ELLIOTT SADLER (No. 19 Dodge Dealers/UAW Dodge Charger)

COMMENT ON RUNNING AT TMS “I love this place, ever since the first lap I took on it in 1997 in a test down here. It fits my driving style. I like it. It’s definitely one of my favorite tracks. I’ve always run pretty well here, qualified well. Certain tracks fit your driving style and this definitely fits mine. I love coming here. It’s a great race track. A lot of people, a lot of excitement. It’s just a fun place to race. It’s so much different than Charlotte the way it’s shaped. I know it might look the same on paper, but the banking is a lot different and the transitions are a lot different. The straightaways seem to be shorter and the turns longer than Charlotte. It’s just a different racetrack. It’s different than Charlotte, Atlanta, Chicago, Kansas, a lot of the other mile and a half tracks. It’s its own entity and has its own characteristics and I just enjoy driving here. I know exactly how I want my car to feel Friday and Saturday to be competitive on Sunday.”

COMMENT ON YOUR 14TH-PLACE RANKING “I feel like as a team where we’re sitting in the points right now we have no reason to hit the panic button or worry about anything. We’ve been through a lot this year. It’s four first year working together and with the penalties and missing Josh (Team Director Browne) for a couple of weeks and the new COT and having a problem at Bristol running second. For the problems we’ve had to be only 11 points out of 12th we’re in great shape. We think we’re going to get better. We’re learning a lot about the COT car and we’re going to get our mile and a half program better. We’re coming up on some good tracks for me and we’ve got some great opportunities to make up some points and get in the top 10.”

ARE YOU GLAD TO BE BACK IN THE CHARGER THIS WEEK? “I am very glad to be back in the Charger. I really like the racecar we have right now. We feel like we can race harder and closer, and I’m just glad to be back in it. We’ll give the COT a break a little bit and give my guys a chance to make some better preparations for Phoenix and Richmond. We’ll come back and be strong there, but it’s good to be back in a racecar that I’ve grown up and raced in for nine years. We think we’ve learned some things about the COT. We’re not where we need to be yet, but we think we’ve made some gains with it from Martinsville. We were all very competitive with it at Bristol. We think we found out at Richmond why we weren’t competitive with it at Martinsville, so we’re making the necessary changes. We’re going to try some new stuff at Phoenix and we hope we have a good weekend there. My guys have been working hard on it, and we’re not going to give up by any means. We’re going to keep plugging away with the COT because half the races in The Chase involve that car.”

ONLY 20 RACES LEFT TO MAKE THE CHASE “We’re six in with 20 left. A lot of great teams are in the top 12 and a lot of great teams have to still make their way in. You’ve only got so many pieces of the pie, so you’ve got to come every week prepared to do the best you can and get as many points as you can because you’re racing a lot of great race teams that are going to get a lot of points every week. We’ve got to be one of those race teams. We’ve got to take what the track gives us each and every Sunday and get maximum points and move on to the next week. We’re only going to do this 20 more times and 20 might sound like a lot but September will be here before you know it.”

ARE YOU HAVING FUN YET? “I’m having a great time. I’ve had a ball this year. We’ve had some good weekends and we’ve had some bad weekends. I love my team. We’ve got a lot of great guys there that believe in me. I believe in them, and we think we’re going to get better as a team the more Josh and I work together. I think everything is good. I wish my teammates had gotten off to a little better start. They’re struggling a little bit as far as luck is concerned, not as far as speed is concerned. Their season is not over with, either. I’ve still got to do my job as a teammate. We’re going to help each other as much as we can, and we’re all pulling for each other. I think if Scott and Kasey put three or four good runs together and get some momentum going they can get their season turned around and get back in this thing also. Kasey had a great start last year and not so much this year. I’m sure it’s worrying him a little bit, but he’s doing a great job as a driver. He’s the leader of that team and he’s staying focused. Those guys have put themselves in a hole, but he knows he has the talent to get back in the top 12. He knows his team has the talent. They’re not panicking at all. They want to be on the right side of the luck one time as far as finishes are concerned. They know they’ve got the team, they know they’ve got the team in place. You can see that as far as Kasey is concerned. We’ve definitely got great engines each and every week. Kasey knows they’ve got a great team and can make it happen, ,so I don’t see him worrying. He’s a cool customer. They had a couple of bad finishes last year before The Chase. They didn’t panic at all. They knew what they had to do and they went and did it. They made The Chase. I think I’m seeing the same attitude this year.”

