SORENSON: “It was a good run. We had a great car all day. This is probably one of the best cars that I’ve had all year. The first run of the best was probably the best that it was and then there at the end it was really good again. The beginning and end was the best, so I guess you can’t ask for any better than that.” THERE WERE A FEW CAUTIONS AT THE END OF THE RACE. DID THAT HELP YOU? “It helped us a couple of spots. We got gas there and some of those guys didn’t. Some of them ran out and some of them won the race. It’s kind of a half and half deal there.” DID YOU TAKE FOUR TIRES ON EVERY STOP TODAY? “No, we didn’t take four tires every time. We didn’t need them. I think our fuel load was more of an issue for us than tires were.” YOU HAD ANOTHER GOOD RUN AT A MILE-AND-A-HALF TRACK. “We feel like we’ve been good at most of these places and had a lot of problems. Today we finished about where we should have. We ran fifth, fourth, sixth, seventh all day. We finished seventh. That’s about where we should have finished and we did so it’s good.” IS THIS A SIGN OF THINGS TO COME IN THE SECOND HALF OF THE SEASON? “I hope so. We’ll see [smiles].”

JIMMY ELLEDGE, CREW CHIEF, No. 41 TARGET DODGE: THIS WAS A GOOD RUN FOR YOUR TEAM. “It was great, really great. I feel like we were better than a top-10 car today but we’ll take it. We weren’t a top-five car at Michigan and got a top-five and we were a top-10 car. You’ve got to take the good with the bad. We were just trying to get solid and trying to get consistent. If you’ve got top-five cars and run in the top-10 with them you’ll start finishing in the top-five. I’m real proud of everybody. Reed did an outstanding job today. The pit crew was spot on. I feel good about the second half. I feel like we’ve got the first half done now and get to go to some of these places for the second time with him and I feel like there will be some strength in that.” WAS TRACK POSITION OR FRESH TIRES MORE IMPORTANT TODAY? “Track position, for sure. Track position and fuel [laughs]. When we pitted there and just got gas towards the end, it was just too risky for me to try to make it. It worked out. At the time it didn’t look like it was and it mired us up back around 15th and I didn’t think that we might not even make it out of there. Tires weren’t worth anything. The track position was so huge. You seen it all day long where people would stay out or get two or just fuel and stuff. The track position made all the difference.” HOW DO YOU CALCULATE FUEL MILEAGE WITH THE POSSIBILITY OF A GREEN-WHITE-CHECKERED EXTENDING THE DISTANCE OF THE RACE? “Well, that’s the risk that you take. My approach to it is if it’s close, and you’re trying to depend on a green-white-checkered, that’s one thing. But when you’re not close and not even counting a green-white-checkered, yeah, that gets risky for me. And our fuel mileage was terrible today. It wasn’t very good at all and I knew that there were cars that were not going to make it from when we pitted. We couldn’t make it no way, no how.” CAN YOU TELL THIS TEAM IS GETTING MORE CONSISTENT? “Absolutely. Unfortunately, we had Sonoma and Daytona to go to because I felt like right up to that point we were starting to get where we were pretty consistent and we need about two or three weeks of that in a row to start getting on a roll. Like I said, we going to these tracks for the second time now there’s going to be a lot of speed in that. We can sit down now and kind of identify the things we need to be better. We had a fast car today and was able to drive to the front. Those cars are hard to come by.”

J.J. YELEY, No. 18 VESICARE CHEVROLET: “The car was really good there for a while. We stayed out and I’ve learned here a couple times you’ve got to stay out with at least 30 or 40 to go. The car was really good, just got a little bit tight there in the center. After that last restart the thing stumbled, may have vapor locked a little bit on the restart and let Clint get by me. For the five, six weeks that we’ve had here, a top-10 is phenomal. I knew that Chicago was a place that we were going to come and get a good run. I just wanted to make sure that we didn’t let it slip away. I know we go next week to New Hampshire. I was pretty decent there last year driving the 11 car so hopefully this is a little bit of momentum that this team needed and we can get back to running in the top-10 consistently.” WHAT DOES THIS GOOD FINISH DO FOR YOUR CONFIDENCE? “It doesn’t change my confidence a whole lot. I know this team is more than capable. I’m not going to let my confidence go down because we haven’t run good or we have bad things happen to us. It would be one thing if we struggled and ran 40th every week and couldn’t figure out what the problem was. We run good every week, we just put ourselves in a situation where we get taken out. We avoided all those today and had a good one.” IS THIS A SIGN YOU’RE GOING TO BE ABLE TO PUT MORE RACES LIKE THIS TOGETHER IN THE SECOND HALF OF THE SEASON? “I sure hope so. I know you have a couple bad runs and it’s hard on everybody, not just the driver, but the crew, from guys changing tires to guys working on the thing. This is a good confidence booster for the entire team. We have Vesicare/GSK on the car this week and we’ll go back and see if we can get a good run for the guys at Interstate Batteries.”

DENNY HAMLIN, No. 11 FEDEX KINKO’S CHEVROLET: “Unfortunately we had a loose wheel there and had to come in and went a lap down. But still, I think with 30 or 40 to go we were 26th or 27th. We made a decent day out of it. The car was tight most of the day. We kind of struggled to get that out but we got better every stop. We kept making gains. We just needed track position.”