DAVID RAGAN, No. 6 AAA FORD: “We wanted to come here and just finish with the AAA Ford Fusion. A top-five finish is great. We wanted to be the top Raybestos Rookie and want to be one of the top contending Roush cars week in and week out. It’s a pretty special day down here. It’s been an up and down week and that’s an understatement. All in all, it ended up a good day but we’ve still got a lot of hard work ahead. We’ve got to go to California.” WHAT DID YOU LEARN OUT THERE TODAY? “You just can’t push the issue and luck is really a lot here. There were a few times when I was on the outside and it really worked out good for me there on the bottom at the end. We could have been Earnhardt Jr., getting our hood ripped off with 10 laps to go, but it just worked out. It makes me look like I did a little better job than I did.” WERE YOU HANGING BACK EARLY IN THE RACE? “I would have like to have got up there and race with ‘em, but that’s per Jimmy Fennig and Jack Roush to cruise around a little bit. We really didn’t want to stay back that far. We almost got in trouble a couple of times on a green flag pit stop, losing the draft. Things just work out when you have a good day, you have a little bit of luck, and you do your job right and things look good at the end of the day.” HOW EXCITED ARE YOU TO FINISH IN THE TOP-FIVE? “I probably won’t sleep a wink tonight. We’ve got to get back because I think we’re going to VIR [Virginia International Raceway] tomorrow with our Busch car. We still have a lot of hard work. We’ll celebrate a little bit and I’m sure we’ll smile but man, there’s still 35 more races and Martinsville pays the same amount of points as Daytona does so we’ve got to keep digging. We went from 26th to sixth and I was like ‘Man, it’d be special for Mark Martin to win this race.’ The only bad thing is that I wish he was in a Roush car if he was to win. Deep down, I was hoping the 16 and 17 can hook up and somehow I can get up there and help them out. It would have been cool to see one of my teammates win the Daytona 500. But if one of my teammates can’t win, Mark Martin is first on the list.” DID YOU HAVE A PRETTY GOOD VIEW ON THE LAST LAP? “I didn’t know who won. I just saw the 5 get loose on the bottom. He came up the hill and they started beating and banging and I just kind of stuck behind Mike Wallace and just tried to keep it straight. I saw the start-finish line and I was just praying that I could make it there without tearing my car all the pieces.” WHAT DOES THIS RUN DO FOR YOUR CONFIDENCE? “Our confidence level has never been down. Sometimes it’s been in doubt before but it’s never been down. It’s great. I tell you, it’s probably more confident when we come back here in July or go to Talladega but California is a completely different type of racetrack. We’ve got our work cut out for us going to California and then to Bristol with the COT test. It’s a great run, a top-five, and a good start for the season but we can’t kid ourselves. We’ve got 35 more races to go.” HOW WERE THE LAST COUPLE OF LAPS? “I would have been happy if they would have thrown the checkered with two laps to go [smiles]. I would have taken a 10th-place finish but that was cool.” COMMENT ON SCORING A TOP-FIVE IN YOUR FIRST DAYTONA 500. “That’s special. My Dad and my Mom, they couldn’t even watch the last few laps. The last few laps the AAA Ford Fusion was handling great. It was just a matter of having a little bit of push behind me or someone to follow in front of me. It just worked out good. When things go your way, they go your way.” WHAT HAPPENED COMING OFF TURN 4 ON THE LAST LAP? “All I saw was Kyle Busch getting on the apron coming off of 4 and he scooted up the hill. I don’t know if we went under him or on top of him but he was just up and down and you could tell that he was just trying to hang on just to the finish line. I was kind of tucked into Mike Wallace and I was committed to following Mike. He had helped me out throughout the race and what a great finish for AAA and everyone at Ford and Roush Fenway Racing.”

JUAN PABLO MONTOYA, No. 42 TEXACO/HAVOLINE DODGE: IS STOCK CAR RACING MORE DIFFICULT THAN YOU THOUGHT IT WOULD BE? “Stock car racing is good. Here, it’s easy, just get a good handling car put yourself in the right position to move forward is all you can do. The way it played out and we missed every wreck was good.” HOW WOULD YOU DESCRIBE YOU FIRST DAYTONA 500? “It started really bad. We were really tight and we were struggling. The car was so bad and I don’t know what happened. We didn’t change the car at all from the 150 and it just got tighter and tighter and tighter and once we started running good we got to the pits and my crew chief told me to go to reverse and when I went to get out of gear and it got stuck between two gears and it broke half the gearbox. We’re not even going to run and Tony [Glover] is like drop the clutch and I put it in fourth gear and said ‘Guys push me back, push me out and let’s go.’ The transmission had second and when I went to third it just broke it in pieces, got fourth and that was it. I was lucky to get a good run on the last restart. It’s a shame. I think everybody at Texaco/Havoline Dodge and Chip Ganassi Racing did an amazing job. We had great motors here. A top-20 is kind of what I wanted to do here.”

JIMMY FENNIG, CREW CHIEF, No. 6 AAA FORD: “It was a good day for those boys. David did an awesome job, the spotter did a good job, the crew, everybody. We couldn’t ask for anything better than this.” HOW MUCH CONFIDENCE DOES THIS GIVE THE TEAM? “I think it was great. It was a great learning thing to run 200 laps. That was our goal, to run all the laps, because you can’t learning anything being in the truck.” HOW BIG OF A CHALLENGE IS THIS FOR YOU? “David has got a lot of talent, a lot of talent. We’ve just got to keep working him into all these places and he’ll be fine. After the first couple of races once he’s been to a few of these racetracks he’ll be just like nobody else.”

DONNIE WINGO, CREW CHIEF, No. 42 TEXACO/HAVOLINE DODGE: “It wasn’t a good day. I thought we had a lot better car than that. We kind of got stuck there in the back and we just couldn’t ever get it right. It was just go tight back there in the back, which everybody that got back to the back got tight. We got it pretty good there at the end but it was just too late. And we didn’t have anything but high gear on the restart. We probably should have freed the car up a little bit more. I probably should have communicated a little bit better on the pit stop. That’s one thing that I thought I did but maybe I didn’t communicate well. In a deal like that when you get blocked in it’s better to just push the car back and leave in first gear and that kind of hurt us a little bit on that.”

DAVID REUTIMANN, No. 00 DOMINO’S TOYOTA: “Coming off of 2 over there I don’t know if somebody got into the 48 car or what happened. My spotter just said ‘They’re wrecking in front of you’ and by the time you hear that it’s too late. I saw a car come across in front of me and I got into him. I don’t even know what car it was. I’m just disappointed. I thought we were going to have a pretty decent finish. We were kind of plugging away steady there on the bottom and I think we would have had a pretty decent run. I hate it for Domino’s and everybody at Michael Waltrip racing but we’ve got California next week so we’ll gear up and go from there.” YOU GOT A LAP DOWN BUT MADE IT BACK UP. “We were horrible early on and Frankie and guys made a tons and tons of changes and got it really, really good. The motor was running hot for a while. We had too much tape on it so all I could do is ride. We got all that fixed and it was driving good. I was like ‘Man, here we go.’ It looked like we were completely out of it and we’re back in it and now we’re out of it.”