Raybestos Rookie Happy Hour speeds:
Menard 23rd
Montoya 34th
Ragan 35th
Reutimann 36th

Raybestos Rookie Paul Menard was the top rookie in the final practice for the USG SHEETROCK 400.

PAUL MENARD, No. 15 MENARDS/TURTLE WAX ICE CHEVROLET: “This is the best driving car that I’ve had so far. We did some things with the front end to not really give it more grip but just settle it down, kind of get out camber sweeps right and just calm the car down so it’s more driveable. It’s a really solid race car. I think we’re running competitive times compared with everybody on old tires. We’ll see how it goes.” DID YOU SCUFF ANY TIRES? DID YOU NOTICE IF OTHER TEAMS WERE SCUFFING TIRES? “Not that I saw. We had all scuff tires so we’ll have all sticker tires for the race. We concentrate on qualifying runs on Friday and basically used up all of our stickers for that. We started this last session on stickers and definitely more speed on stickers so I think we’ll be fine for the race. We’ll have all of our sets and they won’t be scuffed in at all so we’ll be fine.” HOW BIG OF A FACTOR IS THE WIND AT THIS TRACK? “You can feel it. I didn’t really feel it in the corners or down the frontstretch. You’ve got that headwind going down the back and it seemed to kind of bust the car a little bit and kind of bog it down. Then you get behind somebody and it picks right back up and you get a good draft. As far as handling, no, not really but your speed down the straightaways, yeah, it’s affecting it.” HOW EASY IS IT TO GET INTO TROUBLE HERE? HOW DIFFICULT WILL IT BE TO STAY OUT OF TROUBLE IN THE RACE? “The second groove is coming in pretty nicely and there’s definitely a second groove, if not a third groove. I think we’ll be fine for the race. Everybody will have to kind of search and find where their car works and probably have some green flag pit stops and some long green flag runs.”

Raybestos Rookie David Ragan was the top rookie in the first practice session earlier today, posting the 13th best overall speed.

DAVID RAGAN, No. 6 AAA INSURANCE FORD: YOUR TEAMMATES RAN WELL IN BOTH PRACTICE SESSIONS TODAY. “Yeah and I don’t know why we didn’t qualify well, well, besides Matt. Carl qualified 28th, 25th something like that. Our car drives pretty good and it drove good yesterday in qualifying. It just wasn’t fast. I don’t know if we need to look at air pressures, carburetor tuning or gears or what. It’s a long race and you don’t have to qualify in the top-five to run well. Our AAA Ford is handling pretty well. We need to get it a little better on older tires but for the most part it’s pretty comfortable and we have pretty good speed.” THE CAR IS BETTER ON RACE RUNS. “Yeah and I think some of that is we just do more race runs on Friday than qualifying. We rarely get two qualifying runs in on Friday and that just shows where a lot of these guys unload in qualifying trim and that’s all they do so maybe we’re ahead of the game a little bit ahead on the race runs on Saturday morning.”