Loudon Notes & Quotes
Written by John Davison · July 25, 2004
Notes & quotes from various drivers and crew during and following the Siemens 300 at New Hampshire International Speedway.
DALE EARNHARDT JR., NO 8 BUDWEISER CHEVROLET MONTE CARLO - Pre-race update per a Budweiser Team Rep: The plan for today’s race remains the same, which is for Dale Jr. will start the race and then turn the wheel over to Martin Truex Jr. during the first caution. The drivers did not practice the seat swap, but think it will go relatively smoothly. Since Martin Truex Jr. and Dale Jr. are the same size and use the exact same harnesses and seat belts, no major equipment changes are necessary. However, the team has attached some surgical tubing to the seat harnesses that will act like a spring and make unhooking, hooking, and adjusting the belts a much easier and quicker process. This technique was borrowed from the Corvette Racing program, where multiple drivers of various sizes and shapes drive one race car during an event.
The Budweiser Team has also put a cool box in the No. 8 Chevy.
RICKY CRAVEN, NO. 32 TIDE CHEVROLET MONTE CARLO - Brought out the caution on lap 60: “I made contact at Turn 2. The car behind me got into my right rear and put us in the wall.”
DALE EARNHARDT JR., NO. 8 BUDWEISER CHEVROLET MONTE CARLO - Comments after making the driver switch with Martin Truex Jr. during the caution on lap 60:
(HOW DO YOU FEEL?) “There aren’t many people I’d let drive my car. Martin’s one of them. Luckily he was available this weekend. The car is not that good. I think the car might be worse than I am. It’s real loose in and real tight in the middle. It won’t turn in the middle at all. Hopefully we can work on it and get it a lot better and get a pretty good finish. We were good all weekend in practice with Martin in the car. I know we can get a good run. We’ve just got to get the car a lot better.
“I was doing okay. The car just wasn’t as good as I thought it would be or that it had been all weekend. It ain’t no fun getting out, I’m going to tell you that. I like running here. But Martin is going to do a good job for me so it’ll be okay.”
(HOW DO YOUR INJURIES FEEL AND HOW WERE THEY OVER THE COURSE OF THAT RUN?) “My injuries didn’t really hurt bad, but it’s hard. It’s a pain I ain’t never felt before. But I was in two burn centers and I saw some people in there that are a lot worse off than I was. It made me really appreciate how lucky I was to get out of there with just the little burns I’ve got on my legs. But it’s not good enough to drive a car all weekend but hopefully next weekend we will be.”
(IT WAS A NICE DRIVER CHANGE. HOW ARE YOU FEELING?) “I don’t feel too bad. Martin’s been doing a real good job all weekend. The car isn’t handling too great but we’re going to work on that to get a good finish today.”
(WHAT ARE YOUR PLANS FOR THE REST OF THE AFTERNOON? ARE YOU GOING TO STAY OUT HERE AND WATCH THE RACE?) “I don’t know what I plan on doing really. I thought I’d get back and probably change clothes. But we’re just going to see what happens. This is a winning team. I think Martin can run good. This has been a good track for him over the years. I hated getting out of the car.
“That ain’t no fun. I trust Martin and what he can do. Hell, he’s probably better than I am at getting around this place. With this car and this team, he’s got a great chance today.”
(YOU STAYED IN THE CAR FOR 60 LAPS. WHERE DID IT WORK THE BEST?) “It wasn’t working at all. The car wasn’t handling too good. They’ve been working with the car all weekend. It’s been fast all weekend. I really haven’t been tuned in as much as Martin. The car is just not driving today like it has been all weekend. It’s a little loose in but they’re working on the car and hopefully will make it better.
(THE FANS WISH YOU WELL. THEY JUST GAVE YOU A BIG CHEER) “I’ll tell you what, the fans have been great. They’ve sent cards and well wishes. It’s been quite an experience. Aside from the injuries, I wouldn’t change anything. I’ve learned a lot of things through it and I’ll be a better race car driver once I’m back to 100 percent.”
(ON MAKING THE DRIVER SWITCH) “I don’t think it was that big of a deal. My burns weren’t bothering me so bad, but the car wasn’t driving so good. Martin does a good job around here. He’ll be fine as long as he’s staying calm and not being too anxious. He’s used to those quick Busch races - and being in split mode all day. not staying in the car all day. You’ve got to take your time here. You’ve got to save the tires. I think he’s the guy who can do a good job for me. He’s been driving it all weekend and he’s been doing a great job.”
(ON HIS BURNS) “It just hurts. I mean it hurts all the time. That’s all it does. It just hurts. But sitting down is a whole lot better than standing up.”
(HOW READY DO YOU THINK YOU’LL BE FOR POCONO NEXT WEEK?) “I don’t know. We’ll just have to wait and see. That’s what we did this weekend. We just didn’t know. And, we won’t know.”
RICKY CRAVEN, NO. 32 TIDE CHEVROLET MONTE CARLO: “I don’t know what happened. We spun around and I don’t know what happened. I’m pretty frustrated right now. I really don’t know what to say. We had high expectations. We got together with Jimmy. I hate accepting the responsibility of getting together with him; it’s just typical tight racing. But then we just got lifted in the right rear - just got picked up and turned into the wall. It killed the car. So it took us 50 laps to repair it and we went back out and just make some laps and it just blew apart. I haven’t had any thing just blow apart like that in a long time. I honestly don’t know why. It’s not like you can say you’re frustrated about this or that, I’m just frustrated.”
JEFF GORDON, NO. 24 DUPONT CHEVROLET MONTE CARLO - Finished 2nd: “It was a great day for us. I tell you what, when they dropped the green flag I thought we had something for ‘em. We just got loose in and really couldn’t get on top of it all day. But I’ll tell you what, a second place finish makes me really proud of the DuPont Chevrolet team. I wanted to say hello and send my prayers and thoughts to the whole Hendrick family. It’s been a tough week. But Pops would have been proud of that effort we put out there today. I’m real happy. To come from where we started and finish where we did - I’m real proud of that effort.
“We were able to get up there and battle with those guys. I don’t know if we were a second-place car, but we had a real good car on the restarts. I thought I could get up there beside Kurt (Busch), but we had the No.12 (Ryan Newman) behind us and everything. I would have had to give him a pretty big nudge to get him out of the way for that win. It may have cost us a win and maybe even second. I’m real proud of this team to have brought this car from 24th to second.”
TONY STEWART, NO. 20 HOME DEPOT CHEVROLET MONTE CARLO - Finished 5th: “We kept working on it all day. We got tight there. Greg (Zipadelli, crew chief) made a big change on the right rear. We just cranked some weight in it and got a little too free there. We had a good run there with Matt (Kenseth). I’m tickled to death to go to a track where not very many cars can say they came out of there without a scratch and we don’t have scratch one on our car.”
