UAW-DaimlerChrysler 400 - Chevrolet Post-Race Quotes

Jimmie Johnson (Winner) #48 Lowe’s Chevrolet

Yeah, it was a great performance for Hendrick Motorsports. The Hendrick cars, at the beginning of the day today, we all were pretty…struggling with the cars. I don’t know what the other guys had for issues but I was really loose. I think by the first pit stop I was near 20th. We got real aggressive at the beginning, pulled some spring rubbers out of the right rear. Actually, we didn’t lose many positions. It was an amazing stop. We’ve got new guys to the team this year and somehow we got both the spring rubbers and changed the new tires and came out where we went in, which was amazing. We were giving him a hard time and thanking him, which was pretty cool. Beyond that, we just had to stay working on the race car. It was very good on the short run, but as the run went on we got looser and looser. Chad started playing some adjustments around. We finally found something that started to work and once we did that, I was just railing through the pack. I could find my way to third, and then from third to first I would get loose again once I got in the clean air and up towards the front. And then I had to find a new line and work on some things. We got that accomplished and then Ryan and I at the end, when we had our car just right, I knew I needed to get by Ryan. He’s a bulldog to pass. And I just had to really work hard to get by him. I think we put on a good show, we were side by side for a long time. And got it done, so it was good. We were best when we needed to be, which was the end of the race.

YOU HAD A PIT STOP IN THE MIDDLE OF THE RACE WHERE YOU HAD A PROBLEM AND DROPPED BACK TO 15TH. DID YOU HAVE AN IDEA OF JUST HOW GOOD YOUR CAR WAS TO BE ABLE TO PICK OFF THAT MANY CARS? Yeah, I felt really good with it. When you can move through traffic that fast, you know that you’ve got a good car. It’s just tough to move through traffic. One time I think I got six cars in one lap, I caught two of them in two-three wide situations. I was just flying by guys. It was amazing with the pit stop, we had some trouble on the right front with the lug nut which bounced off of the tire changer—it bounced off of Shane. And When it bounced off of him, it went back and it stuck itself right on the stud. We saw it on the overhead video, the thing bounces right off of him and sticks right back on and he couldn’t get the tire back on. So, it was just a crazy thing. Once we had that, we had to work back from that and things were great.

WHEN YOU SAW THE YOUNGER BUSCH COMING BEHIND YOU, WHAT DID YOU THINK? Run. He’s hungry, he’s at his home track, he’s in the same equipment I’m sitting in. Run. I just did everything I could to stay in front of him. I really worked hard to get a cushion in front of him, so that if I ran into lapped traffic and had some problems, then I had a little space to give up or to play with there. I did have some trouble. Some guys were trying to be nice and get out of the way and I didn’t anticipate it and got into the back of the #22 one time and lost a bunch of time. He was just trying to get out of my way and I didn’t expect it. But, he did a great job and I must say that for Rick taking a bold move and taking the #5 and #25 and moving them out of their old shops and moving them up on the hill next to the #24 and #48, building a new 80,000 sq ft shop, putting those guys in there over the winter…You can’t tell that those guys made the change like that. They’re better than they were last year. Usually a change slows a team down. These guys, it didn’t faze them. They’re doing a great job and I’m very proud of everyone at Hendrick for what they’re doing.

THERE WAS A RECORD NUMBER OF CAUTIONS. WHAT AFFECT DID THAT HAVE ON YOU AND THE RACE IN GENERAL? It really helped me because we had an ill-handling race car and we needed the cautions to work on the car. So, it really helped us out. I think maybe it gave us the opportunity to win the race. The last two to three pit stops, we had the car where we needed it, but we needed everything before then to get the car adjusted.

WERE YOU AWARE THAT GREG BIFFLE WAS GRIPING ABOUT YOUR QUARTER PANEL BEING FLARED OUT TOO MUCH AND THAT THEY HAD TO TAP IT IN DURING A PIT STOP? No, I’m not aware of that. What part of the quarter panel?

