Daytona 500 - Inspection Day Quotes

RAYBESTOS® ROOKIE CONTENDER CREW CHIEF FEATURE FOR DAYTONA 500 INSPECTION DAY, DAYTONA INTERNATIONAL SPEEDWAY, FEBRUARY 11, 2005.

SHANE WILSON, CREW CHIEF, No. 77 KODAK/JASPER ENGINES AND TRANSMISSIONS DODGE: “We’re all through inspection. We had to go through twice, just a couple little things but nothing major. Usually you’re throwing bondo and doing some major bodywork but we were pretty minimal. NASCAR does a nice deal when we come down and do our test. They have their templates open and really that’s the best time to go and see where you’re at. You don’t really need to come down with stuff that doesn’t make any sense to try to get it in the gray area [smiles]. We just had a couple of things and we’re good to go now. We’ve got our sticker and we’re ready to go practice tomorrow.” WAS TODAY A SMOOTH START TO SPEEDWEEKS? “Yeah, I’m a lot more comfortable than I was last year [laughs]. The whole team is better this year and we’ll have a better year this year. We’ll be a lot more prepared and we’re looking forward to it.” DID THE EXPERIENCE THAT YOU HAVE GOING THROUGH THIS PROCESS MAKE THINGS EASIER TODAY? “That’s some of it but in our particular case, we were just behind a lot last year. We were thrashing just to get cars done last year. This year we’re critiquing. With our points position from last year, we’re already in the race so we built a little more of a racecar than a qualifier so it was a little bit of a different approach this year than last year, too. We’re worried about how to race in a 500-mile race, not about winning the pole or getting in the race. That part was a lot different, kind of took away some of the stress.” HOW DIFFERENT IS THE INSPECTION PROCEDURE TODAY VERSUS TESTING? “Not a whole lot. At testing it’s all volunteer. You can go through whatever you want to go through and they don’t have all their people down here but mostly it’s the templates because that’s where all the gray area is. A lot of the other stuff is black and white in the rulebook; it is what it is. The templates are all where the gray areas are nowadays. It’s a good deal that NASCAR does that. We didn’t change a whole lot. We had a couple of things here and there that we had to fix template wise but I don’t think it was anything that really affected us a whole lot. We’ll see tomorrow. We’ve got a little more horsepower than we did testing and I’m sure everyone else does and we’ll see what we’ve got.”

ALAN GUSTAFSON, CREW CHIEF, No. 5 KELLOGG’S CHEVROLET: HOW DID INSPECTION DAY GO FOR YOU GUYS? “It went well. It’s a struggle. We try to push and they try to pull. It went well. We didn’t really have any real big issues and we knew where we wanted to work on and they kind of hit those areas and we worked on them and got all we could get and it went good. We got our sticker and that’s the most important thing.” WHAT DID YOU LEARN DURING THE INSPECTION PROCESS DURING TESTING THAT HELPED YOU TODAY? “NASCAR gets hot issues that they worry about. Most all of the rules have been in place for a long time but some of them get shoved to the back and they improvise certain rules so we have to go back and really clean those areas up so that’s the biggest thing. What they’re going to emphasize, what they’re going to stress, where they’re really going to be hard on, we fixed those areas and came back and made it easier.” HOW IMPORTANT IS IT TO HAVE A SMOOTH DAY HERE TODAY? “Today is an important day. Obviously getting your sticker is important so you can get out and practice first thing but you don’t want to be too hasty because you can leaves some things on the table. You want to play a little poker. You want to take your time and work on some things and not push it too fast or get in too big of a hurry. But you also don’t want to make those guys mad. You don’t want to push them too far so it’s a balance, a balancing act. We got it about two o’clock so we did pretty good.” WHAT DID YOU LEARN THIS YEAR THAT WILL HELP YOU NEXT YEAR ON INSPECTION DAY? “Tons. Speedway racing has never been my forte and I never stressed speedway racing but now I’m like ‘whew, a lot of work to do.’ We just saw areas we need to beef up on and where we need to concentrate our efforts and just learning about speedway racing in general. It’s different when you handle every aspect. As a team engineer I didn’t handle that many aspects of it and now handling every aspect you learn real quick. When we came down here and tested and the 24 ran the way they ran and the 48, we struggled and we learned right away we had to go to work. Now going through inspection where we can push, where we can’t push, how to do things and how the game is played.”

TIM BREWER, CREW CHIEF, No. 73 ARC DEHOOKER CHEVROLET: HOW HAS YOUR DAY BEEN? “Hurry up and wait. When you come down here and you’re the 57th car on the entry list, there’s not a lot of need in getting in a hurry. You just kind of play the clock. I told the guys yesterday get very good at just sitting back and waiting on it because they inspected 20 cars for the Budweiser Shootout yesterday which got those guys acclimated to procedure and you come in here today and they’ve got 57 cars to do. You look at your watch and it’s 20 after three and you get out of here at eight o’clock tonight and you got here at seven o’clock this morning. It’s all about being prepared. Hopefully we were prepared well enough in the test at Talladega and Daytona back here in January to where we can roll the car off and lay down a pretty respectable lap to where it will ensure us a start in the Daytona 500.” HOW SPECIAL WOULD IT BE FOR YOU TO TAKE AN UNDERDOG TEAM LIKE THIS AND MAKE THE DAYTONA 500? “Underdog yes, under a lot of pressure, yes. We came down here last year with the 4 car and hadn’t had a lot of success in quite some time but we qualified sixth but ran into a thing called a 19-knot headwind down the backstretch and we were 14-one hundredths off the pole. We felt really good about the efforts there. My son Scott and all of the guys at the shop have been working really hard. They’ve been thrashing in the wind tunnel and that car is probably better than it was last year. Eric’s car is as good as; it’s whoever gets the most breaks as far as the wind up or down the backstretch and whoever’s oil temperatures warm and who hits their marks. It’s a flip of the coin between the two cars and we feel comfortable with that. We’ll just come down there and try to participate and see if we can do the best that we can.” WILL MAKING THE 500 BOIL DOWN TO A GOOD QUALIFYING LAP OR RUNNING WELL IN THE QUALIFYING RACE? “Well, naturally, the only two guys that are locked in are the guys on the front row. You’d like to say ‘Yeah, I’d like to be one or two’ but realistically you can’t say that. That’s the only thing that would lock us in to qualifying at this point. We could be in the top-four, I guess, and still get in but realistically, nobody is locked-in those 150 milers except one and two which, fortunately, we’ve been there before but it’s been quite some time. We’ll remain calm and cool and try to get this thing through the inspection lane later this afternoon and shoot it up on the racetrack tomorrow and see what kind of lap we run.”