(WAS THERE A LOT OF GRIP ON THE TRACK TODAY?) “I don’t think so. I think the heat kind of made it a little bit slippery, which made for good racing. It made the track wide and made it to where we could all race each other a little bit. I think it was a good race and hopefully the fans enjoyed it today.”
“We had a good day. Obviously we would’ve liked to be higher than fifth, but it’s just another top-five and this is the time of year where we start putting those together. So, that’s what we need to do.”
JIMMIE JOHNSON, NO. 48 LOWE’S CHEVROLET MONTE CARLO - Finished 11th: “We got close to a top 10, but we just weren’t with it today. We didn’t have anything figured out. An 11th place finish out of that is pretty good for us and we’re excited about that. Luckily we stopped the bleeding before we bled to death with that two-tire strategy and got us up in there.”
(DID YOU LEARN SOME THINGS THIS WEEKEND?) “Oh, yeah. We definitely learned what car not to bring back here in a month or so. But I would expect that the No. 48 Lowe’s team will be back here testing very soon.”
(YOU WERE FAST IN QUALIFING, SLOWER IN HAPPY HOUR YESTERDAY, AND DEFINITELY OFF TODAY. WHAT WAS THE PROBLEM?) “We’re not sure. In Happy Hour, we weren’t real pleased with the car and we went back to last year’s set-up hoping that would be what we needed. It actually made it a lot looser. With the new shock package, new tire combination, and the track aging a little bit we just didn’t have the ideal set-up today.”
MARTIN TRUEX JR., RELIEF DRIVER FOR DALE EARNHARDT JR., NO. 8 BUDWEISER CHEVROLET MONTE CARLO - Finished 31st: (HOW WAS YOUR FIRST EXPERIENCE IN A CUP RACE?) “We were actually making out pretty good. We picked up some spots there in the beginning. We got up there and that’s when we got real tight and of course that’s when we got spun out. That was the end of our day. It knocked the tow out really bad and then we actually got really tight and lost another lap.
“If that wouldn’t have happened, I think we could have gotten it fixed and gotten the Lucky Dog because I think we were fast enough to do that once we got the car going. But like I said, once we got the tow knocked out and didn’t have time to fix it, the car just wouldn’t go at all. And that’s how we lost the second lap and had no chance of getting the free pass and it just ruined our day. Our car was pretty decent at the end.”
(WHAT HAPPENED WHEN YOU SPUN OUT?) “I don’t know. I was really tight and I was running up high. (Ken) Schrader was under me for a few laps. And actually on that lap I moved higher than I had been running. I don’t know what happened. I don’t know if he locked the brakes up or what he did. But he just drove up my quarter panel and wrecked me. There was nothing I could do about it.”
(WERE YOU DISAPPOINTED WITH THE SPIN OR THE FINISH OR WHAT?) “Well, with the finish. It’s better than 43rd. All they wanted was last-place points. They wanted him (Dale Jr.) to start the race and me to get in the car and get everything I could. And, 15 spots is 15 spots. I’m just disappointed in the way it ran. If I hadn’t have gotten spun out, I really think we could have run good. We had our car going good at the end of the race. We just lost too much time when we got the toe knocked ou
(DID YOU AND SCHRADER GET INTO IT A COUPLE OF TIMES?) “I don’t know why he was running me like that. I was trying to run him clean. But what are you going to do?”
(WHEN YOU MADE THE DRIVER SWITCH, WERE YOU EXCITED OR NERVOUS OR ANYTHING?) “I was fine. I thought it was cool that we did it so quick. We didn’t even practice this morning like we had planned. I just hopped down in there and threw the belts across me and the next thing I knew, I was going. So that worked good. I wouldn’t mind doing that again. But I would have liked to finish better.”
(DID YOU FIND YOUR AIR HOSE OR WATER HOSE OR WHATEVER IT WAS YOU WERE LOOKING FOR?) “Yeah, I found them both. It all happened so quick. By the time I finally got my gloves on it was time to go green. We went green and at the next caution I found all my stuff and was good to go. It was a fun race.”
(WILL YOU DO THIS AGAIN NEXT WEEK AT POCONO?) “Hopefully not. Hopefully Junior is good to go. I’ll get my shot in my own car hopefully some day.”
(DID JUNIOR SAY ANYTHING TO YOU ON THE RADIO DURING THE RACE?) “No, I haven’t talked to him. I think he got out of here pretty quick to rest up. The team was pretty happy with everything under the circumstances. When we got wrecked, it killed our day because we lost another lap trying to fix it. It just made the car handle terrible until we got the car fixed, which was 150 laps later. Once we got it fixed, the car was really good and I was happy with it. I could pass cars and I was able to run with the top five or six cars.”
(NEAR THE END, WHAT WAS GOING ON WITH THE NO. 2 AND THE NO. 88 BEHIND YOU?) “As soon as those guys would get to me, within a half a car length, I’d let them go. And then I’d wait for another opening and I’d go again. Rusty (Wallace) was two or three or four car lengths behind me the whole time. I was just in there (the trailer) changing and I heard them on TV complaining about me holding them up, which I don’t understand because I two or three car lengths ahead of him the whole time. So, what are you going to do? I’m a rookie. They’ll always blame something on me.”
MICHAEL WALTRIP, NO. 15 NAPA CHEVROLET MONTE CARLO - Finished 6th: “We had a top 10 finish for the NAPA team. We finished sixth. We were up in second spot and then had a bad pit stop and then wound up getting way in the back and fought our way all the way up to sixth. I’m real proud of the effort. We had a brake problem. The fan that cools the brakes on the front end of the car malfunctioned and so I had to really drive the car carefully. It hurt me some. I figured out how to deal with it. But we lost some speed because of that. All-in-all, it was a really good day.
“The points situation was improved and we moved up to 16th. Mainly, we gained on the top 10 again - only 15 points, with seven (races) to go and 200 back If I do the math correctly right quick, that’s about 30 points a race. So we’ll just have to try to do it and get it done. That’s very important to do. We’re going to Watkins Glen tonight and spend the day there tomorrow testing. And then it’s off to home for a couple of days and then to Pocono.”
KEVIN HARVICK, NO. 29 GM GOODWRENCH CHEVROLET MONTE CARLO - Finished 13th: “Track position was key out there today and once we lost it with those couple of bad pit stops, I knew we were going to be in trouble. Not getting a chance to pit and make up some gound really hurt us as well as all those cautions toward the end. My GM Goodwrench Chevy was tight toward the end and at every restart it took about 10 laps to get the tires to stop chattering because they had no heat in them. There was just way too much traffic back in the back to make up any kind of ground there toward the end. It’s frustrating because we had a pretty decent car today.”
ROBBY GORDON, NO. 31 CINGULAR WIRELESS CHEVROLET MONTE CARLO - Finished 25th: “We just couldn’t find a good balance today. My front tires were chattering the majority of the first half, and I went back and forth between really loose and tight handling the rest of the day.
