CARL EDWARDS – No. 99 Aflac Ford Fusion (Finished 39th) – “Juan just got loose underneath me and got the left rear of my car. That happens at these places, I guess.” IS IT A FUNCTION OF THE TRACK CHANGING? “No, it’s not a function of the track changing. Juan’s car is just a little bit looser, probably, than mine. He looked real good through the previous corner. I ran right beside him and he looked real tight, but then we went down into turn one and he got loose.” IS THIS SOMETHING YOU EXPECTED? JIMMIE WAS OUT EARLY AND NOW MONTOYA AND YOU? “I didn’t expect it, especially from Juan. He’s got great car control. His car must have been really loose and it just snapped on him. It looked like he needed another couple inches and it wasn’t there, but that’s racing.” IS IT FRUSTRATING TO NOT BE ABLE TO MAKE UP GROUND ON JIMMIE WHEN HE’S HAVING PROBLEMS? “It’s just frustrating in general because I was having fun.”
GREG BIFFLE – No. 16 3M Ford Fusion (Finished 8th) – “We didn’t have the best car today because it was just a handful. We weren’t right in happy hour and couldn’t get it right today. There weren’t any adjustments we could make to get it right. An eighth place finish is good. We pretty much ran 10th to 15th all day and then at the end a few guys tried to make it and ran out of gas, so we got those spots. We’re happy with it.”
MATT KENSETH – No. 17 DeWalt Ford Fusion (Finished 3rd) – YOU GOT FUEL. SMART DECISION. “Yeah, we were 10 laps short so we did everything we could. These guys did a really good job on this DeWalt team this weekend. We were pretty slow when we got here. We qualified 30th and had an uphill battle all day and I think we would have finished about third or fourth on performance and the way everything shook out, we still ran third, so, overall, I’m happy with that.” HOW ENCOURAGED ARE YOU WITH THE TEAM’S PERFORMANCE THE LAST SIX WEEKS? “It’s been better. We’ve been gaining on it. Here, and Charlotte, and Dover, and Kansas we had a really good run except we broke, so it seems like we’re gaining on it. We’ve got to keep it rolling. Next week will be a good test for us. We’ve been terrible at the flat tracks, so that’ll be a big test for us and then I’m looking forward to Homestead.”
AJ ALLMENDINGER – No. 44 Ford. Drive one. Ford Fusion (Finished 10th) – “I feel tired. That’s longer than you think out there, but I’m proud of everybody on the 44 team. Obviously, the end result of a top 10 is good, but we were top 12 to top 15 all day and got a little lucky on fuel mileage. We stopped and a couple of guys ran out, so I’m just proud of everybody. We kept working hard on this car all weekend and it really showed. We started off and weren’t very good on Friday and just kept picking away at it. It still wasn’t perfect. We’ve still got to work on it, but for our first race I was just really proud of everybody.” STRATEGY AND ALL WORKED OUT FOR YOU. “When you’re running decent it’s easy to stay calm and just kind of keep picking away at it. That’s what makes the top teams so good. They’re not always perfect, but they can always just keep picking at it and that’s what we did. It’s something to build on.” DID YOUR RACE TURN WHEN YOU WERE ABLE TO AVOID THE 48, WHICH CROSSED RIGHT IN FRONT OF YOUR NOSE? “That was nuts. I’m glad I missed it.”
NOTE: Richard Petty Motorsports is now 2-for-2 with Ford Racing as far as Top 10 finishes. Elliott Sadler finished 9th last week at Talladega to go with Allmendinger’s 10th-place run today.
DAVID RAGAN – No. 6 UPS Ford Fusion (Finished 17th) – “We just started way too loose today. We made some good adjustments all night long, but we just couldn’t make them fast enough. We tightened up our UPS Ford on almost every stop. Like I said, we made good adjustments that helped throughout the entire race, but they were in small increments. We needed to make more of a big impact with our adjustments. Our car was better at the end than what we started with, and we played the pit strategy game the best we could at the end. We had to come in a pit for fuel which may have cost us a few spots, but we were okay with our car tonight.”
MATT KENSETH PRESS CONFERENCE – HOW DID THINGS UNFOLD FOR YOU? “They were good for us. I thought when we knew we were short on fuel and I thought when we came and got tires with 25 to go and fuel that we actually had a shot to win, if some of those guys didn’t make it, but yet the 2 was real fast all day and Pat Tryson is famous for calling fuel-mileage races. I’m happy Kurt won because at least he was really fast all day and it wasn’t like somebody running 20th ran around half-throttle and won the race. So it was cool that Kurt pulled that off. I’m really happy for them. They were able to go a couple extra laps and be fast, and be able to stay out there, but we just got tires and raced as hard as we could all day. I thought we had a third or fourth-place car on performance and even though the fuel mileage thing, the way it worked out when we had to pit and all that, we still finished third, so, overall, it was a really great day for us. We started 30th and really had to battle hard for it all day long.”
TURN TWO SEEMED TO BE AN ISSUE ALL WEEKEND. IS IT MORE DIFFICULT AS THE TRACK CHANGED? “It’s always been difficult. The cool thing about what we do is we go to different tracks every week that present different challenges and this track the transition has always been flat going into the corner and coming out of the corner, which isn’t a bad thing, it’s just different. Every track has a unique personality. Turn one and two is a really fast turn, probably a little faster than three and four, and when you come off there and the banking goes away, and there were some issues with the wind there this weekend, too, blowing a tailwind – not so much tonight, but most of the week – so it just gets narrow off there. It’s just easy to hit the wall off there. It’s hard to run side-by-side in dirty air, so it’s just a challenging corner.”