Raybestos Rookie speeds after today’s first practice session:
Hornish Jr. 22nd
Smith 37th
Carpentier 44th
Franchitti 46th

The first NASCAR Sprint Cup Series practice session today was cut short by a steady rain. Qualifying is still scheduled to begin at 3:40 p.m.

PATRICK CARPENTIER, No. 10 CHARTER DODGE: WHAT ARE YOUR FIRST IMPRESSIONS OF THIS TRACK? “I like it. It’s fun. We got one and two down there. The last run one there was pretty good and I was so happy. I was catching Jimmie Johnson and then I look at the sheet and he’s at the back with me there. False joy [laughs]. I was like we got it down good but three and four, we still don’t have it. Once you get it down good it’s a lot of fun but I just don’t have three and four. My entry to three and four, there’s something that I think I’m not doing 100 percent right and the car needs to be a little bit more. It just snaps sideways so easily. Just got to try to fix that for qualifying and hopefully we’ll make it happen but I think I’m going to have to rely on lap number two, lap one to learn and lap two to try to make it in, you know.”

CAN YOU COMPARE RACING AT BRISTOL TO ANYTHING ELSE YOU’VE DONE IN YOUR CAREER? “I’ll be honest with you Richmond in the IRL car was kind of similar to that but except you never lift. You see here, that’s what the difference is. You’ve got to lift and play with the car and learn what it is. The other one, if you’ve got cajones then you don’t lift. You’re right there [laughs]. But here it’s a different story.”

HAS THE SPRINT CUP SERIES BEEN A LOT MORE CHALLEGING THAT YOU FIRST THOUGHT? “I knew it was challenging. I know how Juan Pablo is and what he’s done when he was with us and I’m looking at him and at the beginning of the year, if he wouldn’t have had the qualified car, I’ve seen him qualify 38th, 39th in a lot of races maybe he wouldn’t have made, too. But that’s the way it is. To me it’s one of the toughest form of racing that I’ve ever entered. People have no idea, me neither. Watching TV you look at it and watching it for us cause we’re so fast with the open wheel and you watch ‘em and you’re like ‘Man, that thing is really slow’ but once you sit in that thing and strap in, it’s not that slow, believe me. It’s fun though. I really like it and I really hope that I stick here for quite a few years because I feel home and I love it. It’s a big challenge but I still have a lot of fun doing it so it’s one of the first times to in my career.”

SAM HORNISH, JR., No. 77 MOBIL 1 DODGE: “We definitely had an experience this morning. It’s neat to get out here for the first time. Everybody has told me there’s nowhere you can go to practice and prepare for Bristol and there really isn’t. It was neat to get some running time in there. Obviously we had a couple of problems early on. Just learned where the braking points are, what the track likes and what it doesn’t like and how to kind of get around it, I guess.”

HOW EASY IS IT TO GET IN TROUBLE HERE? “It’s pretty easy. The cars have to be pretty free getting in so that you can get off the corner and you can definitely give up a little bit more on entry as opposed to going in a little bit harder which kind of got me in trouble the first time. I tried to go in just a little bit harder than what I’d gone the lap before to see where I needed to be at and apparently I was already to the edge. And then the second time I just ended up catching the apron a little bit coming off the corner. It wasn’t too impressive looking so far but we got some good runs in after that and feel a lot better about that right now.”

CAN YOU COMPARE RACING AT BRISTOL TO ANYTHING ELSE YOU’VE DONE IN YOUR CAREER? “Not really. Dover is about the closest thing you get but it’s the same feeling going through the corners except you’ve got half the straightaway distance to think about it for the next time because t just seems like you’re always turning. They’re like ‘Oh, let’s run about eight laps’ and it’s like ‘Okay, what lap are we on?’ because it’s still turning. And there’s not anything to really differentiate. All you’re looking at is the track so you don’t have anything else differentiating one end from the other, other than how the car feels going through it and seeing the start-finish line.”