“It’s disappointing because I love racing here, but not the way we did today. We missed it this time and have won here before. It doesn’t make sense.
“I’m still confused about not receiving the Lucky Dog during the seventh caution of the day. The No. 21 (Ricky Rudd) was the first car a lap down and wrecked. I was the second car a lap down, but was denied the Lucky Dog. I did eventually get the Lucky Dog two cautions after that, but I just don’t get it. I know if you are the second car a lap down and spin the first car one lap down, you do not receive the Lucky Dog, but I didn’t touch the No. 21. Richard Childress and I have a few questions for NASCAR, that’s for sure.”
TERRY LABONTE, NO. 5 KELLOGG’S CHEVROLET MONTE CARLO - Finished 16th and advanced from 21st to 20th and is within 147 points of 15th-place Mark Martin with 17 races remaining: “We started today the way we finished practice yesterday … just a little off on the chassis. We made some adjustments to the car and it got better, but track position was the whole ballgame and we never really made that big move to the front.
“I know 800 races sounds like a lot and I don’t think I ever figured I’d run that many, but it’s an honor to be in that small group of drivers that’s reached that number (Richard Petty, Dave Marcis, Ricky Rudd, Darrell Waltrip). Today’s finish helped us a little in the points, too, so that’s important.”
JEFF GORDON, NO. 24 DUPONT CHEVROLET MONTE CARLO - Finished 2nd - he’s had five poles and four wins this season…..this was his 8th top-five finish and his 14th top-10 finish. Post-race press conference highlights:
“We had a real strong car at the beginning and then fell off a little bit during the middle and then had a real strong car there at the end. When they dropped the green, I was very excited because we were passing cars and really driving strong to the front. We got a little bit loose toward the end of that run getting into the corner - and we struggled with that throughout most of the day - but it was a really solid effort by the team. We struggled on Friday in qualifying, but I think we learned some things for when we come back.
“We certainly were good today, but we weren’t as good as the No. 97. I made a few attempts there at the end. I got a couple of good restarts and got a run on him and tried to just force him to make a mistake and maybe get too aggressive and put some pressure on him. He did a couple of times and I got my nose underneath him. But he was just so strong I really just couldn’t finish it off. There at the end on that last restart, I spun the tires and pretty much took away our chances of getting another run on him. I just tried to tuck in there behind him and pull off a second-place finish. I’m very happy with it.”
(WHAT CHANGES DID THE TEAM MAKE FROM FRIDAY TO MAKE YOUR CAR SO STRONG ON SUNDAY?) “We tried a little something different in the geometry on the front end of the car. We didn’t come up here and test. We did that on purpose. We decided to use this as more of a test for when we come back here in the final 10. Race conditions are the best way to learn things. I thought we learned a lot. But we changed something in the front end for Saturday and the car just came right back to life. It was one of those changes that took too long for us to do on Friday, so I was asking for the change. We tried to work around it. We didn’t have time because we were the first to qualify.”
(TODAY, THE WINNER STARTED 32ND AND THE RUNNER-UP STARTED 24TH. WHAT’S CHANGED?) “The Bahre’s have done a great job with the configuring the track to give us more lanes to pass on. When they changed the banking here, it really changed this race track. It made an outside groove and made a little bit more room for cars to get underneath. At the beginning when I was passing cars, that was the best I’ve ever seen cars pass. I wasn’t the only one, obviously, because the No. 97 (Kurt Busch) and the No. 17 (Matt Kenseth) were coming up behind me as well. I think Goodyear chose a good tire here. I think a softer tire here is good and also the track configuration. Last year we had trouble with the rubber or the surface - I don’t know what it was - but we had a little trouble today. It seemed to be real good other than the brake markers down there in Turn 1 - everything was real good for passing and for racing side-by-side.”
(DO YOU HAVE ANY PLANS TO EXPERIMENT WITH THINGS BETWEEN NOW AND THE FINAL 10 RACES?) “We’ve been saving a lot of our tests for a lot of those tracks in the last 10 races. Obviously we’re going to be heavily testing and trying not to wear the team out and trying to learn as much as we can prior to those last 10 races. We’re fortunate to be in a position right now to play that strategy because we’re pretty solidly in the top 10 and things are going well for us. Obviously we’re going to do some things differently when we come back here. We weren’t the fastest car, but we were one of them. We got beat pretty bad by that No. 97 (Busch) car and the No. 12 (Newman) most of the day. We’re going to change some things there. But as far as I’m concerned, if there’s one of those tracks in the last 10, we’re going to use it as test if we’re not already testing there.”
(ON TRYING TO CATCH KURT BUSCH) “Kurt did a good job on the restarts because he never did the same thing twice. And that’s important when you’re the leader and restarts are as important as they are. One of the places where my car was real strong was on the restarts. For a lap or two I could really hang with him and seemed to pull away from the guys behind us. The first couple of restarts, he was leaving early. One time, I anticipated him leaving early and I just poked my nose down there and just got out of his mirror just to make him try to drive in there deeper. And the funny thing is that he made a big mistake down in Turn 1, but the problem was that I made one too. That last one (restart) he did the exact opposite. He actually slowed us way down and I got to his bumper and he then he took off and I spun the tires. And so it was pretty much over right there when it began.”
(IN WHAT WAY IS THIS A GLIMPSE OF WHAT WE MIGHT SEE IN SEPTEMBER?) “Other than weather conditions, I would say as long as Goodyear keeps the same tire we should see a lot of the same thing - other than Jimmie Johnson, I think this is one of his strongest tracks and he’ll be a lot faster when we come back. But obviously we learn every race. You’d be surprised at what a lot of teams will learn and how they’ll be stronger when they come back. The No. 97 and the No. 17 - those Roush cars were strong and those are the guys we’re going to have to beat - plus the No.12 car.”
(WILL YOU BRING THIS SAME CAR BACK IN SEPTEMBER?) “I don’t know. I’m not sure if we have plans to take this car anywhere or now. If we have plans to take it somewhere, we’ll still take it there. We’ve got good race cars and we can duplicate a car to make sure we bring a good one back here. But I don’t know the answer to that question.”
(DID LOSING THOSE BRAKE MARKERS IN TURN 1 HAVE ANY AFFECT ON THINGS?) “Not as much as I thought it was going to. Luckily for me, I had a Rev Limiter in the car so I just used that as my brake marker. So if I didn’t get off Turn 4 very good and I waited for the rev chip to hit, I’d be in trouble (laughs). I like having reference points out there. I would have liked to have had just a mark on the wall. We asked for it several times - just put a paint stripe or something on the wall. I understand why they wanted to pull them off because they were falling off and causing cautions. But we don’t want to take too much time in those cautions to replace things like that or fix it. A stripe of paint would be easy to do and quick.
