SONOMA POST-QUALIFYING QUOTES
CARL EDWARDS – No. 99 Aflac Ford Fusion (Qualified 34th) – “I needed one more run in practice. We changed some stuff there for that lap and I think the car would have been better, but it took me the first couple corners to drive it correctly, so I feel like the second half of my lap was a little better than the first half. It was pretty ugly up there. I was axle-hopping and sliding sideways and I thought I was gonna loop it off of turn four, or whatever that was to the right, but I don’t know. It’s an 18-flat. That’s what we ran in practice. I feel if I had it to do over again I could run about a 17.60 or something and that would have been much better, but we’ll race now. We’ve been great in the race here. This is one of my favorite race tracks, so I’m looking forward to it.”
GREG BIFFLE – No. 16 3M Ford Fusion (Qualified 15th) – “That’s about what we ran in practice, a little faster. I was nervous. I played the lap in my head while I was sitting there waiting to go and I knew not to hit the curb, and I’ve been having trouble turning early into turn four, and I got over that and cost me a bunch of time because I had to wait for it to land and get back in the gas. And then turn 11 here is just not my corner either. Other than those, I ran a pretty good lap. The car had good grip, I just needed to get more and need to do better. I need to not make mistakes.”
BOBBY LABONTE – No. 96 Ask.com Ford Fusion (Qualified 25th) – “I felt like I was OK and then I got to that right-hander in the esses and I hit the curb too hard and it just drifted out on me. I felt like if I hadn’t done that, I could have stood in the gas a little better. I can’t pinpoint one big thing, but that was enough to probably cost me a tenth or so, and then a little bit in three might have cost me a tenth. I guess that’s better than in practice. I thought I was going as fast as I could go and didn’t screw up and was actually slower, so maybe I’m feeling it better now after a few more laps.”
PAUL MENARD – No. 98 Menards Ford Fusion (Qualified 30th) – “The first half of my lap I was really happy with it. I didn’t feel like I overdrove it or anything. It felt nice and smooth and then coming down the hill on the esses on the backside I lost a lot of time. My inside tire kept picking up and just screwed up my rhythm through the esses, so I lost a lot of time right there. I think we know what it is and for the race it’ll be OK. I was pretty happy with the way my car drove on older tires in practice relative to the field, so we’ll see.”
DAVID RAGAN – No. 6 UPS Ford Fusion (Qualified 43rd) – “We got loose, and I guess the good side of things is that I didn’t spin it out. I thought we had a top 15 or so run going on through the first seven or eight corners, and then we just got loose being aggressive. I just got on the throttle a little early and got loose in turn eight. If you lose even a little bit of speed here, it takes a lot to get that back. I’m looking forward to Saturday’s practice; I think we’ve got a fast car. We’ll just have to do our job and pass a lot of cars on Sunday.”
MATT KENSETH – No. 17 DeWalt Ford Fusion (Qualified 10th) – “It was really good. We picked up three-tenths from our mock-up run, which is good because getting to do it the same twice is always easier said than done. I felt good about it. We didn’t make any changes and we picked up a little speed, so, overall, it was good. I would have liked to have run just a little quicker, but I thought I hit it pretty good.”
BORIS SAID – No. 08 No Fear Ford Fusion (Qualified 9th) – “John Carter gave me a really fast Ford Fusion. I wish everyone could get to drive this car because it’s a lot of fun. We were really fast in practice and if we would have had a provisional to fall back on, I think we maybe could have had something for the pole. But we’re in a different gameplan when you’re a go or go-homer. We just want to make the race. I want to be here on Sunday. It’s one of my favorite tracks, favorite crowds, great food and pretty girls doesn’t hurt. I think we’re in good shape. Performance Friction gave us great brakes and U.S. Chrome and if anybody wants to help me out, go to No Fear.com and buy a t-shirt.” DOES THIS GET ANY EASIER AS SOMEONE WHO HAS TO QUALIFY ON TIME EACH TIME YOU SHOW UP? “No. This weekend was harder because when our car was so fast in practice and you’re like five-one hundredths off the top of the board, part of you really wants to go for the pole – just your ego. But, man, if you make a mistake and you spin off the track, you let everyone down and then you’d feel like a horses behind, so you’ve really got to temper yourself and put the restrictor on myself for a change and just run an easy lap. That was like 75 percent and designed to just get in. At the end I started to speed up because I thought, ‘Man, I’m going way too slow.’ So I started getting after it a little bit at the end of the lap, but I’m just happy to be in the show Sunday.”