THEY GRIPED TO THE INSPECTORS ABOUT IT BECAUSE POSSIBLY IT WAS GIVING YOU A LOT MORE DOWNFORCE Well, I saw it in victory lane, behind the tire the quarter panel was pulled out. And that’s just a parachute, that just captures air and sucks it under the car. And that was from some contact. So I don’t know why. But if he thinks it’s helping me, that fine. That’s cool with me.

HE WAS GRIPING IN THE FIRST HALF OF THE RACE WHEN YOU BLEW BY HIM I don’t know. I guess everybody is frustrated when they’re getting passed. But, I don’t have a clue.

AT THE END WE HAD CLOSE TO A 40-LAP RUN UNDER GREEN. WAS YOUR CAR FEELING WELL ENOUGH AT THE END HAD THE PIT STOP COME ANY SOONER? We made one run just about to the fuel window. The tires…our left front was wearing out. We were really abusing that tire with our setup. I think we could go almost 60 laps…59 laps or something. And by lap 55 the car would get really tight. So we were getting close to that area. But the car was still driving really good. And even though I was complaining on the radio about the handling of the car, we still at times would have two or three tenths over competition, so even though I didn’t have a very good driving car, nobody did. I think that is because of the smaller spoiler and softer tire combination. It’s making the cars harder to drive. That’s something that I think we’ve all wanted to see from a drivers’ standpoint. It does spread the field out, but it lets the drivers and teams go to work and try to find an advantage.

DO YOU FEEL MOMENTUM NOW AND LOOKING AHEAD AT THE POINTS, DOES IT FEEL GOOD TO HAVE THIS CUSHION? It’s nice to get off to a good start in the Chase. Hopefully we can be in a situation where we were last year. When we got close to race 26 we could experiment with some things and try to find an advantage for the final 10. That’s our game plan and hopefully we can have that situation develop for us. It’s still too early, obviously, to tell. But, the team…we made some changes over the off season. We’ve improved our pit stops, we’ve improved the mechanic situation on the race cars and I don’t think we took a step back this year, which is really good. I do believe we’ve maintained, if not taken a step further from where we were last year. That’s good to have.

DOES TAKING OVER THE POINTS EARLY CHANGE YOUR STRATEGY OR CHANGE THE WAY YOU LOOK AT IT? Not yet. You know, it’s good for team morale. You know, we got $30,000 from NEXTEL for that for the leader bonus, so that’s good. We can go to the blackjack table tonite and have some fun. It’s really good for morale more than anything. As far as your strategy it’s still too early.

IT APPEARS TO BE A ROUSH/HENDRICK BATTLE Maybe. I hope that it’s definitely the Hendrick group that’s up there. But you see I feel in our sport, you’ll have a team or two that sorts it out or has everything figured out for five to eight race span. And then the other guys that didn’t run so good are going to go home, going to test, going to Kentucky or go test at the next race track that we’re racing at and try to find something. And then when that happens and we start finishing fifth, tenth, we go back. It’s just a cycle that takes place. And right now all the Hendrick cars and all the Roush cars…you can see the hard work that everyone put in over the winter. They’ve got one and we’ve got one. So, we’re on par with those guys. The whole crucial part of this is to time it for the final ten and make sure that your cycle comes around on that final ten so that you can be the champion.

IT APPEARS THAT THE FEARS OVER HENDICK ENGINES HAVE DISAPPEARED Yeah, fortunately, we had an off weekend. The off weekend really let the guys work hard and figure out what was going on. All the engines, even mine, I finished and even mine was getting ready to go. It was the same problem on all the engines. So it was really easy for us to see what was going on and look at it and address it. So, we hate the fact that it took so many cars out, took Jeff out. Nemechek had an incredible race car. We hate that, but we did learn a lot because of how it broke. And so many of them broke. So, we feel good about it. A 400 mile race wasn’t as long as Fontana, we didn’t have as many RPMs for a long period of time. So, with the off weekend and the short race, we could go home and really pull everything apart. I’m sure everything is under control but I’m sure the guys are eager to look inside the engines.

