HAMLIN: “I’m pretty happy with that. I’ve got a car that you don’t have to try hard to go fast. This is our Pocono car and Mike [Ford, crew chief] is always pushing me to really go for it in qualifying. I told them that I like this car too much to go too much faster. I drove in 1 and I felt like I should have drove in way deeper and got on it harder. This car was so good in race trim I didn’t want to risk it. We still had a really good solid lap not trying hard.” WAS YOUR CAR LOOSE IN PRACTICE? “You know, when I was here in the spring our car was very, very loose. It seemed like our car was good that first practice. I felt like we had, and I’m really not afraid to say, the best car in practice. We’ll see where it stacks up on Saturday and Sunday.” ARE YOU GLAD TO BE GOING TO TRACKS WHERE YOU HAVE SOME NOTES? “That always helps with the comfort level. It just makes it easier for you to go out there and cut that fast lap right off the get-go. It’s very frustrating to go to a racetrack and you’re 30th in practice and you’re spinning your guts out trying to run faster. It makes it a lot easier when you come back and can do that. We’re reaping the benefits of going back as well as we’ve got our favorite car from here on out.”

MARTIN TRUEX JR., No. 1 BASS PRO SHOPS/TRACKER BOATS CHEVROLET: “I’m happy because of the adjustment Bono made on the car. We were too loose all throughout practice and I kept telling him ‘We’re too loose’ and he said ‘Man, I’ll fit you up, I’ll fix you up.’ He did a really good job with the car right there getting it just right. I was still just a little bit too free. I think I could have went a little faster but real happy with all the guys, all their hard work, and get this Bass Pro Chevy up front on Sunday, I hope.” HOW MUCH OF AN ADVANTAGE IS IT TO START OFF GOOD DURING A WEEKEND? “Well, we didn’t start off good, is the thing, today, this morning. An hour and a half of practice isn’t much time to get it from not so good to pretty good. Like I said, they just did a pretty good job with the car. I just get in there and tell them what I need and if they fix it usually we run good. Sometimes we can’t ever figure out how to fix it and sometimes we fix it. Today they did a good job. We got some notes from here last time, which helped a bunch. We qualified, I think, 11th here last time, which was good, but we came here and we improved on that. It’s a good day for us, so far.” WHEN YOU COME BACK TO SOME OF THE THESE TRACKS FOR A SECOND TIME AND HAVE A LITTLE BIT OF A NOTEBOOK, DOES THAT PUT YOU WAY AHEAD OF WHERE YOU WERE AT THE BEGINNING OF THE SEASON? “Yeah, absolutely, because when we go to make adjustments, we’re not just taking shots in the dark. Sometimes we do what we think it right and it doesn’t do what it’s supposed to. Even if it’s just one page of things that we did that screwed us up or say we were loose and we tried to fix it and we did something to make it worse, we know these things now. It’s been tough on Bono because he’s new, we’re all new and he’s had a lot of pressure on him to do all the things that guys that can’t do that have been here for 10 years. He’s doing a good job of sticking with it. We’re all sticking together and this shows right here.” WHAT WAS THE KEY TO YOUR LAP? “A good racecar. Guys have done an awesome job getting it setup from earlier. We struggled a little in practice and got it a lot better there. It was just a good racecar.” WHAT HAS IT BEEN LIKE BEING A RAYBESTOS ROOKIE IN THIS SERIES? “It’s tough. I mean, these guys are the best there is and to race with them you’ve got to be your best. You’ve got to do everything right. There’s no room for mistakes and no room for second best. We’re just working hard to be the best that we can be.” HOW WAS YOUR CAR? “It felt really good. We were loose all day and we made a bunch of changes for qualifying and it was still a little bit on the loose side to do what a couple of those guys did up there on the front. It was a real good solid lap for us. I love Michigan. Any tracks that we come to that are real wide like this where you can run from the bottom to the top makes for good racing and makes it a lot of fun for us.”

J.J. YELEY, No. 18 HUSQVARNA CHEVROLET: “I’m very disappointed with the run but the same time it was a huge improvement from what we had early on. The guys have really been busting their butts. We have Husqvarna on the car this week and the guys worked a tremendous amount of hours on the seven post just trying to learn some things. I thought we were going to have a great racecar and be ahead of where we were at the spring race. I guess it was information overload. We had all this information and we just kind of fooled ourselves, I think. We were really tight all day long and made a bunch of changes, ever really gained on it. Our mock qualifying run was actually slower than what we were in race trim. Steve and the guys put their heads together. They changed pretty much everything about this racecar except for the color and it was really, really loose. The fixed the problem. I’m surprised we were able to go that fast as bad loose as the car was. I told them if we could have had that one run like this and maybe tuned on it I think we definitely had a car we could have qualified in the top-10 with. It is what it is and we’ll get ready for Sunday.” YOU ARE A FORMER DIRT TRACKER. IS THERE SUCH A THING AS A CAR BEING TOO LOOSE? “It’s just a matter of being able to carry the car that extra little bit. You’re running 190, 200 miles per hour loose, it’s not bad. It’s just a matter of when you hit something it’s going to hurt. If they didn’t have any walls at this place, I’d try to gas ‘er up a little harder sideways [smiles]. It’s just the thought of impacting that wall at 180 mile an hour. Soft barrier or not, it still hurts.”

REED SORENSON, No. 41 TARGET DODGE: YOU PICKED UP A HALF-SECOND FROM PRACTICE TO QUALIFYING. “I didn’t really expect to qualify too good. We picked up about a half-second. The car drove pretty good, maybe a little bit better than what I thought it would, so I didn’t drive it extremely hard. I think I could have probably got another tenth or two out of it. That’s not bad, we’ll probably start about 20th and we’ll be okay.” YOU HAVE SOME TIME ON SATURDAY TO GET THE CAR BETTER FOR THE RACE. “We did an hour and 10 minutes of race trim this morning so I feel like we have a little bit of a head start on that because we planned on it raining tomorrow. We only did two qualifying runs and didn’t really work on qualifying that much. If it rains, I think we’ll be okay since we did a bunch of race trim stuff. I think we ran like 29 laps of race trim. We’ve got some ideas of things we need to do to make it better and we’ll be okay.”