JUAN PABLO MONTOYA, No. 42 TEXACO HAVOLINE DODGE: “That’s okay, I guess, I don’t know [shrugs]. You’re wide open and what the car will give you is what the car will give you. It doesn’t really matter where you start here. I think we’ve got a pretty good car but we’ll see. It’s a lot slicker right now but the same for everybody I guess.” IS IT FRUSTRATING TO YOU AS A DRIVER THAT YOU CAN’T MAKE A BIG DIFFERENCE IN QUALIFYING HERE? “It’ll make a bigger difference in the race not in qualifying.”

DAVID RAGAN, No. 6 AAA TRAVEL FORD: WAS THAT LAP YOUR FIRST RUN ON RACE SETUP? YOU HAVE A STARTING SPOT LOCKED UP. “We absolutely didn’t try one qualifying run the whole practice. Here at Daytona in July, a hard tire and real slippery racetrack, you’d better have your car handling well in the race. You can’t win the race two laps at a time. I wish we’d have run a little better. Certainly we’d like to be the fastest in practice, qualifying and the race but you’ve got to find that happy medium. I feel like our car is pretty good in race runs. Certainly it could be a little bit better but we’ll just have to see how the race goes. We absolutely didn’t put any effort into going real fast in qualifying. We wanted to take care of the race. It’s a long race, a lot of stuff can happen. Like I said, I wish we could be a little bit better but it’s tough to have two different scenarios with one car.” DO YOU FEEL COMFORTABLE HERE BECAUSE YOU HAD A TOP-FIVE FINISH IN THE DAYTONA 500? “I feel like you’re a lot more comfortable at Talladega because it’s a lot easier track. It’s more grippier, it’s newer pavement, it’s wider. Here, you do have to handle and so if you don’t have a car that’s the best, it’s kind of like Chicagoland or Atlanta. You’re just not going to be able to run that fast. And I think watching some of last year’s footage you don’t see the big groups, three by three by three. You see people spread out a little more in this race. Still, you know, time will tell. I’m sure I’ll learn a lot tomorrow and learn a lot tonight that’ll help me in years to come.

DAVID REUTIMANN, No. 00 BURGER KING TOYOTA: “The crazy thing about it is we’re not even close to being locked in and have a distinct possibility of not getting in if somebody goes out and goes quicker than us. This is the only sport in the world that I know you can qualify in the top-10 and have the possibility of going home. Everybody has done a good job. We slowed down from practice and don’t know why that was. If we would have just repeated the same lap that we ran in practice I think we would have been okay. As it is now we’re borderline and hopefully we go out there and nobody else runs quicker and we’ll get in the show and have the Burger King Camry where it needs to be. That’s all my concern is right now.”

AJ ALLMENDINGER, No. 84 RED BULL TOYOTA: “All the guys worked their butts off. It’s not from lack of effort unfortunately. I wish we could just say we’d go home and just try harder but we’re trying hard enough. It’s just tough when you know this is the last race ever with this car on this track. You build new car and you do what you think is right. We weren’t fast enough and it rained so it didn’t matter. What I’d be mad about if I was Boris Said or if I was Jeremy Mayfield or Michael Waltrip, that’s what I’d be mad about. We just didn’t have the speed both cars. At least Brian [Vickers] gets in due to the rain. You get one Red Bull car out there because that’s what’s important. All the guys back at the shop and all the guys that work so hard they deserve to have the cars in so at least Brian gets in due to the rain and we know Brian can run on superspeedways so he’ll be up front.”