KEVIN LEPAGE – No. 61 Hooters Hotel-Las Vegas Fusion (qualified 30th) – “We picked up a little bit from our practice run, picked up about a tenth. We’ve got to be in these shows, you know, so we can’t make a mistake in qualifying; we have nothing to fall back on as far as a provisional or anything or being locked in the top 35. Where we were in practice, that put us seventh overall in that group with a lot of guys still in the 33s. That was almost a flat. I just want to thank Hooters Hotel here in Vegas for coming on board this weekend, and we look forward to a good run on Sunday.”

JAMIE MCMURRAY – No. 26 Crown Royal Fusion (qualified 19th) – “The Cup cars, they drive so much freer than what the Busch cars do, and when you get out of your Busch practice in race trim, it’s a handful, obviously, in a Cup car. The Crown Royal Ford Fusion tested real well here a month ago, and we ran well at Fontana last week. We had some issues and still finished sixth, so we’ve got a great car for Sunday. If it rains tomorrow, I don’t even know that I’d be disappointed because I think we’ve got a great car.”

CARL EDWARDS – No. 99 Office Depot Fusion (qualified 21st) – “Just didn’t have a very good lap, so we’ll just have to make our race car real good for race trim. We worked on race trim most of the day, and I thought we were going to be pretty good. I thought we had a chance at the pole there, but I just didn’t get through one and two there like I needed to.”

KEN SCHRADER – No. 21 Little Debbie/Motorcraft/USAF Fusion (qualified 23rd) – “We’ve been working on race, race, race, and we did we make a qualifying run here today, and it helped us. But we’ve been working on race because we’re locked in the top 35. We only had an hour and a half today and we spent an hour and five minutes of it in race trim. So, we’re pretty happy with that. We got caught with our pants down last week when it came time to qualifying, so we’ll take that.”

ELLIOTT SADLER – No. 38 M&M’s Fusion (qualified 26th) – “We just missed it a little bit. We did some race stuff this morning, but it was just way too loose for me. I’m very, very fortunate and very lucky we’re not getting the backup out right now. It’s not where we want to start, but maybe we’ve learned enough as far as race trim is concerned this morning to get us a little closer for Sunday.”

GREG BIFFLE – No. 16 National Guard Fusion (qualified 1st) – “Always, if you get to do it a second time, you can probably find some more speed. I left some speed out there. I feel like that’s going to get beat. There’s a couple good guys to go. I thought the 48 would beat us, but he didn’t, so I dodged a bullet. The track has got a tremendous amount of grip. With this weather, the engines are running very, very well. The car is making a lot of power and my car was just perfect on that lap. Doug and the guys just did a great job getting this thing ready to go. It’s the same car from California and we found an engine, we had a failure of a part, it was an imperfection in the metal, so nothing we could’ve done or foreseen about that. But, we’re ready to go here for Vegas.” HOW IMPORTANT IS IT WHEN A GREAT RUN AT CALIFORNIA IS NOT REFLECTED IN THE FINISH TO COME BACK AND BE STRONG HERE? “You know what? Our whole team feels really, really good about last week – like we won almost. Spirits are high because the fact is that we have good race cars and we’re running very well. And that’s the key. We had great pit stops, we had a great pit strategy, we had the fastest car for most of the day – Tony Stewart was a little faster at times – but that is the confidence we need to keep going race after race.”

DALE JARRETT – No. 88 UPS Fusion (qualified 15th) – “With the weather looking like it is for tomorrow we worked in racetrim for most of the day. We just wanted to make sure that some things we learned a little bit from California and some things that we’ve just been working on, it all looks good on paper but we had to see it on the race track, and we couldn’t take the chance of rain tomorrow, so we had no idea what it might do there, but it turned out okay. We’ll be in pretty good shape.” WAS YOUR QUALIFYING LAP BETTER THAN EXPECTED? “Yeah, we didn’t really know what to expect, but, yeah, probably a little better than what I would’ve expected. We made one lap in qualifying trim and then that one, so it turned out pretty good.”

MATT KENSETH – No. 17 DeWalt Power Tools Fusion (qualified 9th) – “It was alright. I was a little to free and didn’t get to the green very good. So it was pretty good. That’s a good spot there, a lot better than last week.”