KASEY KAHNE (No. 9 Dodge Dealers/UAW Dodge Charger)

COMMENT ON NEW DODGE NOSE “We’ve changed the noses around, put them in different places, moved the bodies around. You wondered why that happened, but as a driver there’s probably a lot of reasons why. We were strong with the other Charger nose. It’s nice to be back to a track where you’ve run well, and this is definitely one of them. We look forward to getting things back where they hopefully need to be running in the top five and having some good luck all week long, hopefully starting today in qualifying”

ARE YOU FRUSTRATED BEING ON THIS SIDE OF THE GARAGE? “I’ve been here before, and I’ll probably be here again. It’s the way it goes. If we get things turned around we’ll probably be back over there by the time we come back here. We need to get it going. I enjoy this place. It’s tough, but we’ve got to take advantage of good tracks for us. This is one of them.”

COMMENT ON BUMP IN TURN TWO “We were really good yesterday in the Busch car, and there are still a lot of bumps in three and four. One and two is better. I didn’t care about ‘em. I thought the bumps were fine the way they were. It’s still the same exact track it’s been except that little change in one and two. It won’t affect the racing in any way.”

COMMENT ON LAST YEAR VERSUS THIS SEASON “Last year we were strong from the start of the year. This year we’ve had a lot of things go wrong and haven’t had the results. Last year we had a lot of good things happen. Hopefully this will be the start of a great season. It’ll definitely be a good place to get things started.”

HOW’D YOU SPEND THE OFF WEEK? “I got a lot of rest and spent a lot of time with the family. I had some dinners with everybody and didn’t think a lot about racing. Then I thought about it a lot during the week. It’s pretty easy to get refreshed. I haven’t been down at all. It was nice to have an off week, but it didn’t matter if Texas was last week or this week.”

COMMENT ON YOUR RELATIONSHIP WITH YOUR TEAMMATES “It’s always good. With Elliott it’s definitely better than it was last year. We’ve got that all figured out. We were all three in the top five at Bristol and had three great racecars there. We didn’t get the results. We’re not far off. We’re a little bit off, but when we get it figured out we’ll have three cars running strong again.”

ANY PRESSURE ON YOU HERE? “Just pressure to run well, to get up front, not because of what we did here last year. We need to gain points and get back in the top 30 and top 20 and not have to worry about anything else than running well. That’s where more of the pressure is. The part of running well here last year gave us confidence. We were first and second in both of those races if we don’t have problems with four to go. It definitely feels good to be here. We know we can run up front. The penalties at Daytona didn’t help, but this just hasn’t been our year so far yet. You can look at luck. You can look at mistakes. You can look at missing setups. We’ve had a little bit of everything, and I’m part of every one of those things. We’ll keep working hard, keep working as a team. Nobody has got mad at me. I haven’t got mad at them. We’re just all trying to work together and make things right. When it happens we’ll be strong.”

IS DRIVING TWO DIFFERENT TYPES OF CUP CARS A PROBLEM? “It doesn’t bother me much, but it’s definitely a lot different. I haven’t been in this type of car since Atlanta. We’ve been testing the COT and racing the COT. Now we’re back in this. It’s different, but I was in the Busch car yesterday and the way you sit in the Busch car is very similar to the way you sit in this one. I got in that one and felt right at home. Hopefully I’ll feel at home in this one today.”

WHO DO YOU FEEL IN THE COT? “I feel comfortable. It’s just different. The way it reacts and things is a lot different. It takes a little bit to get used to and get used to how it needs to be set to run fast. We’re working on all that.”

IS THE CREW AFFECTED BY THE TWO CARS? “On the team it definitely does and on the guys at the shop building the cars. You would think the team that has run best this year – Hendrick Motorsports – would be definitely caught up. They said they’re behind, and if they’re behind, I know we’re behind. I don’t know who far behind they are, but it’s hard to have a fleet of cars like you need. It’s a different year. That’s the way it is this year and next year people will be caught up because we’ll probably only be running one car.”

REED SORENSON (No. 41 TUMS Dodge Charger)

COMMENT ON THE RICHMOND AVENGER TEST “We unloaded pretty fast. We were good at all four sessions at Richmond. We didn’t really have too good a car at Martinsville, and that was actually the same car we took to the Richmond test. It was all beat up and didn’t look too good, but it was fast. We had a really good test there. We’re looking forward to going to Phoenix with the same setup. We think we’ll be OK at that track because they’re pretty similar, but we felt we learned a lot from that car and we definitely got a lot to learn from that car as well.”

