Raybestos Rookie Final Practice speeds:
Hornish Jr. 21st
Carpentier 37th
Franchitti 39th
Smith 43rd

SAM HORNISH, JR., No. 77 PENSKE TRUCK RENTAL DODGE: “For me being the first time here in the Cup car at Atlanta it was kind of a difficult session because there is no rubber on the track to start with so the car felt really good. And the longer everybody ran you move to the top and it’s good for a little while and then you go back out there again and say I’m going to move to the top and it’s pushing up there. So you go to the middle and as the track rubbers up you just lose more and more grip. You get frustrated because you’re like everything we’re trying to do to the car to make it better and it doesn’t feel like you’re finding anything but now after talking to Kurt and Ryan, they said it’s just basically a tendency of this track and not only this one but the mile-and-a-halfs because the more rubber you put on it, instead of it being like a short track where it gains grip it generally tends to lose it. It’s another part of being a Raybestos Rookie and trying to learn. I’m just glad that didn’t make any mistakes getting upset because I didn’t feel like we were going the right direction. We just tried to make sure that we were calm and patient and that’s the same thing that we need to do tomorrow to try to get ourselves out of the whole that we’re in in the points with being in the wrong place at the wrong time at California and blowing the front tire at Vegas. That put us in a pretty deep hole so we’ll just keep working away at it.” HOW MUCH OF A CHALLENGE IS IT FOR YOU TO NOT GET FRUSTRATED? “You know, it’s pretty difficult. You want to go out there and you want to feel like you’re making the right changes and you’re moving forward. Well when the track is consistently changing like that you don’t really ever really like you’re doing it. The biggest thing is sitting down at the end of the session and being able to talk to Kurt and Ryan about it and feeling what I felt was the right thing. Those are the kind of things that help you get through it because even if it’s going bad and whatever the next time you’re going through it you’re going ‘Well, I was right about what I felt last time and this is what the track is doing.’ You just kind of get used to it and I think that that in a lot of ways is where some of the guys that ran a lot of dirt growing up with the amount that the track has changed with that helps them out because they’ve got a lot of good feeling about what they feel happens as the track changes. Even though it’s totally different, just with these cars it’s a lot different than what an Indy car was where no matter what happened when you started running the session to the end the track kind of stayed the same unless you had a big change in temperature. It can be frustrating at times but it’s part of the learning process. That’s probably the biggest thing that you can do at any stage of being a driver over here is being able to control yourself mentally. I’ve seen guys that have been doing it forever and make a mistake because they rattled by somebody else or get mad about what happened and then you make a mistake and get out of the car and go ‘You know what, if I’d have just been patient and not have got frustrated we’d still be running out there.’ That’s what you’ve got to do, I guess.”