That's kind of why we view Talladega as a wild-card race. |
That's still better than third, so there's 41 guys that wish they ran as good as I did. |
That's still better than third, so there's 41 guys that wish they ran as good as I did. As volatile as this place can be ... to be able to get to second is something I feel we can be proud of. |
That's the way a race at Loudon should finish, ... With the three Chase guys running hard at the end like that. |
The car got a little bit tighter when the sun went down, but we were still really fast. Every time you come in you make your car better, and that's what we did. We kind of just got to the point to where we were pretty much as good as we were going to get and we kind of had to just live with it. I think we had the third best car really. |
The car was good, ... The guys are excited. We've done everything we need to do as a team this weekend. |
The coolest thing is you have 160,000 fans that you can see all day long or all night long. I can remember (passing) Jeff Gordon for the lead and I could see the people cheering. The grandstands are right on top of you. When you get out of the car after practice or qualifying, you can see what the fans are eating and what they're drinking. You're that close. |
The Daytona 500 is really big on my mind right now. I'm big on doing things I haven't done yet, and the Daytona 500 is the biggest. |
The easiest way to sum up the relationship between the drivers and NASCAR is that we are pawns on a chessboard. We don't make the big moves. We're just sacrificial lambs so to speak. They have their way of explaining to you very quickly that you can be replaced very, very easily in this sport no matter how popular you are. |
The fan quit in the car about halfway through the race and I didn't have any fresh air coming into my helmet. So that is the reason I am so tired. |
The good thing is that these guys will leave the track excited about ... how we ran. They won't be excited about where we finished, but we'll look past that and see the big picture. |
The hard thing is Robby Gordon is really good getting into turn one, ... The big thing was to get a good restart and not be concerned with him. |
The last two years, in particular, we've really made huge steps. He's a very, very large part of my life, not only professionally, but personally. |
The neighbors in front of me and behind me and on both sides of me ... they're all the same, ... That's part of what helps keep me grounded and maintain the sanity I guess, from a certain standpoint of not being bombarded with people that live next door and want to snoop and see what you're doing. |
The only time anybody could get close to us was on the restarts, |