RAGAN: “That’s just an awesome run for the Discount Tire team. We had an unfortunate event last week. We really could have picked up some points but we’ve got a great team. We’re just getting where we can work good together and we’re having a lot of fun. And I tell ya, the biggest thing that probably helped today was not jumping back and forth from the Cup car to the Busch car.” RUNNING THIS WELL MUST GIVE YOU CONFIDENCE GOING INTO THE WEEKEND. “Oh, heck yeah. This is probably one of my favorite racetracks. I’ve got as many laps around this track as I do Nashville or Kentucky. We’ve had two solid runs last year in the trucks here. I felt coming into this weekend if we could get a car handling well this could be one of our highlights for the year. We were pretty good in practice and I didn’t really expect to run that fast. That was probably a little faster than probably I wanted to go [smiles]. What a great lap and just a lot of hard work on all the Busch guys.” ROUSH FENWAY RACING WAS STRONG AGAIN TODAY. “And our mile-and-a-half program is really where it’s at. It’s a combination of great engines from Roush Yates Engines and the guys back in the fab shop. We really work hard on our mile-and-a-half program. There’s Childress and obviously Hendrick has their stuff figured out, but we’re right there with them. It’s just a matter of keep working on this thing and like I tell everyone, even with our Cup car, when we get this thing figured out we’re going to be pretty good.” DID YOU HIT ON ANYTHING TODAY THAT MIGHT HELP THE CUP CAR? “I don’t know how much we’ll use. Certainly this is a different aero package, it’s a little different kind of car but we’re going to think about things. We’re always learning. Jimmy Fennig doesn’t need any help. He knows what to do in every situation. We’ll let ‘em know what we did and we’ll see what happens.”

JUAN PABLO MONTOYA, No. 42 TEXACO/HAVOLINE DODGE: “It’s a little better but still not all that comfortable with the car. It’s okay. From where we were in practice, it’s good.” WILL THE CUP CAR HERE HELP THE BUSCH CAR? “I don’t know. We’ll work on it and see which one works better. The Cup car should be really good here. I’m a lot more comfortable in the Cup car than the Busch car. These things have a shorter wheelbase. I haven’t driven them for a while.”