(WITH THE WAY THE RACE WAS GOING DOWN, WERE YOU CONCERNED THERE MIGHT BE A GREEN-WHITE-CHECKERED AT THE END?) “Yeah, I was. If you look at the way it ended, it was basically a five-lap shootout anyway. It kind of worked out to be the same thing. I was thinking to myself that the first race we have the new rule we’d have it end that way. I think that because we go single file with those closing laps it helps on the restarts not to have as many cautions. When you go double file with those lapped cars, that’s usually where the wrecks happen. I was hoping it would stay clean all the way to the end.”
(CAN YOU TAKE US THROUGH YOUR PASS ON THE NO.12 CAR?) “When the No. 97 (Busch) got inside of him (Newman), I dove down into Turn 1 and I was following the No. 97 but saw the No. 12 car get on the brakes real hard and cut left like he was going to try to go back underneath him, and when he tried to do that he got really loose and slid up the track and I was able to get by him.”
(IF YOU HAD QUALIFIED BETTER, YOU WOULD HAVE HAD A BETTER FINISH?) “The No. 97 won and he started further back than we did. Yeah, that would have been nice because you can do a little bit different set-up that way. We started really loose to be able to maneuver through traffic and pass because you really get tight behind other cars here. I would like to have started a little bit tighter. But every time we did that, it hurt the middle of the corner and it didn’t seem to help the entry and exit where we needed it. I know we didn’t drive up there fast, but by New Hampshire standards we drove up there pretty quick.
“I felt like we were a fifth or sixth place car. When we got up to second, I didn’t know if we were going to be able to hold them off. But I realized that track position is still really crucial here. I don’t know what could have happened if I could have gotten in front of that No. 97. I don’t know if I could have held him off.”
(THE GREEN-WHITE-CHECKERED DIDN’T SEEM TO HAVE AN IMPACT TODAY, BUT DO YOU THINK IT WILL IN THE FUTURE?) “It’s going to be an impact somewhere. Today we had something close to that with the five-lap shootout. It’s going to happen. It might not change the outcome of the race, but it might. We’ll just have to deal with it when it happens.”
(HOW CLOSE WERE YOU TO RUNNING OUT OF GAS TODAY?) “I hope we were in the green to make it. They were telling me when we first put fuel in it to really save a lot of fuel. So you run around there in fourth gear and take it out of gear and do a lot of things. But at this track, you really have to scuff your tires a lot. You have to get a lot of heat built up because cold tires are tough and tricky. What you try to do is scuff your tires and when you do, you use a lot of fuel. I was trying to ride around there in fourth gear and not scuff my tires until the last second and then scuff them really hard and go back racing.”
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RYAN NEWMAN (No. 12 ALLTEL Dodge) - Finished Third - “I think our car was good, obviously, from the start. It paid to come up here and test for sure, but I think our car pretty much stayed the same and the 97 and 24 got a little bit better. Once they got track position they were pretty tough to beat. I think what you saw at the end were the fastest cars. That was pretty much my day.
“I was hoping Jeff would hit the 97 and I could blow by both of them, but we all have our own ideas. We were actually trying to free it up in the center, but that’s something that’s really tough to do here. It’s just a matter of trying a few things, and we actually went back on some of the things we did change and made it a little bit better there that last run. But once I lost track position it’s hard to get it back.
“After the last few weeks we’ve had (first top 10 finish since his victory at Michigan on June 20) it’s not frustrating at all. To lead the most laps and come home with a top five is good for the points, it’s good for the championship playoff perspective and we’ll take it and run. I wish we could have won, obviously. I wouldn’t say we’re disappointed with finishing third. We’ll do all we can to come back and be better.
“I was loose getting in on that run there (when Kurt Busch passed). I got loose getting into three and he got underneath me and got a good run off four. I knew he was going to try to wash up and take my line away from me going into one, so I tried to cut loose underneath him and got real loose when I did that. I got up in the marbles a little bit and that’s when the 24 car got by me. That was just a bad place, bad timing.”
KASEY KAHNE (No. 9 Dodge Dealers/UAW Dodge) - Finished 8th, top Raybestos rookie - “It started off pretty good. We were a little too loose and got the car better and drove up to four or fifth I think. On the yellow I tried following the 20 too long down pit road and didn’t get into my pit stall soon enough and slid through it when I did get to it. I lost 15 spots or something because of that. We had a pretty good racecar, so we had to pass ‘em back, but I lost too much track position. Hopefully we gained some points there. We need to get in the top 10, but it’s hard to do. We ran up front most of the day and had a good finish, so we’re looking forward to going back to Pocono. We ran pretty good there earlier this season until I hit the wall, so we should be good to go back.
“It really seems to be pretty good being a flat track. You can pass a lot better than I thought coming into it. It’s definitely not easy to pass. It takes lap after lap usually to get it done, but you can go outside, inside and just try to work somebody until you finally get ‘em.”
RUSTY WALLACE (No. 2 Miller Lite Dodge) - Finished 30th - “He (Dale Jarrett) just got into my rear end coming off turn four. I don’t know what happened, but it was just tight racing and it was getting late in the race. I was looking in my rear view mirror and I was getting held up by that 8 car that was two laps down. I don’t know if he was blocking for his teammate or what. We kept trying to move him out of the way, and he wouldn’t get out of the way. Michael got underneath me and I thought I was OK there. Then the 88 got into me. That was uncharacteristic of Dale, so I don’t have a problem with that. He’s a good guy and I know he just made a mistake. Those other guys, I don’t know about that.
“Every single race this car is in the top 10 or top five and something goofy happens. That’s the most stupid thing I’ve ever seen. I like Dale a lot. He just made a mistake. That’s all there is to it. All those restarts and that lapped 8 car was just in the way. That was unbelievably unrespectful for him to do something like that. It was ridiculous.”
JAMIE McMURRAY (No. 42 Texaco/Havoline Dodge) - Finished 7th - “I ran third most of the day. We just got beat in the pits again. We didn’t have bad pit stops. They just weren’t quite quick enough to run up there with the leaders. We’re just going to have to work on it. When you lose two or three spots every time you pit there’s not much we can do about it. I thought we had a car fast enough to win the race, but you’ve just got to have good track position. I’m not sure what kind of points day it’s going to turn out to be. It looks like everybody we’re racing is right there with us. We probably didn’t gain a lot or lose a lot. We’ve just got to keep digging and keep finishing.”
JEREMY MAYFIELD (No. 19 Dodge Dealers/UAW Dodge) - Finished 10th - “This hasn’t been one of our best tracks. We came out of here today with a top 10, and we’re really happy with that. We wanted to win here, but we’ll take what we got and keep going. The track changed on us a little bit today, and we just couldn’t adjust fast enough. It kept getting tighter and tighter and tighter, but we came home 10th and that’s OK. This is one of the places we were really concerned about, and to get a top 10 here is a step in the right direction. I couldn’t believe all those restarts, but I’m glad we had ‘em there at the end. It probably really helped us. Our car was just too tight to do anything with it.”
