USG Durock 300 - Rookie Final Practice Quotes

Raybestos Rookie Happy Hour speeds
Gilliland 2nd
Hines 22nd
Lamar 35th
Andretti 37th
Kluever 39th
O’Quinn Jr. 46th

Raybestos Rookie David Gilliland posted the second-best overall speed in the final practice session for the USG Durock 300 Friday afternoon at Chicagoland.

DAVID GILLILAND, No. 84 HYPE MANUFACTURING/RANCHWOOD HOMES CHEVROLET: “We’re great. We ran around on old tires. This is my first time here so the first practice was just getting used to the track and just fine-tuning the car and learning where it needed to be. The car was good. I kept telling the guys ‘Don’t worry about the time sheets. We will be good.’ We put new tires on and jumped right up to second and we only went one lap. It’s good.”

IS IT TOUGH TO QUALIFY AND RACE THE SAME DAY? “Yeah, absolutely. That’s why we never made any qualifying runs. We’ve just got to get the car working good. We’re a new team. We’re building our own motors. We don’t have the most horsepower here. Qualifying really doesn’t mean anything. It’s the race. We’ve got a good racecar. We put tires on it and did a couple little things for qualifying. We didn’t practice any qualifying stuff. Everything was race runs, except at the last minute we just put tires on it. We want to win. Nobody remembers how you qualified [smiles]. A lot of people remember I won Kentucky.

WHAT WOULD BE A GOOD WEEKEND FOR YOU? “A top-10 finish. As a team, we’re still building. As a team we’re still learning. We learned a lot from Kentucky but we’re not done learning yet. We’re not where we need to be, I believe, to be a top-five car week in and week out. We need to come to the races and we need solid, consistent finishes to keep building our program.”

IS THIS THE SAME CAR YOU WON WITH AT KENTUCKY? “Yes.”

IT MUST BE YOUR FAVORITE CAR. “Oh absolutely [smiles]. I just told it that when I pulled in off the racetrack. It’s good. We’ve got some stuff figured out that’s going to take us a long ways.”

IS IT JUST A MATTER OF TIME TO GET EVERYTHING PUT TOGETHER? “Absolutely and then after you have that you still come to tracks like this that you’ve never been to. You’ve got 20 Cup guys that just ran two hours of Cup practice when the first got here and they go straight into the thing. They don’t need to worry about the track. It’s been 45 minutes since they’ve been on the track. They have an advantage there but what we’ve got is what we’ve got. That’s why we weren’t as good as we would have liked to have shown in the first practice session. But we were good, because on old tires at the end of the run we were running faster than 90 percent of the cars in front of us.”

DO YOU LIKE THE TRACK? “I do like it. It’s a little bumpy getting in on both sides. I’ll know more at the end of the race. That’s what you really need on a track like this: laps. That’s what’s going to help us the most.”