Sharpie 500 - Rookie Post-Race Quotes

Where the Raybestos Rookies finished at Bristol:
Kvapil 19th
Busch 33rd
Barrett 41st

RAYBESTOS® ROOKIE CONTENDER QUOTES FOR THE SHARPIE 500 NASCAR NEXTEL CUP SERIES RACE AT BRISTOL MOTOR SPEEDWAY, AUGUST 27, 2005.

STANTON BARRETT, No. 95 LANGLEY PROPERTIES CHEVROLET: “I got in my own oil and spun around, unfortunately. I blew up going into the corner, not the best place to blow a motor [smiles]. The guys are pretty rough out there. I was trying to stay out of the way. I had a pretty good car. I was running in the top-10, track position wise and pulling away from the guys behind me. It’s unfortunate. We’ll have fix another car but we’ll some more.” THIS IS A BRAND NEW TEAM. WHERE DID YOU GET ENOUGH PERSONNEL TO PIT THE CAR? “Hendrick does all my pit stuff for may Busch team and I work together with them and their diversity program. They committed to run whatever Cup races we did and I really work closely with those guys. They are a great group. We’re a part of their development program and we really work together so it’s kind of awesome. It’s a struggle to get all the right crewmembers together but I’ve had a crew for the past couple of years. We just came up here with five guys and the guy that’s been with me the longest I said ‘You’re the crew chief.’ It’s just too bad.” WERE YOU HAPPY WITH THE CAR? “Yeah I was. We kept working on it all night long I wasn’t happy because I couldn’t take some of the spring rubbers out. We really needed to get in the race so we tightened it up. We were a little too tight at the beginning of the race so we pulled those out, made changes and got better and better. We’re learning and I hope we’re back here next year.” HOW MANY MORE RACES DO YOU PLAN TO RUN THIS SEASON? “It depends on how fast we can fix this car. We’ll go to Phoenix, if not maybe Loudon. We might go to Dover, or maybe Martinsville.”

KYLE BUSCH, No. 5 KELLOGG’S/JOHNNY BRAVO CHEVROLET: “Pit stops. Bad pit selection. The guys on the Kellogg’s team did a great job making repairs to the car and getting us back in the race. It’s was just a tough night at Bristol.”

TRAVIS KVAPIL IN THE No. 77 KODAK/JASPER ENGINES AND TRANSMISSIONS DODGE WAS THE RAYBESTOS ROOKIE OF THE RACE AT BRISTOL. Notes: Kvapil made up two laps on his way to a 19th-place finish in the Sharpie 500. This is Kvapil’s best finish since he placed 17th at Pocono in June (race number 14). He claimed top rookie honors for the eighth time and took top rookie honors in both NEXTEL Cup races at Bristol in 2005. YOU FOUGHT YOUR WAY BACK FROM TWO LAPS DOWN TO FINISH ON THE LEAD LAP. “That’s what bad qualifying does. We thought we had a decent car. We started the race off just a little bit but track position was the biggest thing that we fought. I got two laps down and it took us a couple hundred laps to get it back. Once we did we had a pretty good car and from there on I wanted to keep my nose clean and get a good finish and stay out of trouble. We were definitely a top-20, top-15 car. That’s not spectacular but from the finishes that we’ve had for the last month we need to have something to build off of. At Michigan we had a good run going so hopefully it’s turning around for us.” IS THIS A SIGN THAT THINGS ARE STARTING TO MOVE IN THE RIGHT DIRECTION FOR THIS TEAM? “I think so. At Indy, the Glen, Michigan, all those races we had terrible finishes but we were going to have okay runs if it wasn’t for some circumstances. Inside, Shane [Wilson, crew chief] and I and everybody knows that we’re going to be all right but it’s just not showing in the results. Finally we got a pretty decent run and I’m looking forward to the rest of the year and getting some good finishes.” WAS THIS A CALM NIGHT FOR YOU? “I guess so. I got tangled up with Mike Wallace one time and we were just racing really hard to get back on the lead lap. He was protecting his line and I was going for it. I thought it was pretty good. The thing doesn’t look too bad for 500 laps around this joint, beating and banging off everybody, and we all survived. I don’t think I made any enemies.” WERE YOU HAPPY WITH YOUR PIT SELECTION? “It was okay. I think our pit selection was okay. It just wasn’t all that great for us because every time we pitted the 99 or the 97, mainly we were around the 99 most of the night, and we could never really get a good in and out. It wasn’t so much the selection, it just happened where we were racing others guys who were in the same position. It wasn’t too bad.” COMMENT ON NEXT WEEK’S RACE AT CALIFORNIA. “We had an okay run there in the spring, a 23rd or something like that. I know we’ve learned a lot since then. We’re taking a better car and we’ll have a lot better setup when we get there. It’s something to build off of, I guess. Nineteenth isn’t at all what we’re wanting to do but after finishing 38th or 40th the last month it feels pretty decent.” HAVE YOU HAD AN OPPORTUNITY TO GO TO THE WIND TUNNEL WITH YOUR INTERMEDIATE CARS? “I believe so. Like the car that we ran at Michigan, that’s one of our best cars. It took us part of the year to figure out what I like and what kind of body build we like. The car we’re taking to California is another brand new car, fresh out of the tunnel so it should be a good one.”

ALAN GUSTAFSON, CREW CHIEF, No. 5 KELLOGG’S/JOHNNY BRAVO CHEVROLET: “It was a tough day, just bad top to bottom. The pit stall didn’t work out very well. We kept getting blocked in and kept going back further and further. I don’t even know what happened there. I know the 10 ran us over and we got behind and cut a tire. It was just bad from the word go.” IS THERE SUCH A THING AS A GOOD PIT STALL HERE? “I think the book ends probably are, the front and the back. It’s just so dependant on who you get by. You can get a stall right in the middle you can qualify in the back and you got two guys that wreck out by you and you’ve got openings in and out and you’re good out. We’ve got to be better than that because like is not always going to be peaches and cream. You’ve got to overcome some adversity. We’ve got to figure out how to do that. We didn’t do it today.” YOUR CREW DID A LOT OF WORK TO GET KYLE BACK ON THE TRACK. “They did a lot of work. We drug that sway bar arm off. I guess he got into the inside wall there and knocked the radiator out of it. We had lots of things to change, had to fix that stuff and get it back out there. It’s a shame. We’ve had two good cars here and got absolutely nothing to show for it. That’s Bristol, it’s tough.” HAVE YOU HAD A CHANCE TO GO TO THE WIND TUNNEL WITH YOUR CALIFORNIA CAR? “We’ve got a good car. We’re taking that car that we led a lot of laps with at Michigan before we got trash on the grill. We’re going to go there and try to get this turned around. We’ve had a couple dismal weeks here and we’ve got to get it fixed.” YOU WON THE POLE THERE IN THE SPRING SO THAT MUST BE ENCOURAGING. “That’s a good track to go back to. You can have good tracks and bad tracks but you’ve got to be able to minimize your bad tracks and we haven’t been able to do that.”