Where the Raybestos Rookies finished at California Speedway:
Busch, 23rd
Kvapil, 24th
UNOFFICIAL Raybestos Rookie standings:
Busch, 21
Kvapil, 21
McClure, 2
RAYBESTOS® ROOKIE CONTENDER QUOTES FOR THE AUTO CLUB 500 NASCAR NEXTEL CUP SERIES RACE AT CALIFORNIA SPEEDWAY, FEBRUARY 27, 2005.
KYLE BUSCH IN THE No. 5 CARQUEST/KELLOGG’S CHEVROLET WAS THE RAYBESTOS ROOKIE OF THE RACE AT CALIFORNIA SPEEDWAY. Notes: Busch finished 23rd and took Raybestos Rookie of the Race honors for the first time this season. This is Busch’s best finish in eight career NASCAR NEXTEL Cup races. Busch and Travis Kvapil are unofficially tied for the lead in the Raybestos Rookie standings with 21 points each. “It was a good and bad day. We worked on our car all day long and just tried to make it better and better. We started out so loose and made so many changes to get it tightened back up. We didn’t really keep up with the track today. That’s what I’m thinking about more because it got kind of hot and we got real loose and then at the end of the race it started to cool down and we got tight again. We kind of missed with the racetrack a little bit but overall the guys worked real hard and I screwed up in the middle part of the day hitting the fence. That was kind of our bummer part right there, having to come back from that.” HOW DIFFICULT IS IT TO RESPECTFULLY GET YOUR LAP BACK? “My car was bad fast on restarts. I fell in behind the 01 on that one restart and I was able to beat the 29 on the other one. Our car was really, really good on restarts. It would go four laps and be the fastest car and then it would kind of fall off. We need to work on making our car where it’s the fastest car for the whole tire run. It was a struggling day but it came out all right. We got our best finish ever so we’ll keep chipping away, trying to get it further down there.” WHAT WAS THE MAIN THING THAT YOU LEARNED TODAY THAT WILL HELP YOU LATER ON THIS SEASON? “We need to keep up with the racetrack a little bit better. The cars are just so aero sensitive out there now. It’s even worse than what it was before because you get behind somebody and you’re tight, tight and then you stick your nose out and then you’re spinning out. I had three cars get in front of me and I knocked a hole in the wall because I had three cars blocking all my air and I couldn’t turn. I’m kinda having to get used to all that again, I guess.” WHAT HAPPENED WHEN YOU HIT THE WALL? “That’s what happened when I got in the fence. There were just too many cars in front of me taking my air away so I just lost the nose completely. I was all the way out of the gas on the brakes, turning it all the way left, and I was like don’t, don’t and then crash.”
TRAVIS KVAPIL, No. 77 KODAK/JASPER ENGINES AND TRANSMISSIONS DODGE: “We were terrible at the beginning of the race. We were really bad and we changed shocks on a couple of pit stops and that’s unheard of. That’s what the car needed. I take the blame for that. We put the shocks on that we started the race with and I thought they were really going to be the deal for us in practice but as it turned out that’s what really killed our setup. It took us a couple runs to figure out what we really needed and once we changed the shocks and kind of undid the adjustments that we did earlier, then we were okay. We weren’t going to run in the top-10 but I think we were a top-20 car, close to 15th. We were just behind from that point on making adjustments and getting the car where it needed to be. I was happy how the car drove at the end of the race. It made me have a lot more confidence going into Las Vegas knowing what we learned here. It’s too bad it took us 500 miles to figure out where we needed to be but I guess that’s part of me being a rookie and communicating with the guys and everything. Overall, I’m pretty happy with how we ended up compare to how we started for sure.”