DARIO FRANCHITTI, No. 40 THE HARTFORD DODGE: “Our first thing that we’ve got to do is get the car so it’s handling right. Right now we’ve got a big problem with the car snapping loose on entry through mid-corner so we’ve got to get that fixed and then they can start working on what I have to do a bit more. It’s an exciting place, put it that way.”

CAN YOU COMPARE RACING AT BRISTOL TO ANYTHING ELSE YOU’VE DONE IN YOUR CAREER? “I think Bristol stands alone. Nowhere is like Bristol. The closest thing that I’ve ever come it was when I was racing an Indy car at Richmond or Iowa. The sensation of speed but the thing is here you’ve got the sensation of speed but you don’t have the grip so it makes it pretty interesting.”

Raybestos Rookie Regan Smith made his NASCAR Sprint Cup Series debut one year ago in the Food City 500 at Bristol. Smith qualified 12th and scored a 25th-place finish in the race. In four starts this season he has completed 1,026 of 1,042 possible laps (98.5 percent).

REGAN SMITH, No. 01 PRINCIPAL FINANCIAL CHEVROLET: “I never realized the rest of the Raybestos Rookies hadn’t been here before so they’re going to have fun. I think Dario has probably got the advantage just from the fact that he’s running the Nationwide car. Just laps here is the main thing. You’re just going so fast you don’t realize how fast you’re going until you get out there. You can stand in here and think ‘Oh that don’t look bad’ but when you get out there things are happening so quick and it’s a little more forgiving now with the new banking and the new pavement. They did an awesome job. Of all the places that we’ve gone recently that they’ve repaved this is one of the best ones. They gave us two and three-wide racing on a half-mile short track which is really cool. It’s exciting. It’s going to be a lot of fun. It was exciting last year, it’s exciting this year. You come to a place and there’s 200,000 people sitting in a little tiny bowl. It’s pretty special.”

LAST YEAR YOU QUALIFIED 12TH AND SUBBED FOR MARK MARTIN. WERE YOU SURPRISED TO RUN THAT WELL? “No I wasn’t surprised. The team was really, really strong and really, really clicking well at that point. They were leading the points when I got in the car and Mark had been having a great year. I enjoy Bristol anyways. It’s one of the places I look forward to coming to even though it’s like a 50-50 shot whether you’re going to crash or run good. I was looking forward to coming here and we raced well all day long. Got caught for a pit road penalty and lost a lap because of it but otherwise we were pretty decent all day.”

YOU HAVE SEVEN STARTS HERE AT BRISTOL IN THE SPRINT CUP AND NATIONWIDE SERIES. WHAT IS THE KEY TO A GOOD FINISH? “Everybody says it and you probably get sick of hearing it, but patience. That’s all there is here. You’ve got to have tons and tons of patience. There’s going to be five or six points in the race where you get mad at somebody and want to knock them out of the way and you need to be smart enough not to do that. Communication with your spotter is really critical here. I’ve had a couple of incidents that could have been avoided just because maybe I wasn’t on the same page as the spotter or something like that and weren’t thinking the same thing at the same time.”

WHAT CAN THE SPOTTER DO TO HELP YOU HERE? “Well it makes the spotter even more important when stuff happens because he’s your only set of eyes and ears. The corners are blind here. You can’t see too far around them so you don’t know. If something happens off of Turn 2, well you’re going to be there in three seconds and you don’t know that it’s there and you can’t see it so they need to really be on their game and help you out a lot. At the same time you’ve got somebody jammed right up under your bumper and they need to be watching that, too. I’d say of all the places we go, for spotters, here and Daytona and Talladega are the toughest.”

YOU AND THE OTHER RAYBESTOS ROOKIES NEED TO RUN WELL HERE THIS WEEKEND. IS THERE MORE PRESSURE ON YOU HERE THIS WEEKEND THAN ANY OTHER THIS SEASON? “I don’t think there’s any more or less pressure. Obviously you don’t want to go to Martinsville not locked in because Martinsville is a tough place also. The pressure is every weekend. That’s the one thing that I’ve learned about the Cup side is the pressure is always there and I don’t think it ever will leave there. If the pressure leaves you at this level of racing then you’re probably done anyways.”