Where the Raybestos Rookies qualified at Las Vegas:
Montoya 4th
Menard 19th
Allmendinger 35th
Ragan 36th
Reutimann 45th
Whitt 48th

AJ ALLMENDINGER, No. 84 RED BULL ENERGY DRINK TOYOTA: YOU PICKED UP ONE FULL SECOND ON THE SECOND LAP. “That’s easy to do when you screw the first lap up as bad as you can. My spotter, Tim Fedewa, told me if I could not to lift all the way out of the throttle in Turn 1. That might have worked except I forgot to not drive it 100 percent throttle into the corner [smiles]. I want to be in this race bad. I went through a lot of struggles so far but whether we’re in or not, I just want everybody to know, especially on the 84 car, that I’m so proud to be a part of the team. I’m so proud to have Ricky Viers as my crew chief and I just love having these guys as my crew. They are the most organized people I’ve ever been around. They make it easier on me than it possibly could be because it’s difficult. It almost brings tears to my eyes how great these guys are. I was a little nervous, honestly, because we ran a 30.7 in practice and it was tough. It’s tough watching these guys. These guys are so good and watching everybody, how much time they pick up, it scares the living daylights out of you because you think ‘There’s no way I can pick up seven or eight tenths’ but you have to. I hope it gets me in. It’s better than I wanted to run. I was hoping to run a .15 or a teen it’d be good so I guess we’ll find out. I pretty much tried to knock the wall down my first lap. I overdrove the car and then the second lap I just had to settle down and see what we had. I want to be in the race, no doubt about that, but more than anything I just want my whole 84 crew to know that I’m proud to be the driver. They’re sticking with me through the times and I’m learning as quick as I can. Ricky Viers, my crew chief and my whole crew, they’re the most organized people I’ve ever been around and they are on the ball. And as difficult as this is, they make it a lot easier than it could be. It’s just awesome, that’s all I can say.”

BRANDON WHITT, No. 72 DUTCH QUALITY STONE CHEVROLET: “It didn’t feel bad. It’s never a good thing when the car feels good because you’re comfortable side. At least we unloaded better and we had a better practice. We picked up again in qualifying but everybody else is. We’ll go home and regroup, take some time off and see what happens.” WHAT IS THE NEXT RACE ON YOUR SCHEUDLE? “I don’t know. I think it’s going to be a while. We’ve really got a lot of work ahead of us before we should come back and try to attempt it. We’ll see what happens and hopefully when we come back we’ll be better.” ARE YOU GOING TO HAVE THE OPPORTUNITY TO TEST OR GO TO THE WIND TUNNEL? “That’s the stuff that we really need to do and we know that. We need to be spending time at the wind tunnel. We need to spend time at Kentucky, we need to be doing this and doing that and we may have jumped in a little too fast. With the competition the way it us you can’t come in behind the eight-ball.”

JUAN PABLO MONTOYA IN THE No. 42 TEXACO/HAVOLINE DODGE WAS THE TOP RAYBESTOS ROOKIE QUALIFIER AT LAS VEGAS. “I think it was good. I think all the Ganassi cars are really fast today. I think track conditions changes a bit and I think David put a really good lap in. We had to really push it. It was good through 1 and 2 but in 3 and 4, with the sun it was a little too slick.” THE GANASSI CARS WERE ALL VERY GOOD TODAY. “It shows what Ganassi is trying to do and which way they’re trying to be. We want to be a team to be reckoned with every time.” SEVERAL DRIVERS WITH MORE EXPERIENCE THAN YOU HAVE HAD PROBLMES TODAY, BOTH IN PRACTICE AND QUALIFYING. “My Busch car was a handful. The Cup car is good. We did a lot of stuff when we came here to Vegas to test and the car behaved the same way where the Busch car is a handful. Sometimes the balance between how much testing you want to do and how much time you want for yourself.” HOW MUCH OF AN ADJUSTMENT ARE YOU GOING TO HAVE WHEN YOU PUT THE RACE SETUP IN? “Hopefully not too much. We’ll see. You’ll have to ask my crew chief.”

DONNIE WINGO, CREW CHIEF, No. 42 TEXACO/HAVOLINE DODGE: “I felt like, just like he did, that we felt like we’d pick up a little bit more than what we did. It’s going to be a top-five or really close. The car has been really good right off the truck. This actually a different car than what we tested out here. It’s the same car that we run at Fontana. We made a few more changes on it but it gets better and better each week that we run it. If we can just keep tweaking on it we’ll get there.” THIS WAS A GOOD DAY FOR CHIP GANASSI RACING WITH FELIX SABATES. “As an organization everybody stepped up. Everybody has tried to step the program up to get where we need to be because this is where we need to be, week in and week out. It’s not here and there, we need to this way every week.”

PAUL MENARD, No. 15 MENARDS/JOHNS MANVILLE CHEVROLET: COMMENT ON THE SPIN. “I didn’t think we were good enough. I thought I heard a .34 over the radio and it was an .84 so I kept digging. It was style points [smiles]. The car was really good, actually. We were wrecking loose in practice and got really good there. I could out of the gas and get right back in it, kind of like when we were testing here. I think it’s the temperature more than the tire. It’s so much hotter here than when we tested. Everybody is loose. It was a lot colder when we were testing. It cooled off and went in our favor.” WHEN YOU SPUN THROUGH THE GRASS, WAS THE KEY TO TRY AND KEEP THE CAR OFF THE WALL? “Pretty much, yeah [laughs]. I didn’t know where it was going to go. I thought it was going to tip over, actually. It was bouncing across the paved area but we’re all good. The only thing you can do is know where the wall is and try to steer away from it.”