Matt Kenseth, driver of the No. 17 DeWalt Ford Fusion, is 11th in the NASCAR Sprint Cup Series point standings going into this weekend. He held his weekly Q&A session behind the team’s transporter before practice.
MATT KENSETH – No. 17 DeWalt Ford Fusion – HOW DO YOU LIKE INFINEON? “It’s alright, it’s just something different. We don’t do it very much. Out of the year that we run, we run only two road courses, which isn’t very many, so it’s always a place that’s challenging to me. It’s just totally opposite to what we usually do. It’s all about pitting the race and track position and all that, but it’s OK.”
YOU STARTED THE YEAR OFF SO STRONG. AS A VETERAN DRIVER, IS IT EASIER TO DEAL WITH THE UPS AND DOWNS? “No, it doesn’t make it any easier. You want to win every week and put in your best effort every week, so when you don’t get the results it’s always disappointing, but you still can’t dwell too much on yesterday. You’ve got to move on to the next week and try to figure out how to do better.”
WHAT ARE THE NUANCES OF THIS TRACK? “It’s a challenge. When I first started it was more about not making a mistake and staying on course. You could bend up a car pretty easy or lose a lot of track position, and, of course, about gambling on pit road and pitting early in case there was a caution so you could get that track position. Today, these cars are a lot closer to the same speed and they’re a lot more reliable. It doesn’t seem like as many people make a mistake or break something or anything like that, so you’ve got to have your pit strategy right and have a good handling car. You can’t make mistakes and you’ve got to run fast all day, too.”
HOW DOES IT COMPARE TO WATKINS GLEN? “It’s a lot different than Watkins Glen. Watkins Glen drives a lot more like a speedway – like a Michigan or something – whereas this place drives a lot more like a short track – like a Martinsville or a track like that – so this track has a lot of slow-speed parts. It’s real slippery and hard to get forward bit, that type of thing, whereas Watkins Glen is more about momentum and going fast.”
HOW DO YOU FEEL ABOUT YOUR SPOT IN THE POINTS? “I don’t feel very good about it. We were farther behind at this time last year, but, certainly, we’ve had a lot more opportunities this year to be a lot higher in the points and be in a lot more comfortable position than what we are. We’re not comfortable by any means, being toward the top 12, so we really need to start getting the results and start getting our finishes.”
JIMMIE JOHNSON, JEFF GORDON AND TONY STEWART ARE ALL UP FRONT. DOES THAT HAVE ANY IMPACT ON THE OTHER DRIVERS? THEY’RE LIKE THE ROCK STARS OF THIS SERIES. “I don’t pay a lot of attention where everybody else is, to be honest with you. We’ve got our own problems to worry about, just trying to climb up there as high as we can. If you can win races and you can finish really good, you’ll be up there in the points and we haven’t been able to do that lately. So we need to get the results. I don’t really worry about necessarily what the competition is doing, we just try to get running the best that we can.”
WILL YOU DO ANYTHING FUN HERE THIS WEEKEND? “No, not really. I don’t really have any plans. Tomorrow, we might go get a tour of San Quentin and check that out. I don’t know if it will be fun, but it’ll be interesting (laughing), so, other than that, I don’t have any plans.”
DO YOU TYPICALLY LOOK FORWARD TO THIS STOP? “Yeah, especially when I first came out here. I enjoyed seeing San Francisco and had never traveled out here before, and seeing Alcatraz and my wife always enjoys coming out and hanging out with her friends and going wine tasting and seeing some of the wineries and all that kind of stuff, but I don’t really do much extra when I get here. I enjoy Northern California, but I just come out here and get ready to race.”
Carl Edwards solidified his sixth-place position inside the Top 12 last weekend with a fourth-place run at Michigan. He spoke to the media after Friday’s practice session and before qualifying got started.
CARL EDWARDS – No. 99 Aflac Ford Fusion – TONY STEWART SAID IT HELPS TO BE A NATURAL WHEN IT COMES TO ROAD RACING. DO YOU AGREE? “I don’t know if I can agree with that completely because I was terrible at it and Boris Said helped me out a ton. I feel like I’m a lot better at it now. I’ve been fortunate enough to race up there with some of those guys that are really good, and maybe some guys it comes to naturally, but, for me, I had to work at it pretty hard. I’m still searching for that first win, so I’ve still got something to learn.”
