Bill Elliott / Stanley Racing Teleconference

May 24, 2005 - Bill Elliott, will make his 55th career start at Charlotte this Sunday, racing his third race in the No. 91 Stanley Tools Dodge Charger. Elliott has four poles, two wins, 11 top fives and 22 top 10s at the Charlotte. He started fourth and finished fourth in his most recent start at the track – fall of 2003. Elliott also leads all active drivers in laps led at Charlotte with 1,413 circuits in the top spot. The tally is sixth most all-time at the racetrack, ranking behind Dale Earnhardt (1,522). Elliott will run select races this year in an Evernham Motorsports Dodge Charger, and will next run with the Stanley Tools team at Indianapolis.

BILL ELLIOTT (No. 91 Stanley Tools Dodge Charger)

Bill Elliott

On testing at Charlotte this month:
“The track is quite a bit different than it has been in the past. I think, you noticed that from the All-Star race Saturday night. The main thing for us is just to expand off of what Jeremy and Kasey learned. We learned a good bit in the test, but then we need to try to build off what Jeremy and Kasey’s comments were and how they ended up Saturday night.”

On Charlotte:
“Charlotte was good to me. The 600 has always kind of eluded me through the years. But, being that it’s a 600 mile race, it gives you a lot more opportunities to have a good day because normally the last 100 miles is always the crucial part of having a good finish in the 600.”

Can you put Ricky Rudd’s consecutive start streak of 764 races into perspective?
“I don’t think anybody can put it into perspective. The way you’ve got to look at all of this stuff is that’s a pretty incredible deal. Not to have an injury or a sickness or something to prevent you from starting these deals. That’s a pretty impressive deal. I don’t care who you are. To me, you go through all this stuff over the years and look back at all the things that could have happened and might have happened, but then it didn’t. And he was able to accomplish that. For me, I had a pretty good run going and I broke my hip at Talladega, and then I had some other problems another time. But, once you kind of experience that you realize that a lot of things can affect you, you know?”

On racing this weekend:
“It’s good to be back. I miss certain aspects of it – some of it I don’t, of course. But all in all, throughout the years racing has been awfully good to me. For me, starting this race at Charlotte here, it will start to be a pretty aggressive racing season again. I run there then I test at Michigan. Then I go run Rusty’s Busch car at Nashville. Then I go to Michigan. Then I run Rusty’s car again at Milwaukee. Then we’re talking about maybe running something the first of July and then running the Pikes Peak race at the end of July. Then Indy, then Michigan, then California again. So, it’s going to start to be a pretty wild season here.

On lucky dog rule:
“Well, the way I see it, it really doesn’t matter. Whatever rules they implement into the deal, whether it’s a guy to get his lap back or whatever, you can unfold it and look at it two ways. A guy that can be ahead of the other guys a lap down and get his lap back. Normally if you’ve got a guy that’s a dominating car and you’ve got a pretty decent race car under the old rules you’d never, ever get your lap back, because you couldn’t put yourself into position. Plus, on top of that, if you got up there and let’s say you were maybe just a little bit off the leader, but could run with him and maybe put him in jeopardy or crash him trying to get ahead of him to get your lap back. That’s the way it was before. The way it is now, you can kind of run there, bide your time, and wait for a caution and then proceed on. But there again, I don’t know that it’s a negative, really. If you look at the whole standpoint it’s probably been a pretty good deal all in all.

And people have accepted it because of the safety standpoint?
“Very much so. Because, with them not racing back to the flag – and you’ve always seen it in the past before they had this – depending on if it was a teammate or whatever, you could get your lap back, or not. Let’s say there were two teammates racing. One guy was leading and one guy was a lap down, and the guy leading backed off and let the guy a lap down get his lap back before the start/finish line, on the way we used to race back to the caution. Where today, it takes that out of the equation. It doesn’t really play favoritism to a team guy that could maybe let his teammate by or prevent an opposing team from getting by to get his lap back. It’s six, one, and a half dozen another. I think at the end result, I don’t see it being a negative. I really don’t.