No. 9 CREW VAN HIT EN ROUTE TO NHIS - Six members of the No. 9 Dodge Dealers/UAW team were hit from behind in the team van en route to New Hampshire International Speedway on Sunday morning. The van was stopped in traffic and rear-ended while stopped. The impact knocked the van into another car, but no one was seriously injured. Jeff Seaburg, driver of the No. 9 transport truck, was sitting in the rear of the van. He complained of back pains later Sunday morning and was taken to a Concord hospital for tests. He has a strained back but was released from the hospital and returned to the track in time for the start of the race. Seaburg, a Las Vegas native, will not drive the team transporter back home to Statesville, N.C.
FERNANDEZ FINISHES SECOND IN SCCA RACE AT LIMEROCK - John Fernandez, Director of Dodge Motorsports Operations, finished second Saturday in the SCCA T-2 Division race in Limerock, Conn, driving a Dodge SRT-4.
“We had Larry Webster from Car & Driver in the second car, and he was running really well,” Fermandez said. “He qualified third and was running third in the race after three laps and had an electrical problem of some kind and blew the fuel line fuse and shut the fuel pump down. We had a lot of fun. I’ve won three times this year in the T-2 division, but second is the best we could do yesterday.”
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* Kurt Busch registered his 10th NASCAR NEXTEL Cup Series victory this afternoon, becoming only the 17th driver in Ford Racing history to reach double digits. Ned Jarrett is the manufacturer’s all-time leader with 43 wins.
* New Hampshire International Speedway becomes the seventh different track Busch has won on in his NNC career. Bristol is the only track in which he has posted multiple wins (4).
* The win was Busch’s second of 2004 (Bristol) and sixth for Ford. He joined Matt Kenseth as two-time winners this season while Mark Martin
(Dover) and Elliott Sadler (Texas) have one victory apiece.
* Busch’s victory also marked the 80th points race win for Taurus since it became Ford’s flagship model in the NASCAR NEXTEL Cup Series in 1998.
* Ford has now won six times in 2004, which is second behind Chevrolet’s 11.
RICKY RUDD - No. 21 Motorcraft Taurus (Finished 39th) - “That was kind of a crazy accident really. We came up on two cars that were running side-by-side that were considerably slower than the pace was. I’m surprised NASCAR didn’t black them because they were having trouble keeping up. Anyway, we came up on them and Mark was right behind me, and I guess we caught everybody so quick that when I hit the brakes Mark drove right in the back of me. It wasn’t intentional on his part and I hope he didn’t get his car tore up too badly, but it was just bad timing.”
THE SAFER BARRIER SOFTENED THAT BLOW? “I would hate to think that was concrete because it hit a ton. I was braced for it and knew it was gonna be a hard hit and it was a hard hit. Evidently, they must be working.”
GREG BIFFLE - No. 16 National Guard/Subway Taurus (Finished 35th) - YOU HIT PRETTY HARD. “Yeah, I did. They just didn’t clean the oil up on the race track good enough and I got high going in the corner. I actually did it two laps in a row. I was stupid enough to do it the second time, but it’s just the way it goes. It’s just unfortunate. We had a pretty decent car. We’re gaining on it, but we’re still not where we need to be.”
MATT KENSETH - No. 17 DEWALT Tools Taurus (Finished 4th) - “It was good, but we just weren’t that good on restarts. On long runs we were reasonable, but we didn’t have anything for those front couple of cars. We were a third, fourth or fifth-place car and we finished fourth, so overall it’s a good day.”
THE CAUTIONS HURT YOU. “You can’t pass very good here, so it’s an advantage to be up front. The tires don’t drop off much, so you just stay out as long as you can and try to get track position.”
IT WASN’T THE NEW GREEN-WHITE-CHECKERED RULE, BUT IT WAS JUST ABOUT THAT. YOU HAD A GOOD BATTLE WITH TONY STEWART. “It was good. To race with Tony is great. There are certain guys that might take advantage, but Tony is not going to do that. He raced me hard and he was better than I was on restarts. On long runs I could get him back, so it turned out OK. It was hairy though because my car wouldn’t go anywhere on restarts and this is a tough place for that, but at most tracks it will be OK.”
HOW WAS YOUR RUN? “We had a great run. The Smirnoff Ice guys did a great job. We had great pit stops when we needed them and had track position, but we didn’t have the car that Kurt did. Congratulations to those guys because they had the field covered all day.”
DALE JARRETT - No. 88 UPS Taurus (Finished 9th) - “The 9 car was trying to catch me there and I just got a run and touched him (Rusty Wallace). I hate it, but that’s part of it.”
YOU HAVE GOOD MOMENTUM TRYING TO GET IN THE TOP 10. “Yeah, but we’ve got to have seven more good races. If we can have them all in the top 10, then there’s a possibility that we’ll get in there, but we can’t have any hiccups from this point on. It may take some misfortune from some other guys. If they have that, then we have to be there to capitalize on it. I like what we’re doing. We’re going to Watkins Glen tomorrow for what I hope is a good test and that will be an important race for us. I’m looking forward to going back to Pocono next week. We had a great car there the first time and we’re taking the same car back and maybe we can get back to victory lane.”
THE DEAL WITH RUSTY. WILL YOU APOLOGIZE? “Yeah. I’ll go and tell him I’m sorry. That doesn’t do any good because I’ve been on that end of it, but I wasn’t trying to get into him. I wasn’t concerned about making a pass on him as much as I was concerned about just running and trying to stay in front of the 9. I don’t know if I just got aggressive or if he didn’t get in the gas, but, anyway, I touched him. That wasn’t what I wanted to do, but, unfortunately, it happened.”
KURT BUSCH - No. 97 Sharpie/IRWIN Taurus - VICTORY LANE INTERVIEW - “It’s great to come up here and race in New England. I actually spent two weeks up here. We had a weekend off and I raced at the Oxford 250 over in Maine. It’s been a wonderful trip and they have wonderful fans up here in New England. It feels good to get the Irwin Industrial Tools car to victory lane.”
YOU’VE HAD SOME BAD LUCK OF LATE, BUT YOU MOVED UP TO SIXTH IN POINTS. “This is where it all begins when we come back here in September. All the fans should get excited and geared up for that because it’s gonna be just that. I thought that we had to apply pressure this week and start our 10 races to go now even though there are still this many races left. We’ve got our work cut out for us.”
YOU STARTED 32ND. HOW DID YOU GET TO THE FRONT? “It was just a great car that would run on long runs. It didn’t qualify well. It didn’t qualify well at Richmond its other time out, so you just have to watch for this Irwin Industrial Tools car to come from the back each time. We haven’t figured out why it doesn’t qualify, but we know why it’s running well up front.”