WHAT DO YOU THINK ABOUT THE DOUBLE-FILE RESTARTS HERE? “It’s way to early to have a strategy for that double-file restart. Towards the end of the race there may be a strategy, but you could only strategize if you knew the caution was coming, so it’s gonna be pretty tough.”
SOME GUYS HAVE SAID THEY WILL BE VERY CHALLENGING. “Yeah, the first turn is not that big of a deal, but it’s that second turn at the top of the hill, where you can’t see over the hill. It’s about a 110 or 120 degree radius and that’s gonna be wild on the restarts.”
WHAT DO YOU THINK ABOUT THE INDY TIRE TEST? “The tire test at Indy went really well. That Goodyear tire felt good, it felt good to drive. You could get the car a little bit sideways and it didn’t feel too treacherous, and the wear looked good – the wear that I saw – so I think it’s cool that Goodyear is putting so much effort into it. I’m glad they included me out there because it’s nice to see a few laps around the place.”
IS THE ISSUE DEAD AT THIS POINT? “I guess you never know until the race starts. You get to see some long green-flag runs in groups, but it felt pretty good out there testing. I didn’t have any trouble with the tire.”
SOME DRIVERS COULD SENSE A DIFFERENCE IN THE TIRE IN A COUPLE LAPS. “I don’t remember much about that tire last year. We never got a real good feel for it because you never ran it hard. This tire, I ran as hard as I could. I did a couple of 10-lap runs, but mostly we did five-lap runs. There were other guys doing longer runs, and it felt good to me. It felt like a tire should. I didn’t have any issue with it. The thing I was nervous about is it would be so hard that it would be real treacherous to drive on, but it didn’t feel that way. It felt pretty good.”
DID YOU THINK THEY WOULDN’T HAVE DOUBLE-FILE RESTARTS ON ROAD COURSES? “I didn’t even think about road courses when I heard that double-file restart thing. I was thinking about Martinsville and Bristol and those places, but I have a feeling that the places where that double-file restart is gonna have the biggest impact will be here and then Watkins Glen will be second. It’s gonna be interesting. It’ll be great for the fans. It could be extremely frustrating for the drivers if it goes bad.”
DID YOU THINK THEY MIGHT NOT DO IT? “I didn’t really think about it. The whole idea is to make it exciting and it’ll sure be exciting (laughing). If I happen to be leading this thing or running second or third that’s the last thing I want to see is a double-file restart, but if I’m running eighth or something, it’ll be just fine.”
HOW WAS YOUR CAR IN PRACTICE? “My Aflac Fusion is alright. I’m not quite as fast as my teammates. We’re working on it right now with the setup, so, hopefully, it’s good in qualifying. I go out early, so I won’t have to sit around and stress about it. We’ll go out and run a lap and take what we get.”
HAVE YOU EVER NOT RACED ON FATHER’S DAY? “The coolest Father’s Day race we had was at Michigan a couple years ago when I won and I got to give the trophy to my dad. He’s got it sitting right there in the shop where they watch the races and that’s pretty cool.”
WHAT ABOUT THE LOGISTICS GOING BACK AND FORTH TO MILWAUKEE. DID YOU HAVE PLANS TO GO WITH KYLE? “No, I’m gonna fly with Jack tomorrow right after practice. We’ll get as much practice as we can get in and then try to make it to Milwaukee right before the race starts. I think they’re gonna let us land the helicopter in turn three there at the race track, so that will be fun.”
SO THERE WAS NO TALK ABOUT GOING WITH KYLE? “We talked about it a little bit, but we’ve got enough people that it’s just better for us to take Jack’s plane.”
DENNY HAMLIN HAD AN ISSUE GETTING THERE ONCE. “I remember I think we were on pace laps there and I remember seeing Denny’s helicopter kind of hovering like they were gonna land and then they didn’t. I thought, ‘Man, that’s terrible,’ and then he ended up winning the race. I don’t think even missing the beginning of the race is the worst thing. For us, it would be the points that would be bad, but it worked out for him that night.”
Greg Biffle, driver of the No. 16 3M Ford Fusion, held steady in seventh place in the NASCAR Sprint Cup Series standings after last week’s fifth-place run at Michigan. He came into the infield media center at Infineon Raceway before qualifying to talk about what lies ahead.
GREG BIFFLE – No. 16 3M Ford Fusion – HOW WAS PRACTICE? “It went really good. I really like this race track. We had some issues like we always do – a little bit of brake issues in the beginning. I’ve been able to keep it on the race track, so that’s good. We’ll just keep working on it. I’m not as happy as we were probably last year in race trim, but qualifying trim seems to be decent. I think we were about 10th or so, so just cut a good lap here and not make any mistakes. That’s the key and see where we end up on starting for Sunday.”