WHAT’S YOUR COMFORT LEVEL WITH THE COT? “Everybody is talking about the Car of Tomorrow and how it went. Bristol and Martinsville are the smallest tracks we run on and it’s going to be a little bit different when we get on these bigger tracks that have higher speeds like Darlington and things like that. As far as the comfort level, the comfort level is pretty good. It’s just trying to make these cars turn. They don’t turn very well. The teams are having to adjust a lot and try to figure out how to make these cars turn a little bit better. It’s the same adjustment for everybody and which ever team has it figured out better is going to prevail.”

COMMENT ON YOUR TEAM “Two of the races we didn’t even get to race. At California we were collected in a wreck on lap seven and then we were out of the race at Bristol on lap 20 something. We didn’t even race in two of them and finished dead last and we’re 25th in points. I think if we just keep doing what we’re doing we’ll be fine. We just don’t need any more dead last finishes and we’ll be fine.”

COMMENT ON TMS “The Cup car has been great here every time. We ran top 10 a lot in the fall race here last year. We brought the car we had at Atlanta and it ran top 10 all day in Atlanta. That was its first race, so it’s got a pretty good record. We’re hoping it’ll handle just as well here.”

YOUR MOTHER IS GOING TO BE A JUDGE IN THE TUMS CONTEST? “Yeah, I don’t know how that happened. I haven’t even talked to her about it yet, but she’s a pretty good cook so she’ll be a good judge. TUMS is pretty excited to be a part of our program this year. They’re on the deck lid all year long, and we’re running a TUMS car here and David Stremme is running a TUMS car in Chicago I believe. It’s a cool looking car. It’s got a lot to do with a lot of race fans because of the food that people eat here. I don’t take TUMS yet. I think I’m a little too young, but I know a lot of people who do take it. It’s pretty cool.”

COMMENT ON MONTOYA “I think everybody at Chip Ganassi Racing knew when Juan came over here he was going to have a lot of attention. Everybody is used to it and it’s kinda died off a little bit I guess you could say from when he first got here. All the race teams are just worried about running good. We try not to pay attention to that way too much because if you do you’re not doing your job. We just try to do the best we can and make sure all three teams are working together. Myself, David and Juan work well together. The crew chiefs are doing great. We’re just worried about the race and the rest of it will take care of itself.”

COMMENT ON PHOENIX AND TALLADEGA “Like I said for Phoenix, we’re taking a car just like the one we had at Richmond. We’re going to start out with the exact same setup. We were fast there and hopefully it’ll carry over. It doesn’t always do that, but that’s what we’re going to plan on. We’ve got a lot of important Target people coming out there, so we want to run well there. At Talladega it’s just Talladega. It is what it is and everybody knows that. All you can do there is hope you’re not at the wrong place at the wrong time and just race all day and hope you’re there at the end. As far as how competitive we’re going to be, we think we’re going to be OK. We’ll go out and race and try to be smart about everything and stay out of trouble.”

COMPARE THIS SEASON TO LAST YEAR “The first difference is when we got to Daytona our speedway cars, instead of being near the bottom, we were toward the top. That was a major boost right there to start the season and a lot of that goes to our motor program. They were pretty far behind and they worked really hard over the winter to step it up and they surely did. All our cars were really fast by themselves and they were really fast in the race, and a lot of that goes to the motor program. As far as the COT goes, we’ve still got a lot of work to do on that. That’s been a tough deal and it’s been really hard for us to build cars because NASCAR is inspecting them and what not. We feel like our intermediate cars for places like here got better over the winter, being in the wind tunnel and things like that. We’re steadily stepping all our programs up. I think by the middle of the season we should be top notch at all the spots.”

COMMENT ON THE NEW DODGE NOSE “There is a little bit of difference. I think last year the car was a little more edgy because it seemed like with the old nose it would grab more, the front end would. It’s a little more consistent I think with this nose. I don’t think it’s necessarily a lot better or worse or anything like that because the overall downforce is pretty close, but I think it’s a little bit more consistent with this nose. It’s a little easier for us to tune the car. Last year we would have the car a little bit tight and we would free it up a little bit and then it would be too loose. It think it’s a little bit easier for me and me and my crew chief [to tune it into the track a little bit easier.”