CARL EDWARDS – No. 99 Aflac Ford Fusion (finished 6th) – “Alright. That was a good recovery. We just had trouble on pit road. We had a couple of slow stops, and I slid through my pit stall, and we battled with the car all day. That really put the nail in the coffin for us. But in the end, it might have been a blessing because it allowed us to get on a different strategy and it got us a sixth, which I think is the best we ran all day. So, that’s not a disaster by any means. It could’ve been better, but it could’ve been a whole lot worse.”
EARLIER IN THE RACE, IT SEEMED LIKE YOU COULD GET TO EIGHTH OR NINTH, AND THAT WAS ABOUT IT. “That’s about all I could. We had about a 10-place car and I thought we were going run 20th with it, and we ended up sixth with it, so that was pretty good.”
DAVID RAGAN – No. 6 UPS Ford Fusion (finished 7th) – “Certainly, that’s not what we want as the 6 car, we’re not celebrating like it’s a win, but a top-10 the way our season has been is certainly refreshing. We’ve still got to come a long way as a company in making these race cars better to win races, but we made some of the right moves today, our pit stops were great, and our UPS Ford was good enough to steal a few spots there at the end. So, that’s what we’ve got to keep working on, and hopefully Lowe’s and Talladega, Martinsville, some of the tracks coming up, we can carry a little bit of momentum that we had.”
YOU SEEMED TO STEADILY MOVE FORWARD FOR MOST OF THE DAY. “I think we had a top-15 car the whole race, but we just started in a hole, starting 31st. We just had to slowly work our way. Last week at Kansas, I felt like we had a good car but we got caught in a wreck in the first 10 laps. So, today I was a little cautious, trying not to get my car torn up, but at the same time, I felt like Jimmy [Fennig, crew chief] and Mike [Messick], our engineer made good adjustments – we just never got it perfect, and that’s the difference between a top-10 and a top-two or -three.”
WHAT DOES A TOP-10 MEAN FOR YOU AND THIS TEAM RIGHT NOW? “Certainly, it means a lot. Like I said, it’s not what we want, but it’s a step in the right direction. Top-10s lead to top-fives and certainly they lead to wins. So, for our UPS team, we just have to get consistent. This should be a normal race for us. So, it’s good. Hopefully, it’ll pump everybody up, and everybody will forget about it on Tuesday or Wednesday when we get ready for Lowe’s.”
MATT KENSETH – No. 17 DeWalt Ford Fusion (finished 13th) – “We were pretty much junk after the first run. The first run we were about a 15th-place car and then we went back to normal, a 25th-place car or 30th, and we just really struggled. We made some changes on one pit stop, and I wa sable to make some moves on a re-start, toward the top 10, but we weren’t fast enough to hold that.”
GREG BIFFLE – No. 16 3M/Scotch-Blue Ford Fusion (finished 20th) – “There at the end, we were going to be pretty good with two tires, but then we got in that wreck. We were going to be decent, but we were just off today. We couldn’t get that set-up to work that we used last week, and we kept working on it. We decided to go to the spring set-up, and that’s about as good as we were going to be – probably sixth or eighth, but that still would’ve been a lot better than 20th.”
WHAT WILL YOU TAKE OUT OF THIS RACE? “It’s pretty disappointing, you know. It probably took us out of the hunt. You know, it’s not over ’til it’s over, but that really hurt us.”