KEN SCHRADER – No. 21 Motorcraft Ford Fusion (qualified 34th) – “I don’t know (whether that will be enough to qualify). We didn’t pick up, we just backed it up (from practice). We’ll have to wait and see. We didn’t get what we wanted, but it’s a lot better than what we unloaded.” IF THE REMAINING GO-OR-GO-HOMERS BACK UP THEIR PRACTICE TIMES, AND NOT IMPROVE, YOU’LL MAKE THE RACE BECAUSE YOU WERE SECOND-FASTEST OF THAT GROUP IN PRACTICE. “There’s no reason to think everybody’s going to back up with the sun going down.”

GREG BIFFLE – No. 16 Ameriquest Ford Fusion (qualified 18th) – “The guys gave me a car to sit on the pole. I feel really bad for the guys. I just over-drove turns three and four, and probably had, maybe, a tenth and a half left faster lap coming than I put up on the board, but got way high down there, still came back with a .51, only to have Junior’s .49, so I’ll feel bad about if that pole speed holds up for the whole session, we might’ve missed it by a little bit. But I’m sure somebody’s going to pick up some speed when it cools off here. But I really can’t say enough about the way these guys prepared this race car for me, and I can’t wait for Saturday night’s race.” YOU’VE WON HERE IN OTHER SERIES. WHAT ARE ONE OR TWO KEYS THAT A CAR MUST HAVE TO BE SUCCESSFUL HERE? “Brakes are definitely important. This place sort of races like a road course, brakes into turn one and then keeping enough grip off, and then keep it turning around the corners. That’s the key. It’s a difficult race track because turn one and two and three and four are so different.”

RICKY RUDD – No. 88 Snickers Ford Fusion (qualified 39th) – “We’ve been struggling. I don’t know. We haven’t been good off the truck. They made some changes before qualifying and they helped a little bit, but it still wasn’t the way it needed to be. I’m at a loss for what we’ve got to do, really.” YOU’VE WON HERE BEFORE. WHAT IS A KEY CHARACTERISTIC THAT A CAR NEEDS TO DO WELL HERE? “You’ve got to be able to drive it in and have it stick on the bottom, instead of sliding up the race track. Everybody’s going to start sliding up the race track, but we can’t hold the bottom right now on new tires, so we’ve got to go work on ours, obviously. The trick again is to be able have it really stick low in the corner, and then it gives you options to moving the groove out if you want to a little later.”

JAMIE McMURRAY – No. 26 Crown Royal Ford Fusion (qualified 2nd) – “I was a little shocked when we went that quick. The race track must have a lot of grip right now. The car drove really good. When I saw Junior run a 40-something earlier, I thought, ‘That’s going to be hard to beat.’ Sometimes the race track will pick up and sometimes it doesn’t. Even coming to get the green, I was like, ‘Wow, there’s lot’s of grip right now.’ It was another good day for us.” YOU DIDN’T MAKE ANY MISTAKES AT ALL, DID YOU? “Oh, no. I was swatting flies, I was all over the place. We run a little shift light in the cars and it kind of tells you the RPMs and you can set it at any RPM you want, and it came on really early and that means you’re going really fast. I thought initially that they might’ve changed the number that it was supposed to come on because it came on so early. But a good, good, good lap for us.” ARE THINGS GOING WELL RIGHT NOW? “It obviously be better if we’d win, but from where we were 10 races ago with this team, Larry Carter has done an incredible job.”

MATT KENSETH – No. 17 DeWalt Ford Fusion (qualified 17th) – “The late draw helped us a lot. We probably would’ve been 30th without a good draw. I didn’t think I got a very good lap, and the car wasn’t really doing what I wanted it to do. We were really off a long ways speed-wise from the pole. Position-wise, on the board, it will look okay, but we didn’t run very good.”

JAMIE McMURRAY Press Conference

JAMIE McMURRAY – No. 26 Crown Royal Ford Fusion – ON HIS LAP. “It was pretty good. We didn’t really change anything from our last race run to qualifying, just a small air-pressure adjustment. When you leave the pits here and go through three and four the first time, you get a really feel for what you have, and I couldn’t believe the grip the car had. Judging off of what Dale, Jr., had run, as fast as what he was in practice, I didn’t think the track was going to have that much grip. And when I went through three and four I was amazed at just the way my car felt. And then for the other two laps, it was a little bit free, but for the most part it had a lot more grip than what I expected.”

HOW MORE RELAXED ARE YOU THIS YEAR? “Over the winter I worked on the mental side on just being prepared, and it’s easy when things go to have a good attitude and to always be positive than it is when you go through what I went through last year, that’s when it’s tough. This year has been pretty easy for me. When we started the first two races, we wrecked out of both of them – the Daytona 500 with a few laps, and then, like, 10 laps into Fontana we wrecked, and I hadn’t finished, like, seven of the nine races in the previous year, so I sat at the pit box at Fontana, and I’m, like, ‘There’s nothing I could’ve done different, so don’t get down.’ I have a different group of guys this year and I walked up to them and said, ‘Look, this has got to end soon. It can’t continue to go on like this. We ran well at Vegas, and you could tell everyone was relieved a little bit. But Larry Carter has done an incredible job. He deserves most of the credit for the results that our team is getting because when we had those bad races Larry just has a way about him of dealing with the guys, and he always keeps a good attitude and a good positiove outlook, and that shows and that rubs off on all the other guys on the team.”

WAS LAST YEAR, IN YOUR ENTIRE CAREER, THE WORST YEAR, OVERALL? “I just kept saying last year, ‘It just can’t get any worse.’ And I’d show up the next week, and I was, like, ‘Wow, I was wrong.’ It just seemed like everything could go wrong. Roush-Yates engines are super-reliable and it seemed like we’d end up with the one that would break. It just seemed like if it could go wrong, it went wrong. So, yeah, certainly in my Cup career it was the worst, and it was frustrating. When I was at Ganassi, if you didn’t run well, the other two teams weren’t running great, so you were, like, ‘Well, maybe our equipment’s just not great.’ But at Roush Fenway, you’re not running well, Matt’s winning races, Greg’s winning races, everybody’s running well, so it’s frustrating.”

DID YOUR HEART SINK A LITTLE WHEN THE 24 PUT THAT NUMBER ON THE BOARD? “Yeah, most definitely. But I guess trying to find the positive in it, is that he didn’t beat me by one one-thousandth of a second, it wasn’t even close. I couldn’t believe how much he picked up from his first to his second lap, he picked up like a half second. If you’re going to get beat, you want to get beat bad on something like that, not just by a few thousandths. There’s nothing else I could’ve done. My lap, I hit the wall off both ends and I was sliding sideways, so there’s not a whole lot else I could’ve done.”