THE CAUTION WITH 10 TO GO. HOW NERVOUS WERE YOU WITH JEFF GORDON BEHIND YOU? “He’s been the guy to beat and if you want to win a race, you’ve got to beat Jeff Gordon nowadays. He’s been strong on big tracks and little tracks alike. It’s great to be able to challenge him and to have this good of a car and the crew gave me this opportunity today.”
JEFF BURTON - No. 99 Roush Racing Taurus (Finished 12th) - “That’s the worst we’ve run in the last month. We got pretty good during the middle of the race. On long runs we were pretty competitive, but on short runs we were no good. We got up to about ninth, but gave up four spots after all of those restarts. We just couldn’t go at the start. Mark had the same trouble and we just kept backing up. It’s not terrible and it’s not great.”
DID THE TRACK CHANGE FROM SATURDAY TO SUNDAY? “It didn’t change all that much, really. At the start I thought it was pretty slippery and slimy, but after that I thought it was pretty much the same.”
MARK MARTIN - No. 6 Viagra Taurus (Finished 14th) - AFTER QUALIFYING YOU DIDN’T SOUND THAT OPTIMISTIC, BUT THIS WAS A PRETTY GOOD DAY. “That was a special job by Pat Tryson and this race team. The Viagra team is an incredible race team. I knew that if they did an incredible job they could get us an eighth to a 15th-place finish and they did that. If there weren’t so many cautions at the end, we could have run up about eighth, but I also knew that if things didn’t go our way, we could run 25th to 27th. It was a smart job and great work by the team. The car wasn’t what we were looking for but we’ll have one next week.”
ALL OF THE CAUTIONS HURT YOU. “My car wouldn’t take off after the cautions. It was real good on hot tires. It was a sixth to 10th place car on hot tires, but it was a twenty-something-place car on cold tires. That’s why it was always slow in qualifying and in practice because you only get a five-lap run in practice. At lap five it would stabilize and at lap 20 I’d run off and leave all the guys that were eating me up. It was a good job by the team.”
KURT BUSCH PRESS CONFERENCE - “This is a car Jimmy Fennig built prior to this year and its first race was Richmond a few months ago and it didn’t qualify well at all. All four tires were just sliding around and that’s the same circumstance we had on Friday as well with not being able to push the tires into the race track. We thought we made the right adjustment and we went the wrong way, so it was more of a burden than we thought. There’s no real reason why this car won’t qualify well, but it does a great job of taking care of the tires. When you don’t punish tires, your car will come to the front during a long run. I think that’s why we qualified poorly with this car and we raced real well for it. Like I said, there’s no explanation for it.”
DESCRIBE THE PASS ON RYAN. “He had a great starting position and was able to lead laps early on. Our car would just get better and better on the run with the same setup under the car without adjustments. It would come to the front with better and better lap times throughout the run. We’d make small adjustments on the car not to upset the balance and it continued to get better as the day progressed. We just left the car alone on the last stop. There was really nothing you could do to our car that would run those types of lap times once it got out in front. We did have to deal with Newman. We’ve been here in the past trying to pass him for the lead. It was back in 2002 and it was a rain-shortened race that happened to be Newman’s first win. We raced each other probably hard for 40 laps straight through not knowing when it was finally gonna rain hard enough to throw the yellow and that would be the completion of the event. This time around I knew I had laps in my favor. Just to lead one lap would have been nice to get those bonus points, but to be able to come away with the victory with such a great car, I’m ecstatic. The crew did such a tremendous job being in an abbreviated position. We had one guy at home with his wife having a baby this week. I don’t know if they had it yet. I hope they don’t name it Loudon. It’s not really that good of a name for a boy or a girl, and then we had a crew guy leave us this week. So we had a couple guys in abbreviated positions and the other guys picked up the slack and were that much more determined to see what type of effort we could put forth. This is a great track for us. It’s a mile and it doesn’t have much to do with aero or with the new balance of these tires. It’s just a matter of getting the car around the race track.”
JACK ROUSH, Car Owner - “What I’ve seen in my 16, 17 years is that a driver straps the car up going for one lap and he goes out and punishes one tire or three tires. On a good day he can some grip on all four tires and goes and gets what he can, and then you come back and make a decent, livable race car that will go a full fuel stop for the race itself. We just don’t have the package figured out on how to qualify this car. This car is a Jimmy Fennig formula for a flat track, which is different than the cars we would run at Dover or at Michigan or at Fontana or at many of the other places. But it will go back to Martinsville and certainly it’ll go back to Richmond. Hopefully, it’ll be in good shape so it can go to Martinsville as well. Jimmy’s got something special here that doesn’t apply everywhere. I think the good news is I asked Jimmy, Pocono is a little bit of a flat track, too, and as we’re basking in the glory of the race and what’s happened here and everybody is feeling good about our day, and any amount of work in the future doesn’t look like it would be too much to undertake and I said, ‘Do we have a better car for Pocono?’ And Jimmy assures me that we do - for Pocono - that he and Kurt have a strategy for a car that’s gonna be what we need for that, which is a little different than what we face here. But we’re in good shape for this car to bring it back to start the Chase for the Championship, which we now have some breathing room with Kurt on. I’m real proud and happy about the cars they’ve prepared. One of the things that NASCAR doesn’t regulate is the chemistry and the chemistry between Jimmy and the car chief and Kurt today was just awesome and that bodes very well for the rest of the season. I’m real happy with what we’ve got in front of us.”
YOU HAD A PROBLEM AT CHICAGO THAT WASN’T OF YOUR DOING. HOW MUCH BETTER DOES THIS MAKE YOU FEEL AS FAR AS YOUR POSITION IN POINTS? “I guess it’s that cushion. Two weeks ago after the race, the team looked at one another going, ‘We now have to come up to an at-bat and get the calls from the third base coach and lay down a bunt when we have to. We’ve got to steal a base when we have to. We’ve got to play aggressively.’ I believe that our Chase for the Champoinship started today. It started with the first Loudon instead of the second Loudon just because of our points position. We’ve got our tests saved up for the latter part of the year with Kansas, Martinsville, Charlotte, Miami and there’s one more test in there that I’m missing. So we’re prepared for the final 10, but now we’ve got to make sure we can get into it. This is a great cushion to have. We didn’t know we’d run this well, but this car just has that chemistry with flat tracks and I can’t wait to get back to another one.”
DO YOU WANT THIS CAR AGAIN IN SEPTEMBER AND HOW MIGHT THAT RACE BE DIFFERENT THAN TODAY? “Well, it will be the first race of the final 10. Obviously, the pressure on those guys in the top 10 will be tremendous and it will be the race following Richmond, so we’ve got to make sure that we get this car through Richmond. We might be on the teeter-totter again at Richmond. We still have to attack each race as if we have to gain as many points as we can and not slip. When we come back here in the fall, I’d like to see some changes to our car that we had today to make it better because you always have to continue to make things better. So we’ll look at the gear and we’ll look at the transmission for restarts in case there is an opportunity for a green-white-checker at the end. We’ll just continue to improve our game everywhere we can look.”