RAGAN PRESS CONFERENCE

COMMENT ON THE LAP AND KNOCKING YOUR TEAMMATE CARL EDWARDS OFF THE POLE. “It’s kind of crazy sitting back on the sidelines and you watch the guys. Mark was one of the first cars that went out and broke the 28-second lap barrier and I said ‘Man, that’s flying.’ I said ‘I don’t know if I can do that or not. That’s pretty fast.’ When you have a good handling car it just makes it so much easier to go out and run fast. Mike Kelly [crew chief] and everyone on the Discount Tire team had worked extremely hard last week on this car. This is a car that we had planned to run here so we had about a week and a half to really massage on it at the shop. We unloaded and we really didn’t change a lot. When you’ve got a good handling car like we do it makes may job a lot easier.” HOW DO YOU FEEL ABOUT THIS YEAR? IS IT OVERWHELMING? “So far it hasn’t been overwhelming. It’s really been good to get some laps in the Busch car before I go hop in the Cup car. California was a great example. We get to run the Busch car first and that was only the second time I’d been to that racetrack and so it just helped out so much. Jumping in the Cup car I felt like I was ahead of the game already. At times it’s been a big plus but at Bristol because the Busch car and the Car of Tomorrow drove so differently. So it was kind of a struggle for me to hop in and out of each car and go fast. But all in all, it’s been fun. Jack Roush and everyone at Roush Fenway put together a great team on both sides, the Busch side and the Cup side for me. My job is just worrying about what I have to do and that’s go fast and take care of my racecar. It’s been fun to work with Jimmy Fennig and Mike Kelly at the same time. They’ve had a past working relationship together. So far so good. I think it’s going to be a long summer when we’re traveling back and forth but I’ve got Carl Edwards that’s going to be flying us around. I’m just going to kind of ride on his coattails through the summer.” WHY WERE YOU SO MUCH FASTER THAN EVERYBODY ELSE? “I don’t know. That just puts more pressure on us to go fast in the race. I don’t want to be running 15th on the first lap. We want to stay in that top-five and I think we’ve got a good enough car where we can. I tell ya something that really helps qualifying here and this is the first time that I’ve thought about it before at Atlanta, California and here at Texas, running the trucks here really do help a lot. Qualifying in a truck you hold it to the floor and man, it feels so fast through the corners you’re not going that fast down the straightaways but through the corners it feels like you’re flying. And I think that helped today, that feel, it reminded me of a truck qualifying here: flat out and you almost get whiplash through the corner you’re going so fast. But down the straightaway in a Busch car or Cup car you keep that speed up where in a truck you don’t keep that speed up going down the straightaway. I credit a lot of it to running the Scotts truck here last year.” THIS IS YOUR FIRST POLE. WHAT DOES IT MEAN TO YOU? “On one side you want to celebrate. Yeah, we were the fastest car today and we won pole qualifying but at the same time a lot of pressure is on us. We’re going to be leading the field to the green on Saturday and I can’t screw up getting into Turn 1 this time. If you’re running 25th, not that many people look at ya but if you’re on the front row, you’ve got quite a few people looking at ya. But I feel like we’ve got a good enough car that we can hang in. Certainly Carl and Mark have really good cars. Shane Huffman’s got a really good car so if we can just run in that top-10 we just want to build back some points from last weekend.” HAS IT BEEN HARD TO FILL MARK MARTIN’S SHOES? “I could have made it hard but that’s something that I’ve really not tried to do. A lot of people ask me how hard is it to replace Mark Martin and I always tell ‘em Mark Martin is the kind of guy that you can’t replace so I don’t have to worry about that. No one expects me to go out and replace Mark Martin. Certainly you can ask Regan Smith that. He’s not going out trying to replace him on the weekends. Mark is that incredible of a racecar driver. It’s my position to just go out and keep AAA happy and Jimmy Fennig. We’ve been working closely together on what kind of common goals we have for the year and Jack Roush obviously has a big input on what’s going on. I really haven’t tried to pay attention to replacing Mark or stepping into the famous No. 6 ride. I more or less try to go out and try to stick to our guns and do what we know is right and everything else will take care of itself.” DO YOU HAVE ANY SYMPATHY FOR THE BUSCH-ONLY OWNERS WHO WOULD RATHER SEE LESS CUP DRIVERS IN THEIR SERIES? “I do have a little bit of sympathy for ‘em because I was there three years ago this race. I was driving the 31-W Insulation car for Wayne Day and we were so happy that we qualified on time. We qualified like 32nd and we out qualified some good cars and man, that was so much fun to come here and that was three years ago this race. And to be on the other side of the fence now, to be with the best motorsports racing team in the United States or the world as far as I’m concerned, and have wind tunnel time and great engines and all kinds of resources thrown at us, it does make it hard. But something my father always preached growing up: we go where the competition is and that’s the only way you get better. And I do understand that a lot of it is money and financial backing that the smaller teams don’t have that we do but as I was growing up racing Legends cars and everything else, we would go where the big dogs were and that’s the only way you can get better. The guys like Team Rensi and Brewco, some of those stand alone Busch teams, I think they do an excellent job for the resources they have. But at the same time, if you really want to get better, you want to be here racing the best.” WHAT IS YOUR TAKE ON CARL EDWARDS’ SUCCESS? “A lot of that is Carl is an exceptional driver and that’s and exceptional team. That group of guys has worked together for a number of years. If you look at that 60 group, they were dominant when Mark Martin was driving the Winn-Dixie car and when Greg Biffle was driving the Grainger car. The 60 car has always been a top Busch car. So it was tough for the Discount Tire team. This is basically a new team; some of Danny O’Quinn’s team from last year, some of Todd Kluever’s team, some new guys. We kind of had to start from scratch, cars, people, equipment, everything. It makes it so much easier when you’re a team that’s been winning races for 10, 15 years. They were on track ready to go and I think it’s taken us a few races. Just last week was our first new car this year. We had been racing some of last year’s cars. It just takes time for other teams to kind of get that gel working where Carl and P.K. and those guys, they’re ready to go from the green flag at Daytona. If we stick together, this time next year we can have a season like Carl’s going.”