On the Chase:
“It’s just like last year, there was a lot of media coverage up towards race 26. And this year, it’s like once we get complacent in what we do, it’s just like the way the points system has been in the past, nobody really talked about it until the end of the year. We’ve had some things that went along with it, but all in all, once you kind of get used to it and it’s a part of things to do, you don’t think much about it. Everybody is trying to run and gain points regardless of if it’s the way the old system was or the way the new system is. To me, you look at it from the standpoint of either getting into the top 10 if it’s more than 400 points, or if you can stay within 400 points of the leader with 10 races to go, then it just starts over again. It’s like you might as well as forget about the first two-thirds of the season if you can stay within that magic number of either 10 or 400, I think is the way it pans out. And with that, you’ve got just as good a shot as a lot of the other guys, with the exception of the way they break the points down there in the last 10 races, from first to whatever position they go back to.”

Is the Chase as good a measure of a championship as when you won it?
“I don’t think people are going to look that far back. You accepted it the way it was then, and you kind of accept it the way it is today. You don’t have a lot of control over a lot of the things that go on, and for me, I was proud of… You’ve got to understand, through my era I came in and we weren’t a part of a well known team. We built our team out of my brother’s and my family’s hard work. We came in, we started races, we finished races, we won races and we won a championship all under that same title. I think, of all the things throughout my career that I’ve accomplished, I can look back at that and that’s my most satisfying part of my career. Granted, there’s been some great things that happened through the Junior (Johnson) era and coming on to Ray, as far as this era is concerned. But, the way we did it, the way we came in, there’s just been very few people who have been able to accomplish that. And, with the way the point system is today or the way it was, a champion is a champion is a champion, is the way I see it, whether it’s the way points were or the way they are now.”

On racing at Charlotte:
“The main thing is to stay on the lead lap. You get some of these guys now, if you look at the way that things have gone now, the Hendrick and the Roush deals have got everyone else smoked. The only other two teams that have won a race outside of that is Childress with Harvick and Kasey with Ray. I don’t know what they’ve done, but it just seems like all of a sudden they’ve emerged into the super teams. And that comes back to having a good run at Charlotte. If you can stay in the hunt and stay on the lead lap and keep yourself in position all night long, you can put yourself in the position to win. But, those are the key things that you’ve got to do.”

On the difficulty of finishing as strong in a part-time vs. fulltime team:
“Let me throw that around as another question. How many fulltime teams have not had top 10 finishes? Look at Matt Kenseth. Based on five races last year, and we’ve only competed in three this year and two we hadn’t finished. To me it’s just numbers. I think you’re capable of doing anything. The main thing is, with the way Ray has structured his teams and the route that he’s going in keeping them abreast, they’re not like a guy just running every now and then without having other avenues of gathering information. With Chris Andrews there, and all of the stuff that they’ve got going on, and him being able to run several different things and keep abreast of Jeremy and Kasey… Yeah, you might lose a little bit, but it would be nowhere near like coming in cold turkey, not having the other information to feed into to run a partial deal. But, being able to run more stuff here the next few months, that’s going to give me a better opportunity to expand on what we’re trying to do.

“Plus, you look at what we did last year, for example at Texas I sat on the outside pole, led a lot of laps and we cut a tire down and crashed. At Atlanta we had a pretty decent run. We got a lap down early, but we ran good the rest of the day. You’ve got to kind of put things in perspective. You look at some of the guys that have run good or run bad, it’s hard to say. I still enjoy competing. I still enjoy a lot of it. And we’ll just kind of see how things unfold. If it gets to where I think it’s a negative to the team… But on the flip side of that, I have helped Ray, especially last year to come on and develop… We started running his in-house cars last year. I was always running a different spec engine than those other guys, trying to get some development ahead of what’s going on. To me, I’ve kind of been the guinea pig. But, I still enjoy the racing.

“To me, I look at it as the opportunity to help Ray’s organization build to the next level. That’s the way I view it. However you want to look at it, that’s fine. But, for me it’s part of making sure that Evernham Motorsports survives in this arena and continues to try to make strides ahead of all the other competition.”

