Camping World 200 - Ford Post-Race Quotes

MARCOS AMBROSE – No. 59 Kingsford Charcoal Ford Fusion (Finished 30th) –YOU’RE RUNNING TO THE CAR TO GET BACK OUT THERE AREN’T YOU. “Yeah, it’s good to go. I just couldn’t get pushed off.” WHAT HAPPENED TO CAUSE THE WRECK? “I’m not sure. I just got hit in the quarter panel and spun out. I thought I had it saved at the bottom, but the motor stalled out and I just went back up in the pack.” WE COULD SEE THE REAR WHEELS SPINNING, BUT YOU JUST COULDN’T GET OFF THE 1 CAR. “No, there was nowhere for me to go. I need two wheels and a wagon.”

NOTE: AMBROSE EMERGED FROM THE INFIELD CARE CENTER ON THE RUN IN ORDER TO GET BACK IN HIS CAR AND REJOIN THE RACE.

MATT KENSETH – No. 17 Roush Fenway Ford Fusion (Finished 3rd) – “It was OK. We ran all right. We didn’t run great and we didn’t run bad. We had to get track position there and got two tires and hung on to third.” WHAT DID YOU LEARN TODAY THAT MIGHT HELP TOMORROW? “Really nothing with that COT car. The only thing we did was have some fun today. There was some great competition out there and it was a great race. Those other cars are, at least for me so far, miserable at tracks like this and these real flat tracks. They just don’t turn and don’t do anything you want them to, so I didn’t learn much today but I did get to have some fun.”

STEPHEN LEICHT – No. 90 Citifinancial Ford Fusion (Finished 25th) – “We’ve got our mile-and-a-half speedway stuff really good. We’ve got our superspeedway stuff awesome and on the road courses we’re awesome, the only place we’re struggling right now is short tracks. These flat short tracks we cannot seem to get a handle on it, but we’ll just go and test some more and figure it out. This Citifinancial team can do it and I’ve got faith in them.”

TODD KLUEVER – No. 16 3M Ford Fusion (Finished 17th) – “It was just an average day at best. Eddie and all the guys on the 3M car do a great job. Admittedly, these are my worst kind of race tracks. I was just telling the guys that the frustrating thing about it is with the way the testing rules are, you can’t go anywhere to try and improve on it. Everywhere we go that’s flat like this – Phoenix, here, Milwaukee – these are just the tracks I struggle with and I don’t know how to make it any better. You can’t test and you can’t do anything. Yeah, you can go to some other flat tracks, but I don’t know. We always test the mile-and-a-half banked race track and we always test Richmond and whatever, but it’s just frustrating when you can’t do anything to make yourself better – play computer games and that’s about it. It’s frustrating because this isn’t how I want to run at these race tracks the rest of my life, but I appreciate Eddie and all the guys. They did a great job with the car.”

GREG BIFFLE – No. 37 Cub Cadet Ford Fusion (Finished 7th) – “We had a good car and then we got stuck behind the 91 and we couldn’t get by him, but that’s just racing and we had a couple of bad pit stops today.” YOU SEEMED TO HOLD DOWN 7TH MUCH OF THE DAY AND FINISHED THERE. “I wasn’t there all day. I tell you what, I started back in 28th or something on our pit stop, which wasn’t that good. We worked our way all the way back to the front. It was hard, but it was just a tough day. These guys work hard and we’ve got good cars, we’re just off a little on our pit stops.”

CARL EDWARDS – No. 60 Scotts Miracle-Gro Ford Fusion (Finished 2nd) – PRESS CONFERENCE – “At the beginning of the race our car was not the fastest car and I’m just really proud of my Scotts Fusion team for making it the fastest car at the end. It was awesome. If we would have had a caution with 10 to go, or maybe if this was a 205-lap race, I think we could have got him, but we just ran out of time. There at the end that was really exciting to be running him down a little bit. I could see him get a little slower and slower as we got closer and closer. That’s the exact position we were in last year. I was trying to hold off Kevin Harvick. He’s a hard guy to hold off and it was neat to be able to race him again this year. We just turned up one spot short, but on that last corner I just drove it down in there thinking that maybe I could rattle him a little bit and he’ll slide up or something, but that’s just all I had. We needed more time.” DID YOU THINK YOU WERE CLOSE TO WRECKING ON THE LAST LAP? “I wasn’t close to wrecking. I didn’t think I was gonna wreck, I just drove it down into the corner just to see what would happen, but I didn’t plan on wrecking unless it was with Matt. If Matt would have been leading, I would have punted him (joking).”

MATT KENSETH PRESS CONFERENCE – “It was pretty good. We weren’t quite as good as the best couple of cars. We were real slow on a short run, but for the long run we were pretty good. I thought we were a top-four or five car, so we just thought we’d try two tires at the end and see if we could get rolling quicker, but it really didn’t. It was just too slow on the start, but after about 10 laps we were pretty competitive.”

CARL EDWARDS CONTINUED – HOW DO YOU AND YOUR TEAM GO INTO THE LAST HALF OF THE YEAR AND FIND WAYS TO STAY FOCUSED WITH THE POINTS LEAD YOU HAVE? “It’s pretty simple. Just like every racer – every race you go to, it doesn’t matter if you win 10 races in a row at your local track, it’s still just as much fun to win that 11th one and it’s just as big of a challenge. We go to the races to win races and that’s what’s exciting. The points stuff is comforting at the end of the day to think that we have a big points lead, but what makes the day great is to win. This day feels, it doesn’t feel very good to run second, so I guess what I’m saying is the motivation is the race. The individual races are what motivates us.”

MATT KENSETH CONTINUED – DID YOU HAVE ANY THOUGHTS YOU COULD WIN BY TAKING TWO TIRES OR WERE YOU JUST TAKING THEM TO SEE WHAT HAPPENED? “Both. You hope to win. That’s why we made the call was to try to win. We thought getting four, we were running fourth and our pit stops are getting better, but they haven’t really been the best, so we thought the best we were gonna come out is fourth if we got four tires, and, really, the thinking of getting two tires too is that with all the cars on the lead lap, I would have thought there would have been some more guys that took two and we would have come out with the lead and got a few of those guys that took two in between me and the 21 and Carl and those guys. Then you have a shot when that happens. You get 35 laps to go and if you mix up some guys with two tires and four tires, generally you have some cautions and some short runs and you’ve got a chance. When I saw the 21 and the 33 and the 60 and all of those guys come out right behind us on four tires, I figured it was gonna be pretty tough to pull it off.”