CAN YOU TALK ABOUT YOUR THOUGHTS ABOUT FUEL MILEAGE LAST WEEK, AND WILL WE SEE THAT HERE THIS WEEK? “Yeah, absolutely. Road racing is always a fuel mileage race – always – because what you try and do is stop before everybody else, so if the caution comes out, then you force people to stop under caution and then you take the lead. It’s always a fuel mileage race here or in road racing because the key is to stop first. Last week, I was running a pace keeping the 5 car about, whatever he was, about three seconds behind me and just ran a pace to keep him there. I just really paid attention and was coming off the gas as soon as I could and being easy on the throttle and doing a fuel mileage race. I knew at some point I figured out the 48 was probably waiting, drafting off the 5, to try and save fuel and then I saw him coming and I picked up the speed a little bit. He was coming really, really fast and I picked the speed up even more. Then I decided to run a lap flat-out as hard as I could and I could run a little bit faster than he could, but then I knew that I could not run that pace and make it to the end, I didn’t believe. So I backed off to see what he would do and, of course, he kept coming and drove down on the inside of us. One lap he got really loose, so it took another whole lap for him to make the pass, but, there again, I was easing off the gas. I just wasn’t gonna be able to run that pace to the end. Where I made my mistake is he got in front of me and I saw that he was really, really loose and having trouble hanging onto it, and I felt I could get back by him if I ran hard. Right then I should have came off the gas and just tried to stay in front of the 5. He was gonna run out no matter what. I kind of got a kick out of watching a TV show this week and Chad blamed it on me saying that once they passed me I should have slowed down and then they could have made it. They weren’t gonna make it no matter what. They were a lap-and-a-quarter short. You’re not gonna save a lap-and-a-quarter worth of fuel in five laps. There’s just no way, unless you’re running pace car speed. So if I would have backed off it when it was obvious he was gonna pass me and catch me, we probably would have made it. But, coulda, woulda, shoulda. I learned my lesson and I know now how much two laps of gas I have to save in a 40-lap run. I have a better idea of how much that is, and, hopefully, in the future I’ll be able to get it by a quarter-lap the other direction.”
HOW IMPORTANT ARE BRAKES HERE AND HOW DO YOU TAKE CARE OF THEM? “The same thing, just lifting a little bit early getting into the corner and use them the least amount that you can. If you run the car as hard as you can and brake the last possible second, you’re on the brakes really, really hard and you get a lot of heat in them. If you continue to do that, the brakes will continue to deteriorate. You’ve got to race other cars around you, so you’ve got to use a lot of brake and run in the corner hard, but when you have the opportunity you really need to try and back the corner up a little bit – come off the gas and wait a few seconds before you go to the brakes real hard and that will tend to save them a little bit. But that’s about all you can do. That transition from gas to brake – lifting the throttle just a hair earlier. A lot of times it doesn’t affect the lap time even measurable, but you can be a little easier on the brakes.”
DID YOU HAVE ANY FUEL LEFT IN THE CAR? WERE YOU NOT PICKING IT UP OR DID YOU SHUT IT OFF QUICKLY? “Probably both. We don’t know. We didn’t run it out, so we don’t know what we could have picked up, but three-tenths would have won the race. I did shut the car off through turns one and two and coast to try and save fuel because the fuel I was on at the end of the straightaway. When I started it running down the back, in hindsight in our Monday morning meeting I talked about it is there could have been, possibly, if I would have shook the car a little bit more, knowing that the fuel was that low, it’s a possibility that we could have got a little bit more. But, there again, we never measured how much was still in it, so it could have been bone dry. We just don’t know and, unfortunately, we will never know. It would have been nice to know how much was in there, but we did recognize that the 99 car picked up more gas than we did, or he held more fuel, and certainly that’s an issue. Three-tenths of a gallon would have won the race. That’s plenty. It takes three-tenths, I don’t know what the calculation is, but you can almost run nearly a lap on three-tenths, so we would have made it for sure with that. We don’t know where that three-tenths was. If that fuel cell was a little bit shy. Was there a little bit left in it? The other thing is it’s a sinking feeling, I’m gonna tell you right now, as you’re going 180 miles an hour and you’ve got the car in gear and it’s slowing down, if you push the clutch in it rolls a heck of a lot faster than with the clutch out – the motor is slowing the car down – a dramatic difference. If the car isn’t running, you need to push the clutch in, so that’s the bad part about it. I let it out a couple of times and pumped the throttle and I could get a bump out of it and that was it, it would just continue to slow down, so at some point you’ve got to cut your losses and put it in neutral and coast to the start-finish line. Otherwise, you’re not even gonna make it, so that’s what happened.”
