HAMLIN: “It was an up and down day for us. We hung around the top-10. We hung around the top-10 for most of the day, right around 10th spot. We just couldn’t quite get this car going but Mike [Ford, crew chief] made a great call at the end to take two tires. It worked out great for us.” HOW IMPORTANT WAS IT FOR YOU TO GET OFF TO A GOOD START IN THE CHASE? “It’s very important. We’ve seen in the past that if you falter here you struggle for the rest of the Chase. It’s good for our whole FedEx team to come out of here with a great finish and hopefully this is just a building block for things to come.” WHAT DOES THIS RUN DO FOR YOUR CONFIDENCE? “We’ve just got to keep building. We’ve got some really good race tracks coming up for us with the mile-and-halfs and Martinsville so I’m looking forward to a great rest of the season.” COMMENT ON THE TWO-TIRE STOP AT THE END OF THE RACE. “It was really good for us. Mike and the guys were debating four and I just thought two was the way to go. We couldn’t keep up with those guys on four tires. We just didn’t have enough grip and it was fortunate enough for us that we had a car good enough to run top-five with.” THIS IS THE FIRST CHASE RACE. IS IT ANY DIFFERENT THAN ANY OTHER RACE THIS SEASON? “No, not really. I want to win another race. There’s no pressure on our team whatsoever. We’re not in a pressure spot to win.” EIGHT CHASE DRIVERS FINISHED IN THE TOP-16. DO YOU THINK ROUND ONE WAS A DRAW? “It usually is and it’s going to be like that for the rest of the season. These guys in the top-10 are in the top-10 for a reason and that’s because they are Chase contending cars, championship-winning cars. We’re just going to do our best to maintain with those guys and see where we’re at at Homestead.” DID THE LAST CAUTION HELP YOU? “Yeah, definitely the last caution helped. We were running the 31 and 25 down anyway but just got a little tight there at the end but it was still a great run for us.”

J.J. YELEY, No. 18 INTERSTATE BATTERIES CHEVROLET: “It was an awesome top-10. I wish we didn’t get that late caution because the car was really good on longer runs. Steve [Addington, crew chief] and the guys worked their butts off. I know they were really discouraged. I think the fastest we were all weekend was 33rd in our best practice. Our second run we made a couple changes and really hurt the race car and I started getting a little discouraged. We never gave up. The guys kept digging and the Interstate Batteries car was really hooked up. Like I said, we’re happy with eighth but I thought we had a good shot at a top-five if we had kept going green. But it’s definitely light years above where we’ve been struggling here.” DID YOU GUYS MAKE A LOT OF CHANGES TO THE CAR THIS MORNING? “The guys changed spring and shocks and they changed a lot of things today. It was a matter of kind of flying blind into the start of this deal but most everything they did was a good change.” HOW IMPORTANT IS IT FOR YOU AND THIS TEAM TO FINISH STRONG THIS SEASON? “It’s very important because these guys work just as hard as anyone else. They deserve good finishes. We’ve had the opportunities, we’ve just haven’t been able to seal the deal. In the back of my mind I was worried about that last restart, someone maybe getting into me and taking a good day and turning it into a bad one, just like the season has gone all year long. The main goal was try to get to top-20 in points. We just need to run top-10s. We’ve got one of 10 races down. We’ve got nine more to go.”

DENNY HAMLIN PRESS CONFERENCE

“We struggled on new tires. We were just in the way for like 40 laps. It just took our car forever to come in and we just hung around seventh to 10th all day and really couldn’t do anything. Mike wanted to come in and take four tires with 50 to go and I just didn’t think we had enough time to come back to the front. So we took two and it worked out good for us.” CAN YOU DESCRIBE THE MOVE THAT KEVIN MADE ON YOU AND JEFF BURTON LATE IN THE RACE? “I was running the top groove and my spotter couldn’t key the mike before he stuck in three-wide. You’d think you’d be a little cautious, but it’s all good. It didn’t cost me, really, anything but about seven spots at the time [laughter]. He’s faster, he won the race, I finished fourth. It’s all good. It was real risky at the time. Had it probably caused us a bad day, I would have probably….never mind [laughter]. It was risky at the time. I was very surprised that he did that.” AS RISKY AS THAT MOVED SEEMED TO YOU, DID IT ALSO KIND OF SHOWCASE KEVIN’S STRENGTH, NOT ONLY ON THIS DAY BUT THIS SEASON? “I didn’t think he needed to do that to show how strong he was. I mean, I think he could have passed me and the 31 in five laps fairly easy. But that’s the way he wanted to get to the front in a hurry. He didn’t want to risk being mired back in traffic and getting in trouble. He left that to me.” DO YOU AGREE THAT THE CHAMPION WILL HAVE HAD A BAD DAY? DO YOU FEEL LIKE YOU’VE DODGED A BULLET TODAY BY NOT HAVING A BAD DAY? “Well, I watched TV a couple years ago and that’s the way it was, but I think the competition level this year…I mean, a bad day is going to be in the 20s or something happens and you get caught off sequence. I just think that these top-10 guys run top-10 every single week. You look at it and it’s taken more to make the Chase this year than it ever has in the past, points-wise. That’s because every time you turn around it’s the end of the race and you’ve got eight Chase guys, or eight top-10 guys finishing in the top-10. I just think you’re not going to be allowed to finish 40th, that’s my opinion.” PRIOR TO TODAY, WHERE WOULD YOU HAVE RANKED KEVIN HARVICK? “I think Matt [Kenseth] probably came in with the most momentum, overall. When you look at all the racetracks, he probably was, I guess you could say, a favorite or whatever. Kevin was right there behind. I just think they’ve got a really good short track program. Their flat track program has been great all year and that’s where we’re at right now. At Dover next week, they could struggle. Who know? Or they may win the race again. It’s all a crapshoot, really. We all just run consistent and do the best we can. Like Jeff, I don’t think there’s any clear-cut favorite.”