Getting locked in is everything. We don't want to go through the heat races and requalify because you never know what could happen. |
He needs to hold his head high, ... I know what it feels like to be right there. |
Helio [Castroneves] and I are starting towards the front, so hopefully we can work together and really have something for these boys on Thursday night. |
I had been looking around for rubber the whole time, |
I hit those corners very good, but for the King to go by me, there had to be rubber there. I went down there and felt it and I got to him and I backed off because I didn't want to show him. |
I've got to thank Mopar and Paul Kistler for getting our engine program back where it needs to be, ... Tonight it was just rubber down and holding our own. We had no tire left, we were just lucky it stayed up. The bad thing about Chico is when you get an early number in qualifying, you're in trouble. The later the number the better here. |
It looked like [Meyers] could maneuver anywhere but the top and my car was good on the top and bottom, |
It's great to have this Bass Pro Shops Mopar car in victory lane, ... We've been struggling all year long, but it just goes to show that with hard work with [engine builder] Paul Kistler and everybody at Mopar, when you get these engines running these racecars will roll around the racetrack. |
Kraig was running a great line up there and we hadn't gotten into lapped traffic yet, |
We could go anywhere we needed to go. I grew up in Knoxville on the half-miles and Sioux Falls on the quarter-miles and I love these quarter-miles as well as the half-miles, but when you've got a car working like this it's like, 'Holy cow it's fun to race.' |
We probably had a fifth-place car, ... The Mopar had been running great so we put another engine in and it would run wide open but that was it. I couldn't throttle it. It wouldn't take off, wouldn't do anything. To run across the bottom you had to lift a little bit. But I'm just tickled. We're making progress. A top four for us is a victory. We had an opportunity to run better, but as long as we're going forward that's all we're working toward. |