getting old enough and I needed to have a real job and I needed to figure out what I was going to do with my life, and racing wasn’t really looking like it was going to work out at all – that’s real pressure, you know, the real world. This is different. You can leave the race track – I can, and fortunately I can put this aside and not let it run my life. We are still at Dover, ask me before Homestead it might be a different answer, but right now I feel wonderful.”
YOU MENTIONED FUN. HOW FUN WAS THIS WEEK? “I really enjoyed this week. That’s really cool to open up the paper and see your name at the top of the Sprint Cup standings – that’s a big deal. Where I come from that’s huge. I really have enjoyed it. That was a blast. I feel like we’re running well enough that we can do it, performance-wise.”
MATT KENSETH – No. 17 DeWalt Ford Fusion – YOU’VE WON HERE AND YOU HAVE TEAMMATES THAT HAVE WON HERE. WHAT IS IT ABOUT THIS TRACK AND ROUSH FENWAY RACING? THE TEAM HAS DONE WELL HERE. “Well, I was messing around on the internet last night and I saw how bad we’ve done here in the fall race the last five years, actually, so I don’t know. It’s always been one of my favorite tracks. I always really like it, but it’s kind of a feast or famine for us. We’ve led here a little bit, it seems like we’ve been able to win a time or two, we’ve also had problems and finished real bad, too. Our performance is usually pretty good here, so I always look forward to it.”
IS RACING ON CONCRETE MUCH DIFFERENT THAN ASPHALT? “I don’t know because I never ran this track when it was asphalt, so somebody like Mark [Martin] or [Ken] Schrader or some of those guys could probably tell you the differences of this track. It’s hard to really compare asphalt or concrete because there’s not another track that’s anything even close to this on the circuit. So, it’s hard for me to compare because I’ve always raced on the concrete.”
BEING IN THE POSITION YOU’RE IN AFTER THE FIRST RACE, IS YOUR APPROACH NOW DIFFERENT? “I don’t really hardly ever approach any race any different, really. I try to take it one week at a time and do the best you can every week and see where it goes. There’s really nothing we can do about last week now, or the week before, so really just take it one week at a time and try to bring our best stuff, perform the best we can and really not worry about.”
DO YOU FEEL THAT A COUPLE OF GOOD RACES AND YOU’RE RIGHT BACK IN IT? “You never know what’s going to happen to everybody else, you can only control your own team and how we perform and the things that we do, and we’ve just got to do that to the best of our abilities, try to get the best finishes we can and not worry about the rest. Last year we dropped out of four or five races, had big problems in four or five races, and then put a really good – last five races I think we were in the top five or six and came back to finish fourth. So, anything cam happen. You just, like I say, got to take it one week at a time and work as hard as you can and see where it turns out.”
DOES THE FACT THE TEAM GENERALLY IS PRETTY GOOD HERE GIVE YOU SOME CONFIDENCE? “Yes, it does. I’ve always really enjoyed the track, it’s always been one of my favorite tracks, I just enjoy getting on here, driving around here. It’s been a pretty good track for all of those guys, it seems like, especially since they went to the COT, Carl and Greg, especially, have run really well here and we’ve done pretty decent, too. So, yeah, you have more confidence when you run a place that you like and you run good at.”
WHAT WAS YOUR MOOD AFTER LAST WEEK’S RACE AT NEW HAMPSHIRE? “Probably wasn’t that great. It was as good as it could be for what happened, I guess.”
DID YOU RE-ANALYZE EVERYTHING? “No, not really. To be honest with you, I still haven’t watched a replay of the wreck. I haven’t even seen it. There’s sometimes you get into a wreck and ‘if I could do that over, I’d do this or do that,’ but I could do that 100 times and be in the same wreck 100 times. There was really nothing I could do. I was just in the wrong place at the wrong time. The only thing that we could’ve done to not be in that wreck was to be running better and be ahead of it, so really that what my focus is to get ourselves running better so we can be up front.”
IN YOUR CURRENT SITUATION, DO YOU THINK ABOUT WHAT JIMMIE JOHNSON DID IN ’06, WHEN HE WAS MORE THAN 100 POINTS OUT AFTER FOUR RACES AND CAME BACK TO WIN THE CHAMPIONSHIP? “I really don’t think about nay of that. I really honestly take it one week at a time and concentrate on that particular race. You can’t control what anybody else does, you can only control your own team – if you can go out and win races or finish up in the top five, you’re going to get a lot of points, more than most of the people. I think you just concentrate on that every week and hope it’s enough.”
WHAT EFFECT DID LAST WEEK’S RESULT HAVE ON THE REST OF THIS TEAM? “You hope none. Obviously, the better you do the more enthused or better mood, or however you want to put it, everybody’s going to be in. Today, so far, has been good. Our car’s been really fast. Everybody’s been making good changes and working hard. Everybody’s in a good mood with their chin up. So we’ll just go out and do our best. There really isn’t a lot they can do about last week. We were just in the wrong place at the wrong time. It wasn’t something they did to put me in that position, other than we weren’t good enough to be ahead of it, so that’s where our focus is, to get running better. They can’t control things like that, I don’t think I could really control what happened last week, either. You’re going to have weeks like that.”