Aaron's 312 - Rookie Qualifying Quotes

Where the Raybestos Rookies will start at Atlanta:
K. Busch, 4th
P. Menard, 14th
J.J. Yeley, 16th
C. Bowyer, 17th

RAYBESTOS® ROOKIE CONTENDER QUALIFYING QUOTES FOR THE AARON'S 312 NASCAR BUSCH SERIES RACE AT ATLANTA MOTOR SPEEDWAY, OCTOBER 29, 2004.

KYLE BUSCH IN THE No. 5 LOWE'S CHEVROLET WAS THE TOP RAYBESTOS ROOKIE QUALIFIER AT ATLANTA. YOU PICKED UP QUITE A BIT FROM PRACTICE. "Yeah, but I'm kicking myself, though. It wasn't all of what it could have or should have been. I had to breathe it a little bit off of turn 2 and at this place, if you're able to hold it down all the way around you're going to be the man around here. I'm just a little bit short." DID THE TRACK STAY CONSISTENT FROM PRACTICE TO QUALIFYING? "It's getting better. The more rubber that's getting put down is getting better so hopefully it doesn't rain here this weekend. This place has lost a ton of grip from when it was new. I'm having a hard time hanging on to it so I can't imagine all the rest of these guys. It's going to be an interesting race. It's going to be whoever holds on to it the best and we're trying to do what we can with it." AT LEAST YOU CAN SEE MARTIN TRUEX JR. "We'd love to be able to beat him, of course, and sit on the pole for all of what happened this past week. We couldn't do it this week but we'll have to keep trying." WAS IT TO YOUR ADVANTAGE TO NOT HAVE THE CUP CARS ON THE TRACK BEFORE QUALIFYING? "It was an advantage for me because I didn't screw myself up, throttle traces with the Cup car versus your Busch car. It helped me out and now we go on to the Cup side and we'll see what we get over there."

J.J. YELEY, No. 18 VIGORO/THE HOME DEPOT CHEVROLET: "It wasn't bad. We only got to do one mock run in practice and we drug the left side valance real, real hard and it definitely hurt our time. We really didn't change much just because the car felt good and didn't know what we could really change. The car drug really hard through one and two and upset the car a little bit. But I run flat through three and four and real close to it in one and two other than the bumps. If we could have kept it from dragging we might have run a high-six, mid-seven if we were lucky. I'm really happy with the .85. We had a really fast car in race trim. Qualifying is only two laps and we've got 200 tomorrow." WHICH END OF THE TRACK IS MORE DIFFICULT FOR YOU? "The middle of one and two I seem to struggle the most with. There's a lot of bumps right there. There's some variations in the banking and if you've played the video game, it's about the same. You struggle through one and two you'll be good in three and four." YOU ARE RACING THE CUP CAR THIS WEEKEND. WAS IT AN ADVANTRAGE TO PRACTICE AND THEN QUALIFY THE BUSCH CAR BEFORE STEPPING INTO THE CUP CAR? "It's going to be a huge advantage, especially on the Cup side. I think that's why I struggled a little bit at California, not having a lot of laps to jump in a strange racetrack and expect to go out there and get everything out of the racecar is pretty tough to do. It takes me a couple of laps to get the confidence and everything and having two hours of practice is really going to help out here in a little bit."

PAUL MENARD, No. 11 MENARDS/PITTSBURGH PAINTS CHEVROLET: "I'm pretty happy with that lap. We picked up I guess about three-tenths from practice. Any time you can pick up is good. It's a good solid lap; probably top-15 at least and hopefully a top-10 but we've got some pretty fast cars coming up, too. This is the same car that we had at Kansas and Charlotte." YOU RAN WELL AT KANSAS AND HERE AT ATLANTA, BUT STRUGGLED AT CHARLOTTE. "We just missed it. It was one of those days that being so low in points, we got through tech real late and that put us behind the eight-ball. We lost some practice because of that along with five or 10 other cars. We missed the setup and didn't have time to adjust on it. It kind of threw us for a loop having to qualify how you were going to race. We probably were a little conservative on that. A lot of little things add up." DID THE TRACK STAY CONSISTENT FROM PRACTICE TO QUALIFYING? "I thought it was about the same, maybe even a little more grip. In practice this morning I was sweating a lot. I got out of the car after qualifying and barely broke a sweat so if anything the temperature might have cooled off and that might have given us a little more grip." DID IT WORK TO YOUR ADVANTAGE NOT TO HAVE CUP PRACTICE BEFORE BUSCH QUALIFYING? "It probably did. It kept the track more similar to what we had this morning. With IROC practice, I guess that's still the same compound that we run so that didn't make a lot of difference. Anytime you can keep the track consistent it helps you. We want to have a solid top-10 run here. A top-10 is definitely doable. We want a top-five and after that we want a win. We'll keep going forward."

CLINT BOWYER, No. 21 REESE'S CHEVROLET: "We were looking for a little bit more. We've just been fighting this car being loose all day long. We tested here and we were real loose then, too. The boys don't give up on me and they just keep trying. I know they'll get it here come happy hour." IF THE CAR IS LOOSE IN QUALIFYING, HOW MUCH OF A HANDFUL IS IT GOING TO BE DURING THE RACE? "That's what I'm worried about [laughs]."

BUSCH PRESS CONFERENCE

"We unloaded and we weren't too good but we just kept working on the car. Lance [McGrew, crew chief] had some awesome ideas to make changes to the car. I really thought we were bringing it up a little bit and I knew you were going to have to hold it wide open around here in order to get a full lap so it was going to be tough. Of course, Martin laid down a really good lap there in the beginning of this session and we kind of went out there and tried to match it. We weren't quite able to do it but overall we're fourth right now so that wasn't too bad for us." IS IT WIN OR NOTHING ELSE THE REST OF THE WAY? "You just go the rest of the way doing the best job that you can. That's all that we've done all year long. It's the same story that it's been the whole year. You've got to keep digging at it." HOW MUCH OF YOUR FOCUS IS ON NEXT YEAR? "We've been pretty focused on the NASCAR Busch Series side all this year and we're really towards trying to finish the best that we possibly can every weekend. We're working on our Busch program obviously and we've got a couple Cup races here coming up that we need to also handle. We just put all that to the side. We haven't done what we needed to do on the Cup side and it's kind of aggravating to us not to do as well as we'd like to. We'll just put that behind us and keep digging with our Busch program in order to kind of learn things for next year and we'll just kind of go after it after that."