Raybestos Rookie Final Practice speeds:
Clauson 19th
Gale 24th
Franchitti 27th
Keselowski 39th

Bryan Clauson was the top Raybestos Rookie in the final practice session for Nicorette 300 today at Atlanta Motor Speedway. Clauson posted the 19th best overall speed in the session.

BRYAN CLAUSON, No. 41 POLAROID DODGE: “We have a really good long run car there. We just made about a 25-lap run and the car is really good. I ended up getting in the fence there a little bit that last lap but nothing they can’t beat out. We’re looking forward to this weekend. I think we’ve got to work on our car a little bit on the short run but overall I think we’ve got a car capable of running in the top-15, maybe the top-10, if we play our cards right. Hopefully we can have a good run for our Polaroid Dodge this weekend. It’s their first weekend here in NASCAR so hopefully we can bring them into the sport well.” HOW IMPORTANT IS IT TO GET TRACK TIME TODAY? “It’s unbelievable. It’s really tough, especially when you get weather like we’ve been having lately raining out practice and going places that you’ve never been and only having an hour and a half to get used to the track to get yourself up to speed and on top of that, trying to compete with these Cup guys who are tuning their cars for an hour and a half. It’s tough but we’ve been doing good. Brian Pattie [crew chief] and all the guys have brought really good race cars. We’ve made minimal changes here today, just stuff to kind of get me comfortable so hopefully we can continue using some of the race for tuning.” HOW MUCH DO YOU THINK THE TRACK WILL CHANGE BETWEEN NOW AND THE START OF THE RACE? “It’s going to be completely different. You’ve going to have 30 mile per hour winds and it’s going to be 23 degrees cooler. The track will have a ton of grip and hopefully our weaknesses will be held down a little bit by that. We didn’t make a qualifying run there. We just kind of focused on race setup and I feel like we’ll have a good car in qualifying trim. We’ve had some good qualifying runs before so we didn’t feel like we really needed to do that here. It’s going to be tough. The track is definitely going to change and that’s what we were talking in the middle of practice there. Every race I’ve really started we’ve had the same weakness, the same problem at the start of the race, so we tried to get on the other side of that this week trying to just continue learning what these cars from practice to race.” ARE YOU COMFORTABLE HERE? “Oh yeah. The hardest thing to do at a lot of these places is go up and run up against the fence. Coming from the sprint car and midget stuff, I’m used to being up right near that wall. It wasn’t too bad. It took a little bit to get used to today because you’re going so fast. It’s just a little different than anywhere else. But I feel comfortable there and the guys had a really good car for me and it handled well on the top there. That’s probably where you’ll find us during the race.” CAN YOU TELL HOW FAST THIS PLACE IS? “Oh yeah. Like I was telling somebody, when you have a really, really good car it’s really hard to tell how fast you’re going but when you’re off the slightest bit and the car is jumping out from you or getting tight and heading for the fence, you realize how fast you’re going. We had a couple of scary moments here. The car just kind of jumped out but we saved her.”

CALE GALE, No. 77 RHEEM CHEVROLET: HOW IS YOUR CAR? “We changed some things around. This is the first time that we’ve had this group of guys together. Jason Meeks is calling the shots over here. We got it better toward the end of practice. Number one, I’ve never been here before at all, never made a lap, so that was interesting the first few times going out there. Just finding the right balance seems to be, you really need a good handling car here to be competitive, that’s for sure. We did our mock run and everything felt fine so we should be good for tomorrow’s race.” DID YOU MAKE A FULL RUN ON TIRES? “Probably right at it. I mean, we did 30-something laps and at the end of the run we made some changes right there at the end on older tires and our laps times were pretty competitive right there. We feel like we’ve got a god driving car. Got a lot of Cup drivers to go out there and battle against tomorrow. Hopefully we can stay out of trouble and end up with a good finish.” HOW MUCH DOES THE CAR CHANGE DURING A FULL RUN ON A SET OF TIRES? “Lap times it seems to be over a second as far as falling off. It seems like the car wants to get tighter on a longer run to me. The place is real rough. You need to know where the bumps are at and that’s what I just told them [his crew]. I don’t have a clue where the bumps are at. I followed Jeff Burton and he just drives around them. So that’s one thing I’ve got to figure out tomorrow in the race and they’ll be a lot of good guys to learn from.” HOW IMPORTANT WAS IT TO GET TRACK TIME TODAY? “After going out there and running on the track I feel like it was a lot. There’s nothing like seat time in any kind of racing vehicle you ever race, especially going to a new track. We’ll see tomorrow. I feel like if we can adjust it in the race if it’s not right. We made some pretty minute changes that seemed to make a lot of changes on the car. We’ll see tomorrow.” HOW DOES YOU CAR NEED TO HANDLE AT THE START OF THE RACE? “I think we need to start out to be a little bit free at the beginning of the run because it seems to get tighter. Maybe about middle of the way she’ll be pretty neutral. We don’t want to lose too much ground at the start of a run. Hopefully we’ll be competitive enough towards the end of the run to hang right there with ‘em.” WHAT WOULD BE A GOOD RUN FOR YOU IN THE RACE? “Hopefully go out there and run in the top-15. Kevin’s [Harvick, car owner] car seems to be real good. We got basically the same kind of car, there’s not much difference. I’ve got good equipment up under me, a good team and we’ll see.” CAN YOU TELL HOW FAST THIS PLACE IS? “It seems to be pretty fast. I feel like Vegas, when we went out there and tested, was real cool out there. We were almost wide-open. We’ll see tomorrow when this place cools down and there’s rubber out there how fast it is tomorrow during qualifying. I’m pretty sure it’ll be pretty quick.”