RAYBESTOS® ROOKIE CONTENDER RAIN DELAY QUOTES FOR THE AUTO CLUB 500 NASCAR SPRINT CUP SERIES RACE AT AUTO CLUB SPEEDWAY, FEBRUARY 24, 2008.

SAM HORNISH, JR., No. 77 MOBIL 1 DODGE: “Probably my best rain story that I can think of right now is when I was running Toyota Atlantic. In 1999 we were running Vancouver. I think we qualified seventh for the race, a street course so there’s not hardly any runoff. I think I passed like three cars going into the first corner. Qualifying was in the rain so I felt that we had a pretty good idea of what we were going to get. There was a kink and I came through the kink and it had been raining harder than what it was in qualifying and just hit this huge puddle and it spun the car around at about 135. There were 30-plus cars there. I spun around and I basically closed my eyes because I’m like ‘This is going to hurt and I’m going to get hit by everybody else.’ I spun going in the right direction still, just downshifted and kept going. I went down to the next corner and then I got rear ended by a car and flattened the rear tire so we came in. We pitted and we came out 30th. We worked our way back up to about fifth. I was trying to pass the guy for fourth, spun, went into the tire wall. I’m like ‘There’s no way this thing is still going to go’ plus there’s no starters so you’ve got to keep it running all the time anyhow. I spun, hit the tire wall, and I’m like there’s no way I’m going to get out of here but I’ll try it. So I put it gear and ended up wiggling it a couple of times and got out of the tire wall and kept going. I don’t know where we went back to. There was no yellow at that time. I was passing a couple of other cars and got pinched up against the wall and it popped the car up and I’m like ‘Man, there’s no way this thing is still going’ and ended up finishing 10th in that race. We’d been front to the back to the front and it seemed like the longest race I’d ever ran up until that point. I’m like man, everything on that car has got to be tweaked or bent and they did all the measurements and everything was fine. We ran all the same suspension pieces the next weekend at Laguna Secca. Usually the rain is pretty tough on all the equipment but for everything we hit we ran the same car, all the same pieces and finished fifth the next weekend. So it was pretty good suspension pieces and a little bit of luck that we didn’t end up bending anything. Through those two finishes, that’s what got us ahead in the rookie of the year points and extended it enough that we were able to keep it throughout the last race of the season which was in Houston.” IS IT UNUSUAL FOR YOU TO SIT AROUND AND WAIT TO GET ON THE TRACK? “I feel like I’ve been doing this my entire life, in Indy cars and all the open wheel stuff. We would run on road courses in the rain but if it’s any lightening or anything like that you don’t run. I’ve had all these experiences before. Done it in November in go-karts where it’s only 35 degrees out and you’re frozen after the first corner, stuff like that. But once you get up here and you get running the ovals there’s nothing more boring that being at the racetrack on a rainy day because you can’t go anywhere because you don’t know if it’s going to dry out and you’re kind of forced to sit there and deal with it as much as you can.”