HOW BENEFICIAL WAS YOUR TESTING HERE IN JANUARY? Really, it’s hurt us. We tested the car and had such a great test. We really came back how we tested and thought that it would work. And we really had to go to work on it. Qualifying, we still ran a good lap. But it was a very eventful lap. The first half of the race, the car was really loose, still. We finally got it right at the end. We really tuned in the car during the test session and it hurt us for the first half of the race.

YOUR THOUGHTS ABOUT GOING BACK TO ATLANTA? Yeah, we did a tire test there and coming back inside the gates, driving on the track, remembering the battle at the end of the race battling with Mark Martin, brought back at lot of memories, so I think that was good for the team to go back. At least for the #48 team. The other teams still have to go back and I’m sure will have some emotions. We left there on such a high note, all the Hendrick cars were really running well and I think we’re going to have a really good showing.

Kyle Busch (2nd place) #5 Kellogg’s Chevrolet

It was definitely a good day for the Kellogg’s Robot Chevrolet. It was a lot of fun. To be able to bring a second place finish home to the Fox/Century folks that were involved here today for the event and the movie coming out, that came out Friday. It’s probably going to be the number one movie so I was one spot short. We’ve still got a long year ahead of us. I hope this wasn’t just a fluke but qualifying on the pole two weeks ago in California and finishing second here in Vegas. It’s a tremendous opportunity for the whole team, putting the #5 and #25 cars in the same building. Being able to go out strong here is definitely the awesome thing. Just working on the cars all day here is what we did. You know we were tight, tight, tight always in the center. To be able to work on that all day, Alan Gustafson and the guys made awesome calls there and got the car handling better and I was able to drive by all those guys on the outside to come back up through to the second spot.

DO YOU RATE A SECOND PLACE FINISH IN THIS RACE AS BEING BIGGER THAN ANY OF YOUR VICTORIES IN THE BUSCH SERIES? If it was a win, probably. But, you know what? I haven’t actually gotten a win since our accident in October of last year. It’s just another one of those second place finishes that we could have turned into a win but we’re glad that our teammate was able to win. I can’t say that it’s been bigger than any of our Busch Series victories just yet, but it’s definitely right up there with him. Right up there with them. Probably Lowe’s Motor Speedway is my biggest win because it was in front of all the Hendrick Motorsports people and in front of all the whole racing people around North Carolina. And it was our home track, Lowe’s.

HOW DO YOU FEEL ABOUT THE IDEA OF A SECOND RACE IN LAS VEGAS? I think it should be here. An October or September night race sounds good.

WHEN YOU WERE CHASING JIMMIE PRETTY GOOD, HE HAD A LITTLE BIT OF A PROBLEM WITH WIMMER AND YOU WERE ABLE TO TRIM SOME OFF THE DEFICIT. WERE YOU ABLE TO GET CLOSER OR WAS IT JUST A LITTLE BIT? I was obviously excited that I was catching him, having a shot just to kind of get up there, but then once Jimmie got through another set of lapped cars and got through there pretty good…and I got to them and they were side-by-side. So, I kind of lost that ground again. Anything can kind of play around in the lap car world. You know, I was there last week, so I probably screwed up a lot of people. It’s all a matter of how you can get through the traffic and stuff like that. Jimmie was trying to go low on him and I guess Scott was giving him the outside to go around him and they got bottled up—no big deal. I’m sure Jimmie would have been upset if I won and he lost, but…

