Raybestos Rookie Happy Hour speeds:
Montoya 18th
Ragan 21st
Reutimann 31st
Menard 38th
Allmendinger 41st

Raybestos Rookies Juan Pablo Montoya (18th) and David Ragan (21st) were the top rookies in the today’s final practice session at Martinsville. Montoya leads Ragan by 15 points (226-211) in the Raybestos Rookie standings entering the Subway 500.

JUAN PABLO MONTOYA, No. 42 TEXACO/HAVOLINE DODGE: HOW WAS YOUR CAR IN THE FINAL PRACTICE? “It’s okay. It’s there. That’s the problem: everybody’s there. I think we’ve got a good car and I think if we can stay out of trouble we can definitely go to the front. How far to the front we can go, I don’t know. Everything is good so far. We’ll be fine.” IS THE TRACK GETTING SLICKER? “Yeah, you can still notice it when you start spinning the wheels and you start getting tighter. It’s pretty interesting.” HOW DIFFICULT IS IT TO PIT HERE? “It’s not that hard. I think Dover is probably number one and the hardest. And this is hard because you really have to slow down but that’s about it.”

DAVID RAGAN, No. 6 AAA FORD: “That’s certainly better than where we started on Friday. Our AAA Ford is not quite perfect yet but certainly we’ve made some good ground just in getting it to turn through the center. We still need a little bit but our biggest thing is we’re trying to work on the car to get it to where it’s easy to pass because starting in the back we’re going to have to pass a lot of cars on Sunday. It’s certainly better than where we started but still have a little ways we can go.” HOW DO YOU PASS HERE AND BE AGGRESSIVE AND NOT BEND ANYTHING UP ON THE CAR? “That’s a real good question. The biggest thing is take care of your car. When you can pass someone, pass ‘em. Don’t mess around. Don’t waste a lot of time behind ‘em but if someone is equal speed you just have to out-drive ‘em. You have to catch ‘em around a lap car or something like that. Hopefully we catch a couple of cautions at the right time, we have some good pit strategy, some good pit stops with the AAA pit crew and I think we can find our way up toward the front. This is a good racetrack for me. We’ve always seemed to run pretty well here. We’re just going to be coming from the back and make things exciting on Sunday.” IS THE TRACK GOING TO GET SLICKER AND SLICKER DURING THE RACE? “It’s already starting to rubber up as much as I’ve ever seen it in practice. I think between the truck race today and all of our practice today the track will have a lot of rubber on it tomorrow. Usually you’ll see some rubber start building up on the track that first 150 laps and then it’ll continuously get worse throughout the day. The best car is going to be able to stay up underneath that little stretch, that strip of rubber that if you get into it almost feels like a flat tire. Hopefully our car will be able to stay down on the bottom and pass some cars. We’ve got 500 laps to pass 40 cars so if we take our time and do what we need to do and not tear up anything. We really just have to be around at the end of this race. We need a good run to build some points for the last two weeks. We just have to be running at the end and we’ll race ‘em with 50 to go.”