GREG BIFFLE PRESS CONFERENCE

GREG BIFFLE – No. 16 National Guard Fusion – “The National Guard was real good right off the transporter. Of course, this is the car we ran at California and just brought it back here – a lot of the teams did that that ran well there. We were just extremely happy with the way the car ran. We were worried about weather so we did mainly race trim. It seems like anytime we do that we end up qualifying really good. You know, you get the car right in race trim, it seems like it’s easy to put it into qualifying trim. On our qualifying lap, we didn’t get a good, clean qualifying lap in practice. We were coming down the backstretch on our qualifying run and Ryan Newman pulled out in front of us, so we didn’t get to finish it, so we didn’t get a qualifying run in practice, and were 17th on the sheet, so really just didn’t know what expect going out here for qualifying. I just thought about what I needed to do and just drove the car like I knew how to drive it. I just hoped it would do what I wanted it to and it did. I didn’t think it would be good enough, either. I thought somebody would beat it. I think I waited a little bit to pick the throttle up because I thought it would be a little loose, and it’s a little bit different style of car, body-wise, of what I’m used to. It has some more grip in the back and we’re trying different stuff moving forward. Just real, real happy to be on the pole here in Vegas.”

HOW’S YOUR CAR FOR SUNDAY? “My car’s really good for Sunday, and my Ameriquest car seems to be pretty good for tomorrow as well. We’re kind of flirting with different balances, front to rear, different offsets and things with all within what we’re allowed to do with the templates and stuff, just to get driver preference behind the wheel, what the driver likes to feel and how he wants the car to drive. And I’m kind of getting off what I did last year, winning those five races at the beginning of the season, and kind of going toward what we learned at the end of the season. It seems to be working. It drives a little bit different; I don’t care for it 100 percent, I like the feel of my other cars last year a little bit better, but they’re not as fast. So, these cars seem to be just a little bit faster, but I just don’t quite like the feel as much. I like the car a little bit looser. When the car drives a little bit tighter, it just as more rear grip to it. But we’ll just keep going. It seems like we don’t have as many tests because we’re forced to go places and test where we want to test. I feel like we would’ve done another mile and a half test somewhere else to kind of try a couple of different things. We would’ve gone to Kentucky, which I think we still can, but the tires are the issue.”

IS THIS GOING TO BE CALIFORNIA, PART II, BASICALLY? “I hope it is, other than the 24 laps to go, Part II, but we’ll see. It looks like on the speed chart there’s a couple of guys on the lap-to-lap tracker that are faster than us. One of them is the 9 car. The 9 car is the fastest car here. If something doesn’t happen to his car or blows the right-front tire and hits the fence, then he might be the car to beat on Sunday. It looks like, so far. Granted, it’s the first day of practice. We still have tomorrow, and then the long race, but right now they look like the fastest car.”

WHAT HAPPENED TO YOUR ENGINE? “It broke an intake valve spring and they did a metallurgy test, an x-ray on the material and it had a pin hole in the material, an air pocket in the valve spring itself. It’s about a quarter inch wire, the valve spring is, and it was bad material. They took Carl’s engine, and we have what’s called a spin tron, which simulates a lap, and they put Carl’s valve train on the spin tron and ran it another 1,000 miles and nothing failed – at California Speedway. We can make it do, accelerate, decelerate, like it’s making laps. The engine thinks it’s making laps, it doesn’t know any difference, and it went another 1,000 miles with no failure. That’s what we try to do. We try to make our engines go twice the distance of the race without a failure. So, it was just material, and that’s going to happen.”

DURING QUALIFYING, DID THE WIND GUSTS AFFECT ANYTHING? “You know, it didn’t. At least not when I made my run, and I didn’t really feel it move the car around much. But it’s taped off solid and its down on the ground. I can really feel it turning when you get close to the wall here getting into turn one, the car wants to move every lap, so it must be the way the wind’s coming around the track. When you get up close to the wall, within a foot of it, the car moves around. So I just stayed a little bit more off the wall when I qualified to make sure I got in the corner real clean.”

WHEN WAS THE DECISION MADE TO BRING THE CALIFORNIA CAR HERE, AND DO YOU THINK YOU CAN DOMINATE HERE LIKE YOU DID IN CALIFORNIA? “I don’t really know. These tracks are quite a bit different. It was pretty bold to bring that car here. I thought about it. I tested here and was so-so and went to California and was like three-tenths faster than the field – two years ago, not this test but the year before. It told me clearly that these race tracks are different and they take different cars a little bit. But, so far, this car seems like it’s just as fast and driving well like it did at California. I expect to run well, considering where we qualified and how fast it was in practice. I did a race lap of 31.80 and Mark was in qualifying trim and we were faster than he was, and that’s very, very rare for any cars to be in qualifying trim and you’re faster than them in race trim. I was extremely surprised. The 26, McMurray, and Mark were both in qualifying trim, and we put a faster lap on the board just in race trim. There, then at the end when everybody got to qualifying trims then a bunch of people jumped up there, but the track was getting faster, too.”