ANY INFORMATION FROM THE BUSCH RACE? “Jimmy Fennig and I didn’t derive much from the Busch race, but Matt Kenseth may have with his car. The setup between us two are confidential and on both ends of the page. I’m not saying that we were similar in ways or different in ways, just two different approaches. We’ve had that for some race tracks, whereas we’ve been identical for others. Kenseth is a great teammate to be able to go to for information. We used his front shocks today, where he probably used something of ours. That’s what teammates have to do. Our cars are built under the same roof, so we’re able to communicate easily between the guys that work in the fab shop and then of course with Jimmy Fennig and Robbie Reiser as well.”
JACK ROUSH CONTINUED - “There’s a real time link between the six teams, including the Wood Brothers, where the engineers know when a shock is being changed or a spring is being changed in practice. They have drivers and the crew chiefs and the engineers have a meeting after happy hour to see what they found that goes right and wrong. Typically, they’ll look at one another’s setup and I say, ‘Yes, that’s what he’s running,’ and I should be that much different than him. Or, in some cases if they think their driving style and their cars are identical for some of the parameters that are key to setup, they’ll come back and say, ‘Alright, I’m a little screwed up. If Kurt can drive it, I’m gonna drive it.’ But Matt and Kurt typically have got a little bit different setup and they pace themselves so far away from one another in terms of springs and things. But some things like shocks and tire pressure and other things are pretty much constants. As soon as they figure out that somebody has got a better package there, well then that’s what they adopt.”
DOES THIS CAR GIVE YOU MORE CONFIDENCE? “On the cars, the flat track car - there is a flat track car formula that is understood based on where the center of gravity is and some of the components in the car. That information is generally known and followed throughout. The final nuance of the control arms and the spindles and some of the other things, the crew chiefs have got their own preference for giving the drivers what they want to feel, so they are a little different. Depending on those decisions, then the last 50 pounds of spring, sometimes 100 pounds of spring, an eighth-inch of a bar will vary.”
DO YOU HAVE AN ASSEMBLY LINE PROCESS? “We do have an assembly line process to build the cars and to build the bodies. As soon as the crew chiefs decide or I decide or the drivers collectively decide that we all want this car, then the car can be duplicated. I’m sure that Mark will be looking at what Kurt and Matt had before we go to another track that is similar - a Richmond - that he’ll have a car more like that. But I suspect that when Matt thinks about what his day was, that he probably missed it on bar or missed it on spring or on weight or something that will cause him not to want to give up on his car, but to tweak it and bring it on back.”
KURT BUSCH - CAN YOU COMPARE TRACKS LIKE THIS? “We’ve thoroughly enjoyed the success with this car. Will it continue? We don’t know that. The information is available to our other teams. I’ll leave that to Jimmy Fennig. He’ll be able to relay the information to the other teams, where you don’t want to give away your secrets because those will be your competition. I hope that we can race other Roush cars for the victory and if this car continues to run well, it’s just a testament to Jimmy Fennig’s ability and to the team’s ability to build a specific car for a specific application and then to run well with it. Things fell into place today. They might not fall into place at Richmond or Loudon or Phoenix - wherever they might be - but it’s a car that can win and, hopefully, can be duplicated.”
CAN YOU DISCUSS ALL THOSE RESTARTS AND HAVING TO DRIVE THROUGH THE FIELD? “This place is notorious for bad qualifying if you go out early. You have to deal with it. It’s just the way that the race track absorbs heat from the sun, the way the asphalt is able to maintain temperature. When you go out early, it’s a hurdle you have to overcome. Gordon sat on four previous poles leading up to this event and the track challenged him to lay down a lap and he wasn’t able to. We went out fourth and we weren’t able to. The more the track gains heat, the faster the cars go. It’s similar in race trim as well when you’re out racing around. The tires start off cold. You slide around quite heavily and then you gain more momentum as you run because the temperature of the track and the tire match each other.”
WHAT ABOUT THE RESTARTS? “Our car was a car that wouldn’t abuse tires whatsoever. It was tough on the restarts to hold the 24 off. He’s been in his prime the past two months with being able to win at big tracks, short tracks. If any other competitor was there, you’d still have to beat him, but Gordon is the toughest right now. With the restarts at the end of the race and his car being better on cold tires, we had our hands full. I knew there was an opportunity for a green-white-checker, so any restart I knew couldn’t be the last one.”
DID YOU MAKE A MISTAKE ON THE NEXT-TO-LAST RESTART? “Yes. There was probably an opportunity for him to get underneath us. It seemed like his gear ratios were a bit better from the start-finish line to turn one, so those are things that we’ll change when we come back and try to alleviate that problem to where we can stretch it out no matter what. But when you’ve got lapped cars taken away from you on the inside and now it’s single-file with the leaders, it’s that much more difficult to stretch out a lead.”
CAN YOU DESCRIBE THE LAST PASS OF RYAN? “The worst thing about that pass was that the door was open for the 24 to follow. I had no idea his car was that strong. The opportunity to pass here is limited. You have to do certain things with your car that give you corner speed or they give you exit speed. Those two are different and with Ryan Newman slipping up, we were able to gain the momentum underneath him through one and two. You hope you don’t leave the door open for others to come along through because you want them to have to deal with the same issues that you had to go through with opening a door and then closing it behind you. But he was able to squeak through. Newman is a tough competitor and he just slipped up a little bit where our car was just that much better in that specific time.”
DID YOU SPEND THE WHOLE WEEK HERE? “It was just a great vacation in New England. It’s not often that you get an off-weekend with the Nextel Cup Series. We’ve now got 17 straight, 18 straight weeks where you’re gonna be competing and it was good to take a break and to go back to what you would call your Saturday night roots of running a Late Model race. That’s what I did. Kenseth and I both ran in that Oxford 250 and it’s a great touch to do once a year - to get back to your roots and to sign millions of autographs with all the pit passes that people get and to pack the stands. They said they haven’t had a grandstand sellout like that since the early eighties. That meant a lot to Kenseth and I - to be able to bring that much excitement to the New England area and that’s a track Bob Bahre built such as New Hampshire International Speedway.”
IS YOUR CONTROVERSIAL ASPECT GONE AND DO YOU THINK FANS ARE EMBRACING YOU MORE? “Each race track is a different challenge and to be able to absorb the fans’ reaction is another challenge. Being from the southwest, you see things that the southeast doesn’t see or that the northeast wants to cheer for you in a different direction. It’s a fun challenge at every race track that we go to, to try to win. Whether it’s appreciated or not, it’s competition. It’s the value of this sport. It always starts off rough when you’re a rookie, whether you wrinkle somebody’s fender the wrong way. I picked the biggest guy to pick on and that probably wasn’t the right thing to do, but you learn from those circumstances and it’s fun to be able to come away with a win like today where you didn’t expect anything to really happen. At Bristol, we might expect things to happen. I’d just expect to survive, but wins like today help the fans gain more knowledge about Irwin Industrial Tools - our sponsor - and the driver who was able to win on a short track or flat track or banked track and have some fun. I’m a guy that likes to go and compete hard. My tenacity might not match what is should have when I first came into the series and I’ve been able to make some changes to that and try to achieve success everywhere we go now.”
