RAGAN: YOU HAD A RESPECTABLE NIGHT AT DARLINGTON. “I thought we were in good position there when we stayed out there running in the top-five but the green just went way too long. The new tires just got us. I felt like we had a top-10 car on equal tires as everyone else. We ran some really fast laps. The Discount Tire Ford was good. We had one bad pit stop that hurt us six or seven spots and man, in a 150-lap race, you just can’t make up that.” DID YOU LEARN SOMETHING TONIGHT THAT WILL HELP YOU IN THE CUP RACE? “Just as soon as you think you’ve got it figured out, you get in the wall a little bit [smiles]. Man, I run the first 120 laps without a scratch on this sucker and just when I started racing, man, it bit me. You just have to have a lot of respect, you just got to know when to go and when not to. I know a little more but I still don’t know it all.” IS IT JUST A MATTER OF GETTING LAPS? “Yeah, getting laps and you’ve just got a gut feeling, you know, what’s good and what’s bad. You know what kind of tires you’ve got and you really got to study the cars around you. You know, it can fool you. If somebody’s got fresher tires, they drive by you and you get disappointed and discouraged. They just go. It’s all about tire management here. I think we can just look back on this race and see a couple of things that we shouldn’t do next time and see a couple things we should. We’ll hang in there.”

JUAN PABLO MONTOYA, No. 42 TEXACO/HAVOLINE DODGE: “It was just really tight all day. I had a decent car, it’s just as the night went on it got tighter and tighter and tighter and that was it. At the beginning we were just falling back. Steven Wallace hit me in the pits.” HOW DIFFICULT IS IT FOR YOU TO GET USED TO TIRE MANAGEMENT HERE AT DARLINGTON? “That’s not a big deal because that’s what I always learned in open wheel you’ve got to do that. I think for a lot of people it’s different but for me it’s a normal day at the office. You can only go as fast as the car will give you and that’s it, you know. It’s like that restart. We just weren’t fast enough so we were just hanging there.”

BRAD KESELOWSKI, No. 23 MACTAC.COM CHEVROLET: “We had one of the best cars at the Turns 1 and 2 end of the track. I tried to take advantage of it with our Mactac Chevrolet and got to the outside of someone and they came up on us and pinned us in the wall. It bent something in the suspension. I’m not sure what. We kind of struggled from there and lost laps trying to fix it, got back out and the 17 car spun out in front of us and we got into it. Somehow during that wreck we broke the clutch trying to miss it. An unfortunate ending to what was going to be a great run for the Mactac Chevrolet.” THIS IS THE FIRST RACE WITH YOUR NEW SPONSOR. “Yes, this is the first race with Mactac and we’re glad to have them on board. We gave their graphics the ultimate test today here at Darlington and they still look great even though the car doesn’t.”