WHY AREN’T THERE FUEL GAUGES? “That’s a good question. Certainly, it would probably be a better question for NASCAR and whether they would allow us fuel gauges or not. It would help us because then we would know right when we were gonna run out. I would have known how much was left and how hard I could run the car and the whole thing. It wouldn’t be a gas gauge. You could measure how much you’ve used more accurately than what’s left because what’s used goes through a sensor, so it knows exactly what’s gone through the sensor versus how much is still sloshing around in there. You’ve really got no way to measure that, so you could have a gas gauge for sure. I think the stock car and our heritage has been put fuel in it and go.”
WHAT IS UNIQUE ABOUT THIS TRACK? “Road racing is definitely a different animal altogether. We road race two times a year – here and Watkins Glen – and I’ve got some road race wins in my past – none in the Sprint Cup Series, but we’ve come close here. We usually run in the top five, which you have to be in that top five to be in striking position. I remember last year, it still haunts me today, that we did our pit stops exactly right and I got the lead and drove off the race track leading last year in turn one, going up the hill, so that was a little disappointing. We ended up with a good finish, but that possibly was my first win down the drain, but hopefully this year we’ll have the same strategy, but won’t drive off the race track and maybe we’ll pick up our first win.”
HAVE YOU EVER HAD A CRAZIER FINISH THAN MICHIGAN AND COULD WE SEE SOMETHING SIMILAR HERE? “Certainly pit strategy plays into it. Let’s face it, we’ve talked about this all year, any race can be a fuel mileage race. Phoenix was a fuel mileage race a couple years ago. Richmond can be a fuel mileage race. You could name about any of them – nearly all of them – and if a caution comes out three or four laps before you can make it on fuel, if you can go at Richmond 70 laps on fuel or 100 and the caution comes out with 104 to go and another caution doesn’t come out, it’s a fuel mileage race. So you can make any race a fuel mileage race just by the way the caution comes out. If they would have taken one more lap to clean the water up on pit road when the 12 hit those barrels, it would have been a different race at Michigan. So there are so many things that go into each race. That’s what makes it so dramatic and dynamic. This race, we make it a fuel mileage race by our own doing because we stop about a lap short on fuel and we come down pit road and hope for a lap or two of caution, which always happens here through the end of the event. If you don’t get a caution, then you light-foot it for a little bit and make up one lap of fuel because we just want to be the first on pit road. So this race always turns into a fuel mileage race because that’s our doing. All of the oval tracks can turn into a fuel mileage race because of where the caution happens to come out.”
HAVE YOU BEEN INVOLVED IN ANYTHING WEIRDER? “Yeah, the one that was a little bit different than that in the past was here. We pit stopped here under caution and we were five or four laps short of making it. We were shutting it off and coasting down the hill and around and all that under caution, and then when we went back under green I think we ran the last 10 laps of this race I just shifted between third and fourth and never gave it more than about three-eighths throttle. It was like I was driving to the race track. I never went fast just because we had to make it to the end. It was kind of fun driving like that to try and stretch the fuel and try to make it, but that was a pretty wild race that I was involved in going as slow as we were going, but Michigan was the same way. We were playing cat-and-mouse up there and ran out of gas.”
DAVID RAGAN HAS STRUGGLED. ARE THERE THINGS YOU CAN DO TO HELP OR DO THEY JUST HAVE TO PULL THEMSELVES UP BY THEIR OWN BOOTSTRAPS? “Kind of pick themselves up. We’ve been trying to help them with production meetings and team meetings and how their car is driving and what we’re experiencing. I never knew David to be much of a road racer, but he’s pretty fast here this weekend, so that’s good for that team. I have a lot of respect for Jimmy Fennig. He’s very smart. They’re off a little bit and it can happen. It happened with Harvick. It happened with Junior. They’ve switched crew chiefs, switched teams, switched all kinds of stuff and I don’t think anybody is immune to it. I’m glad to see Chris Andrews over there helping them a little bit to see if they can get some communication back and get going again with what they’ve got in place because they’ve got some good chemistry, I think.”