THE EARLY PART OF THE SEASON AS SHAPING UP AS ROUSH AND HENDRICK, WHAT IS YOUR PERSPECTIVE ON THAT? I’m just excited to be here. It’s fun to be associated with such a great organization in Hendrick Motorsports and what Mr. Hendrick gives us all. Just for what the chassis, body and engine shop and everyone…they just work their hearts out. It goes from the front office to the dumpster guys, the guys that sweep the floor. It just doesn’t matter, everyone does there job there at Hendrick Motorsports. Their job is to be number one and obviously we’re working towards trying to be there. We’ve got the Roush guys to try to beat but it’s definitely going to be a good battle. And like Kurt said, don’t count out anybody else just yet. It’s a long season ahead of us. Those guys will go test, they’ll get it done. DEI will go test, Ganassi…Yates, everybody. There’s just a tremendous amount of opportunity out there and for everybody to get going.

PRESSURE ON YOU BEING IN FRONT OF YOUR HOME FANS….WHAT DO YOU THINK OF THE WAGERING? I had a bunch of guys that put money on me so I was wishing the #48 car would have pulled over and let us win. They would have made some bank. I bet you all of the sportsbooks would have gone broke! But, it was pretty cool. Everything was fun this weekend but I bet next year I’ll have a lot lower odds.

YOU SET THE AGE RECORD FOR QUALIFYING AND RAN WELL THIS WEEK. ARE YOU SURPRISING YOURSELF? No, I’m not surprising myself. ….(A Coca-Cola is placed in front of him) No, not Coke! Pepsi’s better. Anyways, back to the question. I’m not really surprising myself. I just wish it was easier on myself to try to finish this well every week. In the Busch Series I could finish top 10 every week. In the Cup Series, it’s just a tremendous amount harder. There in the middle of the race I thought, ‘Damn, we don’t even have a shot for 15th!’ But the guys kept working on the car and got it running better for us and we were able to pass guys on the outside and come back up to second place. So, I wish I could have obviously won today, anybody would wish that. We could have set that youngest winner record. It probably would have been pretty, pretty hard for anybody else to beat coming up.

NOW THAT YOU AND KURT ARE RACING EACH OTHER HOW DO YOUR PARENTS DIVIDE THEIR TIME IN THE PITS? I hope my Dad stays in the Hendrick Motorsports pit because that’s where his job is! He works at Hendrick Motorsports. He used to work on my ARCA team and he works around a little bit in the organization now. You know, Mom…they both hang around both of us a lot. It’s cool to be able to have such a family that’s great like that. It doesn’t matter who’s up front or who’s behind or whatever. They both support us very much.

DID YOU FIGURE HOW THAT TIRE GOT FLAT? I didn’t figure it out, no. The guys were going back and pushing it behind the wall. I can only assume that it was coming back on the access road—a bunch of junk coming back there and stuff like that might have cut it. I didn’t feel anything going wrong with it in the last few laps. I probably wish it was going down a little bit which would have made the car looser where I probably could have caught Jimmie, but we were just too tight.

WHEN YOU’RE RACING AGAINST YOUR BROTHER, DO YOU THINK ABOUT THAT OR DO YOU THINK ABOUT OTHER THINGS? You’re focused on the task at hand, obviously, and just trying to get laps and make it to the end and work on your handling and make sure it gets better. I’m trying to think of a time where we ran side by side together, I don’t know if he was passing me…he probably was passing me. I just was always noticing him up front, leading sometimes or running second or third and thinking, “He’s got a good shot to do this.” I don’t know what happened on pit road, if he had a slow stop or what exactly happened. But he got mired back in traffic and that just kind of hurt him right there but the #48 was really strong and it probably would have been a really, really good race between him and the #97 if they would have restarted 1,2. You know, we came back from….I think we restarted like 10th or something like that on the last restart and drove up to second and Kurt was farther back than I was. It was pretty cool that we were both able to come up through there.