Is it more important for you to make sure don’t leave any good runs on the table?
“My perspective is a little bit different than those guys. When do you lose it, or when do you keep it? It’s just like playing cards – know when to hold them and know when to fold them. No one knows that. Some guys have better opportunities than others, but my point is, when do you ever know? At least with the opportunity the way I am today, if I want to run five races or 25 races, that’s my decision. If I want to come back next year and run all the races… I’ve not said, ‘This is, bam, shut the door and I’m done.’ At least I’ve given myself an opportunity to continue to, at least, stay kind of up to what’s going on, and to make decisions based on how you feel per year.

“But, there again, each person has his own way of looking at things. If Mark (Martin) says, ‘If you give me this kind of equipment, I’ll come back next year,’ well, I had good equipment in ’03, and I didn’t see why that was going to be any different in ’04 if I had continued to stay with Ray. That wasn’t driving my decision. What drove my decision was more that I’ve got children, I want to spend more time with them, I’ve got family things I want to do. I’ve got other things that, as I continue to get older, yeah, I could probably drive a car another two or three or four years, but my point is that you’ve got an age there eventually that you’re not going to want to do anything or be able to do much other stuff. I don’t want to continue to close that window up. I want to be able to start looking at doing other things, and if I find something that I might really want to do I’ll just quit racing altogether, or race part time, or go play in the dirt, or go do something different. I’m not totally committed in everything I’ve done to this point. For me, it gives me a lot of options that nobody else has. As far as the stress and the deal… Let’s take a hypothetical situation, let’s say Mark says, ‘Okay, I’m going to go another year.’ And he goes back next year and he has a miserable year. But, on the flip side let’s say he has a great year and wins a championship. How do you play those odds? Right now Ford and Chevrolet have a pretty good race car and they’ve got some good race teams. But who’s to say that it might flip and somebody else might have that?”

On fans’ attachment to race car numbers:
“I think people get etched in their minds a certain thing. You might have certain things or certain sports you grew up around or whatever, and a certain thing just catches you and stays with you throughout time. I think what the No. 9 was synonymous for and coming through the ’80s and all the stuff that we did well, and then coming back to the No. 9 in 2001, and winning in Homestead, then Pocono, Indy and then Rockingham in the fall of ’03, has kind of rejuvenated that group of fans. I think with me stepping aside and Kasey coming in and doing as well as he has – he’s got a great personality, he’s got a lot of things going for him – I think all of that plays a part in what ends up becoming of that.”

On Pocono:
“I love Pocono for some reason. It always was good to me throughout the ’80s and ’90s, I ran well there. It’s just to me a lot of fun racetrack. It’s a very challenging racetrack. I had a lot of good memories there. I can remember going to Pocono in the ’70s, and there wasn’t enough people in the grandstands to start a good fight. And now today, you can’t even find a seat in the house. It kind of has it’s own following, but to me, it’s always been a fun, fun racetrack.

Fondest memory at Pocono:
“I’d say winning there in ’02, coming back and the way we raced. Just being able to race the guys that I raced towards the end of the race, and having such a good day. I think Sterling was leading there later on in the race, and I was able to get by him and hold off Kurt Busch. And then to turn around and backup the win the next week at Indy… Looking back at winning back-to-back in the ’80s there, it’s just been to me an extremely lot of fun racetrack.”

Did it mean any more to you to see Martin win the All-Star race last weekend?
“I hadn’t heard anybody say any different. I was tickled to death to see Mark win. If anybody could have won it, Mark was probably one of my favorites – if Kasey couldn’t have won it, Mark was. To watch Kasey win at Richmond and then Mark win the All-Star Challenge was really a neat deal. Mark has been dedicated to this sport… I remember when Mark came in in the later ’80s, and he was just a scrawny little kid. And to be able to be as tough a competitor as he is today, and as well as he’s run in the Roush stables, he’s kind of been just a solid, solid runner every year.”

1,413 career laps led at Charlotte – that’s a lot of time to have spent up front:
“Yeah, that is to not have won a 600 there. Maybe this is the weekend we can do it. We’ll see.”