DAVID STREMME, No. 40 LONESTAR STEAKHOUSE DODGE: HOW ODD DO YOU THINK SUNDAY’S RACE IS GOING TO BE? “I’m going to say it’s going to be quite a bit different [laughs]. They’re going to have wrecks and it’s going to be just staying out of trouble, about like any other race. I look at last year and guys that didn’t run all that great at the beginning were running good at the end. It’s more physically and mentally demanding than a normal 500-mile race because you have an extra 100 miles. The hard tire and smaller fuel cells and all that stuff, you’re going to have to not make mistakes coming on pit road, pit stops, everything. There’s quite a bit there that you need to look at, probably a little more than you normally do every week.” HOW DO YOU PREPARE TO GET ON AND OFF PIT ROAD WITHOUT GETTING A SPEEDING PENALTY? “Come Saturday we’re probably going to do a lot of pit road entrance. The leaving is not as bad but it’s just getting to pit road and not getting caught speeding. That’s something that we’re going to work on. I mentioned that to them before, even after Darlington, I need to just practice more of that. It’s going to be pretty critical. It’s going to be different as a driver because normally you’re going to be out there if you have long runs under green where now you only run 40 and you’ll have to come in and pit compared to 60 or 70 laps when you’re out there.” CAN YOU GET AWAY WITH A TWO-TIRE STOP OR NO TIRES AT ALL? “That’s not my decision, that’s up to those guys on the pit box. I just drive the car [smiles].” WILL THE CAR DRIVE A LOT DIFFERENT WITH TWO TIRES VERSUS FOUR? “I don’t think it will. You’re going to have to put fuel in and you don’t have to put in 22 gallons. To finish good within those last 30 laps you’re going to have to be up toward the front. You’re not going to drive up from the back up to the front.” HOW MENTALLY TOUGH IS THE RACE GOING TO BE? “My main goal is just to finish. I think we have a really good car, just don’t get caught up in racing in the first part of the race. It’s a long race. We thought Darlington was long just because we slowed down so much, but this is going to be a pretty long race. It’s the longest race all year. The big thing will be just getting from evening to nighttime, making sure that we don’t out tune the car.” THIS IS THE SAME CAR THAT RAN WELL IN THE NEXTEL OPEN. “I feel pretty good about it. We had a good run there. The car drove real well. We’re not going to get caught up in this practice here, just get ready for qualifying because we knew what it raced like. We kind of feel that we maybe have a little advantage over some of the other guys that say didn’t run in that race. But for the most part, all the guys that we’ve got to beat run in the All -Star and the Open so they know what they’ve got, too.” ARE YOU HAPPY WITH THE PROGRESS OF THE TEAM? “Bones [crew chief Lane] and everybody are doing a great job. It makes my job a lot easier. I know at Darlington we should have had a lot better finish than what we ended up with. We run really well there. We were competitive in the Open and run really good. We run with some really good cars that have been running up front a lot here the past few weeks. It’s helped my confidence, for sure. I know we’ve got a really good team. We have good cars, we’ve just got to get everything put together.” HOW BIG OF A CONFIDENCE BOOST WOULD IT BE TO RUN WELL IN THE 600? “It would be real big and I’ve always run good here at Charlotte, whether it’s old asphalt, levigated, anything. It’s fun but the one thing is that our team is getting stronger, I believe, every week and it shows. We just keep digging and keep our focus on what we have to do and get better and get back in the top-35 in points and just keep building and try to get top-15s, top-10s, whatever we can get.”

STEVE LANE, CREW CHIEF, No. 40 LONESTAR STEAKHOUSE DODGE: IS PREPARING THE COCA-COLA 600 MORE CHALLENGING FOR YOU BECAUSE YOU ARE A NEW CREW CHIEF? “Not necessarily. The good thing is that we’ve got our teammates to fall back on as far as preparation and within the Chip Ganassi organization we’ve got so much stuff to fall back on, a database so to speak. But actually with having the harder tire and the new pavement, I think it’s good because it puts everybody on an even playing field. So when everybody came here to test, you kind of started with a clean sheet of paper and that’s good. We came in with them and it’s not like they’re really ahead of us. I actually think it’s kind of a good thing myself.” YOU RAN DECENT IN THE NEXTEL OPEN. “He was really happy with the car. And the plan going in was at lap 15, if we see we can’t win this thing, let’s just ride it out because we’re going to bring the car back to the 600 if it runs good. At lap 3 he said ‘This is our 600 car, this is it.’ We throttle her back there a little bit and rode because he wanted to bring that car back. We felt like we had a really good racecar.” WILL YOU SEE A LOT OF PIT STOPS ON SUNDAY NIGHT? “I think Sunday is going to be survival. I think the biggest thing that we’ve preached to our pit crew all week is just maintain. We don’t need real fast pit stops but we can’t come back down pit road. And to the driver, you can’t be smoking ‘em getting in; you can’t be speeding on pit road. All we’ve got to do is survive and be on the lead lap and I think you’ve got an easy top-10 finish here.” CAN YOU GO OVER TWO FUEL STOPS WITHOUT CHANGING TIRES? “I think you can definitely leave the tires on but I think you’re in a situation where you’re going to see guys take ‘em off just to be able to let the air out of them and then they’re going to put them right back on. As far as leaving them on, I don’t see that happening unless you only need like half a can or something like that. But if you need to put a can and a half of gas in, you’re better off to just change tires, put you some cold ones on there. But they’re going to be scuffs, naturally.” HOW BIG WOULD IT BE FOR THIS TEAM TO RUN WELL HERE? “For us, huge [smiles]. It seems like every week we’re getting a little better. At Darlington we did have a spark plug issue or we felt like we would have had a good finish. For us it would just mean a lot to both our sponsors.”