YOU MADE A GOOD MOVE IN THE POINTS Oh, come on. Now all we have to do is keep it there, or move up even further which would be great. That’s just pretty cool. I mean, it shows that the #5 team hasn’t lost what it had from years ago when Terry won the championship. We’re looking forward to bringing this car up to the front every week. You know, Terry was doing an awesome job, it’s just that things weren’t really clicking. And he wanted to go back to a partial schedule. They threw me in there. Everybody is saying that I’m not ready but we’re just going to go out there and try to do the best we can and if we wreck a couple of cars, win a couple of race….whatever. We’ve just got to make sure we’re doing out job at hand and do the best possible job that we can every week.

Jeff Gordon (4th place) #24 DuPont Chevrolet

HOW WAS THE RACE FOR YOU TODAY? It was good. You know, I’ve got to go find out what’s wrong with Ryan Newman, but I guess a bunch of other guys do, too. We had a heck of a run going there. The car was so good on new tires that I just wanted to get up there and get a shot at Jimmy. I don’t know if we could have won there or not since we had some tires issues there where we fell off. I had a great. And I felt like I passed Ryan pretty good. We were being aggressive and everything and I don’t know, he just drove down into the back of me.

IT SEEMS LIKE THIS IS A DAY WHERE YOU REALLY EARNED YOUR FINISH Yeah, I’m just proud for the DuPont Chevrolet team. You know, we went back and forth every time we were up in the top 5. Somebody would take two tires and we’d have problems or something would happen. You know, we’d get shuffled back. It was just a great effort on the car because we just kept tuning to make it better and better. I wanted to get up there and give my teammate Jimmie Johnson a run for his money and also Kyle Busch, what a great run for him today. I hate what happened to Brian Vickers today, if he hadn’t have had his trouble he might be up there today. Overall effort for Hendrick Motorsports is a nice bounce back from Fontana. I don’t know, I had a little trouble with Ryan Newman there so I have to find out what that’s about. But, it costs us a shot at getting a win. I don’t know if we could have gotten up there with Jimmie or not but it certainly took all of our chances away.

WHAT HAPPENED BETWEEN YOU AND RYAN? I worked on him, worked on him and worked on him. I raced him clean, he kept fighting me and I was doing everything I could to get by him. I finally did get by him. He got a big push from behind him and got a pretty good draft going into Turn 1 and I just took my normal line in there. And, he got on me and got me loose and then he just hit me. I’m just fortunate…I feel fortunate that we’ve got a car in one piece and a top 5 finish.

IT SEEMS LIKE IT’S SHAKEN OUT TO BE BETWEEN HENDRICK AND ROUSH HERE IN THIS PART OF THE SEASON Yeah, definitely. In winter testing that looked to be the case as well. I’m really happy with the way things are going. We’ve got to qualify a little bit better, but other than that we’ve got a great race team and great race cars. The Roush cars do as well.

Kevin Harvick (5th place) #29 GM Goodwrench Chevrolet

HOW WAS YOUR RACE TODAY? We had the car to beat today, but it wasn't to be. I'm proud of all the guys on this GM Goodwrench Chevrolet. We were put to the back twice and still got a top-five.

Tony Stewart (10th place) #20 The Home Depot Chevrolet

TELL US ABOUT YOUR RACE I think we passed 80 cars. You know, we got off to a good start. Got ourselves in the Top 13, I think, during that first round. Then we got ourselves in the top 5 during that second round. You know, on the stop we lose a couple of spots and car spins in front of us. We’re slowing down to keep from hitting the car that’s spinning. Then three seconds after the wreck, somebody plows into the back of me and turns me around. It was just a first step in a sequence of bad events that kept costing us time and position. We came in on the next stop and worked our way back up into the Top 10 again. We followed the #0 car in and his tire carrier decided he was going to walk all the way around on pit lane to get around the tire changers and ran into the car with the tire and knocks the tire into one of my tire carriers and it tears our car up. Back we go again. The tire was pretty severe on the left front. Joe Nemechek drives into us off of Turn 2. It was just one after that first sequence of events…after getting spun around, it was just something we couldn’t recover from. It was bad position coming off the pits. It was one thing which led to another which led to another all day.

