Where the Raybestos Rookies qualified for the Sprint Showdown:
Hornish Jr. 8th
Smith 23rd
Carpentier 27th

SAM HORNISH JR., No. 77 MOBIL 1 DODGE: “The nice thing is that no matter what we’re going to get to race. As far as it not being a points race, it’s nice to be able to come out here, learn a little bit about the car. A lot of times we talk about the second half of the season. When you’re a Raybestos Rookie they talk about how you perform in the first half and then once you’ve learned everything how you perform the next time you go back to a track so this gives us basically an opportunity to come here and race and then kind of see how we do when we come around the second time. Hopefully everything will be real good. I’ve been real happy with the work the guys on the Mobil 1 Dodge have put forward. It’s just tough to go to some of these races for the first time and not to know what to expect out of the car and once you get one little dent or you fall behind a little bit you just can’t do anything different.” ARE YOU MORE AGGRESSIVE IN THE RACE TOMORROW NIGHT? “I mean, you don’t want to crash anyhow [smiles]. The big thing is we really want to make sure that we do the right things tomorrow. We want to make it into the race and if you wreck you’re probably not going to make it in the race and even if you do you’ve got a bent up car for the all-star race. Yeah we’re going to push it and if you’re the guy that’s in third or whatever and you’ve got to get in you might make a move that you wouldn’t make normally but you’ve still got to be smart about it.” IS THIS YOUR BACKUP CAR FOR THE COCA-COLA 600? “Yeah. We came down here with two new cars basically and felt really good about what we had with ‘em. The other car seemed a little bit better than this one, a little bit more consistent over the long run so we just really decided that we were going to make sure that we didn’t get ourselves in trouble and not qualify in because of it. I’m real happy with the work that the guys put forward because this isn’t a points race. It’s kind of a fun race. Obviously we want to go out there and we want to do well. They put a tremendous amount of work into making this car good and as long as I stay out of trouble tomorrow, as good as we’ve been over a long run we shouldn’t have a problem making it in. But it’ll be tough, too. There’s a lot of guys that have that same feeling that they’ll be in.” YOU MUST BE PLEASED AT THE QUALITY OF THE CARS. “Even for the stuff that I’ve tore up with having tires go down and we basically lost a car at California and for the problems that we’ve had for them to put together not just a bunch of race cars but cars that are also put together well, that’s great. That’s what we hoped would be able to happen and the thing that we really wanted to do is make sure that we’re a benefit to the team as a whole and that Kurt and Ryan didn’t never get to the point where we were taking away. So saying all of that, I think that that’s really what’s happened so far. We’ve been able to continue to move forward and make sure that we’re an asset to the team, not a detriment.”

REGAN SMITH, No. 01 THE PRINCIPAL FINANCIAL GROUP/DEI CHEVROLET: “We’re not too happy with that. We’ve struggled all day today. We’ll use this as a test for next week to hopefully figure out what we need to do to be different next week and where we need to be when we come back. I was to the tight side but I was bouncing my whole front end all over the place. We’ll look into it and figure it out.” WILL THIS BE YOUR BACKUP CAR FOR THE 600? “To be honest I don’t know what the plan is cars in the shop-wise or anything like that. If it comes out alive it probably wouldn’t be a bad idea since it’s already setup and designed for that. We’ll wait and see.”

PATRICK CARPENTIER, No. 10 CHARTER DODGE: “It just got loose on me. Normally I would kind of lift because we need to make the race but this time I said ‘What the heck. Just give it a shot and see what happens.’ It kept spinning, kept going sideways more and more and more and the car was a little bit too loose. We didn’t do any qualifying runs, just practiced for the race. I think we’ve got a good race car.” WHAT HAPPENED WHEN YOU SPUN? “It was a little bit loose in Turn 1 and 2 and it got loose on me in Turns 3 and 4 and started going sideways. I just kept my foot in it. I didn’t want to hit the wall and luckily we avoided the wall s I was pretty happy about that. It’s too bad. The lap was pretty bad. We’re going to start last but at least the car is in one piece so that’s good.” WHAT IS YOUR MAIN OBJECTIVE TOMORROW NIGHT? “Move up the front like we did at Darlington there at the beginning of the race. We passed a lot of cars and hopefully we’ll get the car to do it and that’s what we’re going to do.”