CAN YOU COMPARE THE IMPORTANCE OF WINNING AGAINST THE IMPORTANCE OF SALVAGING A GOOD FINISH? “Each race they give us an opportunity to pass cars or to have pitfalls in the pits. When there’s a number of laps that you have to deal with, you learn to pace yourself, whether you’re first and you lead each lap until somebody comes up and passes you. Then it’s a whole different game than when you’re coming from 32nd up to the lead. We continued to work on our car and make it better, whereas Newman may have thought he had a great car and didn’t make adjustments. We were able to get by him. They usually hand out points right after the checkered flag falls and that’s where you have to be competitive.”
IT’S BEEN ROUGH SINCE BRISTOL. DID YOU FEEL SECURE IN THE TOP 10 OR THAT IT WAS SLIPPING AWAY? “It was time to go. We looked at it as a position that we didn’t necessarily deserve to be in or didn’t want to be in. What better place than the track you’re gonna start the chase for the cup than to get everybody kicked into high gear. It was just one circumstance after the next. We had a mechanical issue at Sonoma and then backed it up with a top-five at Daytona. Then we had a guy get a flat tire in front of us at Chicago. It’s just the rollercoaster that this series provides for a driver to overcome, a crew chief, a crew member and an owner to deal with all the circumstances. We’re a team that can run strong. We just have to make sure the bad days don’t overcome the good days.”
YOU CAME OUT 4TH AFTER TRUEX HIT THE WALL. “Yeah, that’s an opportunity to gain positions. Each time that there’s a caution period where you know everybody has got to come in for four tires and you’ve got to excel on pit road - get the car in the pit box so the crew guys can jump on it quickly. The crew guys get pumped up when they know that they’re running eighth or ninth and if they give a great stop, we’ll come out fifth or sixth. That’s just team morale and team chemistry. That’s when a guy is on third base with two outs and you get a single and bring that guy home to score that run. It’s a team effort. With being able to compete on pit road just as we were on the race track today, those things add up together for a victory.”
JACK ROUSH - “Unless I didn’t use my stopwatch correctly, that was a 12-second-something stop. That was a pretty good stop for us.”
KURT BUSCH - DOES THIS LET YOU EXHALE A LITTLE? “We’ll take this car and analyze it to a point to where we can make it better. Even when you win, you can do things better to win on your side of it. You can’t control when yellows come out. You can’t control when somebody has a flat tire, but we’ll continue to improve this car. The weeks ahead we have Pocono and Indy - two tracks that are similar to one another - with a road course mixed in at Watkins Glen. We’re gonna be running a special Superman paint scheme at Michigan, back to Bristol. We’ve got our tracks that are ahead of us with our cars prepared, now it’s just a matter of having good days on the race track where preparation meets the opportunity.”
JACK ROUSH - WHO WERE THE NEW CREW GUYS AND DO YOU FORESEE MOVING SOME OF YOUR BETTER PEOPLE FROM OTHER TEAMS INTO THAT MIX? “The fact is I can’t name the two guys that stepped in. I know that one fella came from the shop, who is a guy that normally didn’t travel, and the other guy came from the truck shop. Between now and then, Jimmy and Harry McMullen will review and peruse the applications we’ve got. We will look for people that might be ready for a promotion or an advancement from within. We’re a promote from within company. We do that first before we look outside, but we’ve got to review who is ready to move and how we would fill in behind them. Then we would look at who is on the outside and what the opportunities are for somebody that could really help us down the stretch. But we’re in no great hurry to do that. We’ve got a pool of 300 people to draw from and we’ll have an adequate crew for the 97 team until we’re able to find out what is exactly the right chemistry and right situation for people. We only have to fill one position. Hopefully we’ve got our baby born and we’ll have that taken care of before we go to Pocono, but the tire guy is a guy that also had some other jobs that were important to us. Each position within the team and the company for that matter requires a certain skill set to be complimentary and to make us whole. We need to not only find that right skill set in a person, but the right motivation and the right compatibility with the other people that work in proximity to them. We’ll get that done in good order.”
IS THE 99 SPONSOR SEARCH OVER FOR THE YEAR? “Absolutely not. We’ve got a number of new potentially positive discussions going on. I’m very hopeful based on some news I got today that we’ll have full sponsorship - at the kind of numbers we’re looking for - for next year for the 99 car. I’m very hopeful that we’ll get the help we need to help us have reasonable finish with it this year. Understand that once Roush Racing decides to run a program with a car number and with a driver, there isn’t an economic decision made about what the people will be paid, how many tires you’ll buy, how many cars you’ll build. I’ve raised myself and raised my company to ask the first question, ‘What’s the right thing to do?’ And then to not ask as second question. “The only way you can throttle that and manage that is not to let your eyes get bigger than your stomach and take on more than you can. We have got the resource to stay with the 99 program until we decide that there is no prospect for sponsorship for it and, to the contrary, it’s very much alive today.”
WHAT ABOUT THE SUCCESS YOU’VE HAD HERE AS A GROUP? “First of all, when we won early with Jeff Burton here, it was because he was so good at flat tracks. We also won early at Las Vegas and at Texas. We didn’t win early at Chicago, but a lot of the new places that have opened up we’ve had great success with because the guys are so quick to adapt and they’ve got such great notes on the things that historically worked at similar places and they’re able to apply that so well. That got us started. People that are good at flat tracks are just good at flat tracks. I suspect that in their youth - maybe their misspent youth - they may have spent a lot of time sliding around on public highways and back roads and things. People like Mark Martin and Kurt for that matter - that like high-banked tracks - they really like to get in the gas hard. They enjoy rolling the car in a corner, feeling it take a set in the race track and get down in the race track as they say, and then bury the gas pedal in the floor. Mark, in particular, has trouble because he goes looking for that. It is at its best at Bristol and at Dover - and probably Dover more than Bristol - where you can really bury it in the corner. At a place like Phoenix, Jeff Burton and Kurt, for instance, have got more patience and they’ll wait on the throttle if they have to at say a Phoenix. Mark won’t hardly do that because he wants to remember Winchester when he was growing up and Dover and Bristol. So drivers have their own enthusiasm for and their preference for different race tracks and putting everybody down in the same car which could do the job, won’t always get the job done. By the time they go looking for the shocks and the bars and the springs that make them feel good, then sometimes the cars are quite different.”
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