HOW HARD WAS THE DRIVE TO GET BACK IN THE TOP 10? It was tough! We couldn’t have done it without…the guys on the crew were the reason we did it. They got the thing driving good enough for us to be able to do that. So, again and awesome job.

Jeff Burton (17th place) #31 Cingular Wireless Chevrolet

I had a good car early and was moving along pretty good there and got in that wreck and spent the whole rest of that race trying to figure out how to get fixed up from that, get fenders fixed up and all that. We finally got it where it was decent and took off, got up to about 8th and then just not knowing what we were to do to the car because we were always trying to fix the car after that wreck, we just never got the right adjustments in it. So, I’m a little disappointed for sure that we didn’t get to run as good as we wanted to, considering we were in the wreck and all that we shouldn’t complain too much.

Joe Nemechek (19th place) #01 U.S. Army Chevrolet

TELL US ABOUT YOUR DAY I went from having a shot at winning to almost being lapped. This is really disappointing. The U.S. Army Chevy was great until that last run. The car got so tight -- it was a handful to drive. I don't know what happened. There was still plenty of racing left to get to the front, but this time -- for no explained reason -- the car got awfully tight. It really hurts when you have one of the best cars for the majority of the day and then end up 19th.

Ryan Pemberton (Crew chief) #01 U.S. Army Chevrolet

When Joe came in for the last stop he had one of the fastest cars on the track. We didn't make any adjustments -- took four tires and fuel. Something went amiss and we could not immediately identify any problem after the race. We'll go over everything at the shop this week to see what went wrong.

Scott Riggs (31st place) #10 Valvoline Chevrolet

TELL US ABOUT YOUR CAR AND YOUR DAY Yeah, we had a good car. We just kept ticking with the balance and playing with it the whole time. We had good pit stops just trying to get around a lap car there, and just tried a little too hard and got on the throttle a little too quick. It came around on me, I should have pitted, I knew I had a flat tire but I should have pitted as soon as I came by pit road. But I tried to go back around and catch up with the field.

IT APPEARED THE PITS WERE NOT OPEN AT THAT TIME, THOUGH They were open when I went in but they were closed when I spun. But it cost us more by tearing a fender off than it would pitting too early. That’s just something you learn. We should have been a little bit quicker about calling that, myself and everyone. I just hate it because they give me a good car and then we had to come in. It was pretty extensive work, that tire beat the right front off it pretty bad.

ARE YOU LOOKING FORWARD TO ATLANTA? I am. It’s disappointing to have such a good car at California and Las Vegas and have disappointing finishes. It’s just frustrating.

Brian Vickers #25 GMAC/ditech.com Chevrolet

RE: LAP 13 ACCIDENT - WHAT HAPPENED? You know, we just got wrecked. It’s a shame. Junior apologized which is good. Stuff happens and guys make mistakes. I’m just disappointed for the GMAC Chevrolet team. We had a great car. We had an awesome car for the race, it handled so good. We were moving up toward the front. We didn’t have a good day in qualifying but it was going to be a good day for us.

Dale Earnhardt, Jr. #8 Budweiser Chevrolet

RE: LAP 13 ACCIDENT - I got into the back of Brian (Vickers) going into Turn 1 and turned him around and got out of the race. It’s a big mistake on my part. It got to the corner too hard and it’s really not a fault of him at all. It’s my fault and it’s a shame and I apologized to him and everyone at Hendrick Motorsports. And hopefully next week will be a lot better week.

Bobby Labonte #18 Interstate Batteries Chevrolet

RE: LAP 13 ACCIDENT - I saw the smoke and couldn’t’ see anything because of the smoke. You’ve got to get these cars so loose to drive them through the center of the corner on entry, that (when) I turned the wheel down to go left, I spun out.