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Aaron's 499 - Dodge Post-Race Quotes
“The car wasn’t good the first part of the race, but the Kodak team kept working and got it better for me. I knew when we got it decent I would be able to drive it up through there pretty good. I was just driving around in the back about three-quarters throttle. The car wasn’t handling very good, but we stayed out of trouble and missed that big wreck and they got the car working pretty good. We got up in pretty good position and got shuffled out. A couple of guys got together and I was right behind it and there was nowhere to go. We needed a good run, and we had a decent one going. At least we crashed with two to go and not 50 to go.”
“We’d got good restarts and passed a couple of cars on restarts so I thought we might have a chance there at the end. Elliott laid back a little bit more than I did, but he was my friend. We’re best friends. He knocked the hell out of me off turn two, but that was cool. It’s very stressful, and I’m glad it’s over.
“I was fortunate to miss all the wrecks. Donnie (crew chief Wingo) made some really good calls. I just took fuel on that last stop and it put us up front. I think that kept us from getting caught up in that really big wreck. This is probably one of the best cars I’ve had, and it felt great to put it all together. I never would have thought Tony would have been able to get up underneath me and pass me. It seemed like the outside had been better. When you’re looking in your mirror you think you’re clear and the spotter says you’re clear, but he doesn’t sound very sure. It’s just the way it is. I would have thought someone in 10th would have pulled out and tried to go with whoever was on the outside, but it’s tough to make those decisions.
“When they dropped the green flag I was on the inside and couldn’t get up. I dropped almost all the way to the back, Tony and I. I got to the middle and my car was really fast. It’s weird because after that red flag the middle didn’t work as well and we took half the cars away. You needed to be on the top or bottom, and if you got in the middle you went backwards. No strategy, just stay out of the big wreck.
“I looked down (when Waltrip got into me), and I wasn’t sure if I was clear. You can feel him kinda picking you up, but what do you do the last two laps at this place? You just try to get all you can.”
“It’s been a long weekend after yesterday and today. That’s the way this stuff is. You’re happy if you miss the big wreck and upset if you get in it. Fortunately we didn’t get too badly damaged. We went a lap down because we were so slow, but we hung in there and got a 14th. We’re happy about that. I was a little sore after yesterday, but it wasn’t too bad. We battled back and forth today. We got up high and got toward the front early. We had a car that could have been there if we could have adjusted the balance just a little bit.”
“We were just out there surviving and worked our way up to the top five there at the end. Our car is getting better and better. It drove good all day. We just need a little bit more. We’ve made huge gains on it. We were right in the middle of that last accident. I saw it happen. We were in the right place at the right time. We missed the first couple of cars that spun in front of us. The 48 came across, and I was able to get by him. I’m just real proud of this team. We needed this.
“We ran with the best of the best at the speedways today, so that’s a good sign. Our Dodge was really good, obviously. We could go wherever we needed to go. I’m proud of our Dodge guys. We dodged a lot of wrecks today, stayed out of trouble and it was just a good day for us.
“We’ve been working on our speedway program for the last year. So, at every single race we keep getting better and better. I know a lot of people wrecked out today, but we were out there in the middle of all of it. My hat’s off to all of these guys here at Evernham Motorsports. Our Dodge Charger ran good today. We dodged some wrecks and thanks to all of the local Dodge dealers out there.
“I tried something different yesterday – I kind of stayed in the middle of it and it didn’t work. But I did the same thing today and it worked. We just stayed up there the best we could and ran as hard as we could all day, and we came home with a top five for it. I’m just really proud of everyone.
“Our Dodge was good enough to be able to dodge all the wrecks today. That’s the good thing about it. We needed this. We needed a top five for the points. That’s our first top 10 and top five all year. We’ve got a long way to go, and we’re getting better every week. We just were lucky today. You’ve got to have a lot luck when you come here, and that’s really what we had today. We were right in the middle of all the wrecks, and we just got by all of them. We dodged the little ones and brought our Dodge Charger home.”
“We didn’t want to see it go this way. I didn’t see what happened to start it all, but usually it’s a stupid move. We had a good car, but we kept getting stuck on the outside or the inside. We were working our way back up and then boom, that was it.”
“It all broke loose and we didn’t have anywhere to go. We’d been waiting on it all day. They wrecked on the straightaway again. It’s ridiculous that professional drivers can’t run three deep without hitting each other. Our car was good in the middle. It was OK on the top, but it wouldn’t run on the bottom of the track. We were real good in the middle. We got shuffled back. We got trapped on the bottom and we were working our way back up to the front. A bunch of cars got messed up. There’s just no safe place to race here anymore. It’s stupid to race like this.”
“All I saw was a lot of smoke. I’d love to see the replays and see what really caused it. I knew everybody was doing pretty good for a long time. To run that close that long with no incidents is a lot of expect out of people. I think somebody just ran out of time or room and it caused a big wreck. You could feel the intensity picking up. Everybody was doing a lot more bump drafting and bumping off the side of each other. A lot of that stuff was going on, and we didn’t have that earlier in the race. All of a sudden it all started happening. I had a great car today. It handled perfect and drafted well. I couldn’t ask for anything more. We had good pit stops and had good track position. We got a hole in the right front corner of the body. We fixed that and it made the car better. We’ll get if fixed and see if we can get out there and get some laps.”
“We got up toward the front, and I made a bad decision and went all the way to the back. Bump drafting is just part of this kind of racing. It’s part of the package. Everybody is going to do it. It seemed like it was a lot better than the Busch race yesterday. People weren’t running into each other. This kind of racing just isn’t any fun at all. At times it is when you’ve got a really good car, but if your car isn’t good you’re just along for the ride for 500 miles. There was a little bit of bump drafting going on. I was getting bumped here and there and I bumped here and there. That’s what you’re going to have when you have these types of races. You can ask them not to bump draft, but they’re going to do it. That’s how you get to the front. We’ve got three straightaways here, and you bump draft on all three of them. It didn’t seem too bad. It seemed like everybody was minding their own business. It was just regular restrictor-plate racing, pretty boring out there. I still don’t know what happened. Obviously someone bumped someone else too hard. Sooner or later you’re going to have this on this type of track.”
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