CARL EDWARDS – No. 99 Aflac Ford Fusion (finished 3rd) – “That was fun. I appreciate all of the fans coming out here on Monday. That’s cool to see as many folks out here. I think NASCAR did the right thing to have the race today. Yesterday I wanted to race real bad in the wet, but it turned out great for us. This Aflac Fusion was good. I ran out of fuel right at the end. That was perfect. My guys did a good job. A lot of fun out there today.”
WERE YOU TRYING TO SAVE FUEL AT THE END? “I was trying to save for later, but then I saw Tony and Marcos were coming back a little bit – I got real excited, real greedy – and I used up a little too much, so then I had to save more at the end. Man, that’s good. That’s not a win, but, for me, that’s a good run here at Watkins Glen.”
CARL EDWARDS press conference
CARL EDWARDS – No. 99 Aflac Ford Fusion (finished 3rd) – “From 33rd to third, that was a good, solid day for us. You know, I’m really proud of my guys for the strategy, it was great. Bob did a great job. Ran out of fuel, really, on the last lap, the light was on, it was missing. The guys did a great job, and it was just a perfect day for points for us. I wanted to win this thing really bad – that’s one of my goals this year, to win a road-course race – I really, really wanted to win today, but third place, we’ll take it. To finish in front of Kyle, who’s 13th in points, that’s good for us, and to finish behind Marcos and Tony and be closing in on them a little bit at the end, that felt good.”
DID THE HOT TRACK PLAY TO YOUR FAVOR? “For me, the slicker it is on the race track and the hotter it is outside, the better off we are – our 99 team. So, I really liked that a lot. I can only assume that Tony’s leaning on his dirt experience and all of the open-wheel stuff that he’s done to drive on that kind of race track, and I know that I really enjoy it. When it’s like that, it’s a lot fun. So, it’s good for me.”
WHEN YOU MADE THE MOVE ON KYLE BUSCH, WERE YOU AWARE WHAT HAD ALREADY HAPPENED TO THE 24 CAR AND WHERE YOU WERE IN TERMS OF POINTS? “I hadn’t really thought about that. I couldn’t see Denny – I’m close with him – I don’t know Jeff is in front of us, as far as points, I don’t know how big of a gap it is, all I knew is that I wanted to be in front of the 18, because coming in he was 13th in points. The difference between fourth and third, it’s not a lot, but it’s the morale for the guys, to open up that gap a little more. And, going into Richmond, I know I need all I can. I’m assuming Kyle’s still 13th in points; it’s got to be close. To make ground on 13th, other than win races, that’s our mission for the 99 team right now. So, that’s all I was thinking about. I did think about Jeff’s wreck, because I was underneath him. I wanted to make sure I was clear of Kyle before I moved up. That’s the only thing I was thinking about, in regards to Jeff.”
GREG BIFFLE – No. 16 3M Ford Fusion (finished 5th) – “It was a great run for us. I could’ve gotten the 18 – he was running out of brakes and my brakes were awesome, but I was out of gas. My fuel light was on every time I went around the carousal, so I just had to save, you know? We weren’t going to make it. I just saved, and that was it.”
YOU KEEP GETTING BETTER AT ROAD RACING? “Yeah, we are getting better. We were as fast as the 47, I think, maybe not the 14, but we’re getting there.”
WHAT DOES IT MEAN FOR YOU – WHO HAD ONLY ONE CAREER TOP-10 HERE – TO FINISH THIRD AT A ROAD COURSE WITH THE POINTS SITUATION SO IMPORTANT? “It is a good day. We expected to run well here, but you can’t expect a good finish. So we expected to run well and we got a good finish, nothing happened. We had great pit stops, the guys did a good job preparing the car, our brakes were good, the transmission shifted beautiful – that’s all you can ask for when you’re road racing.”
THAT WAS A SUCCESSFUL DAY. “Yeah, that was a really good day for the 3M Ford Fusion. The guys did a great job on pit road. We had great pit strategy. Our engine ran good, our transmission shifted really good and our brakes held on. It was unfortunate – I started running out of fuel toward the end, so I had to let the 18 go, that was the hardest thing, and just stay in front of the 42. That was really hard. I had a really fast car – it was a good day for us, a good top-five in points, and we’re going to some race tracks where we feel like we can win, and hopefully lock ourselves into this Chase.”
MATT KENSETH – No. 17 DeWalt Ford Fusion (finished 14th) – “For how we’ve been doing lately, that’s really good. We were 14th, which is about what we are, to be honest with you. So, that was a good finish for us – we just need to make our team stronger. We’ve got to keep working on it and get our cars better. We got here Friday and we were three seconds off the pace it was so bad, and we figured out how to get a top-15 out of it, so overall I’m pretty happy with that. We always want to do better, but for how we’ve been running, I’m pretty happy with that.”
DAVID RAGAN – No. 6 UPS Ford Fusion (finished 24th) – “We started back in the pack and we knew that we had a much better car than what our qualifying effort had shown. But, being at a road course, we knew that we were just going to have to get by one guy at a time and not rush ourselves around the track. I’m still learning how to get around this track, so each lap I was just trying to hit my marks and not make any mistakes. We ran pretty well earlier in the season in Sonoma, but Watkins Glen just seems to be a track that I'm still learning about how to get around. We were able to stay out of the big wrecks of the day, but we did have some damage to our UPS Ford after getting hit in the back at one point in the race. But it wasn’t enough to really bother our car. We’re definitely looking forward to getting to Michigan and we should have a good run there this weekend.”
BORIS SAID – No. 08 U.S. Chrome Ford Fusion (finished 34th) – OVERHEATING PUT YOU OUT? “Yeah. Just disappointed. I’m a good halfway guy. John Carter gave me a great car. We were just after halfway – running fourth or fifth, I forget where – going in the inner loop, someone went in and went through the grass and dug up a bunch of dirt on the track, and when I went through it, I just went straight off through the grass. You know, it was no big deal – one guy passed me – but the radiator was clogged up so we had to come right in and pit unscheduled. We lost all of our track position and made another pit stop, and I think we still could’ve gotten a top-10 out of it – we were like 16th or 17th there – and then Kasey Kahne got into me and went through the grass two wheels, and there were a bunch of grass clippings there, I guess, and it just clogged up the radiator again, and the engine overheated.”
SO, THAT HAPPENED TWICE? “Twice, yeah. It was driver error – it wasn’t the engine’s fault. You just can’t run through the grass.”
WHEN DOES THIS TEAM RETURN TO THE TRACK AGAIN? “I’m not sure. We’re working hard, John Carter and myself, to try to find more money. Maybe we’ll be at Talladega, who knows? We’re looking for sponsors.”
JAMIE McMURRAY – No. 26 Crown Royal Ford Fusion (finished 40th) – “Broke another input shaft. It did the same thing at Texas, and they thought they fixed the problem. It’s really weird because, I would say, if you polled the NASCAR community that there’s probably only been about three or four of those broken in NASCAR history and we broke two this year, so we’ve definitely got a problem. They thought they had it fixed.”
DOES THAT GIVE ANY WARNING? “No, it just breaks.”
YOU WERE RUNNING WELL BEFORE THAT HAPPENED. “We got our car to where we were doing pretty good, but we’ve had just a tremendous amount of mechanical failures this year, and at this level of racing, you shouldn’t have any, much less to have two or three throughout the year.”