Dario Franchitti spoke with members of the media this afternoon at Richmond International Raceway. Franchitti is recovering from a fractured left ankle he suffered in a NASCAR Nationwide Series race last weekend at Talladega (Ala.) Superspeedway. He holds a 37-point lead (89-52) over Bryan Clauson in the Raybestos Rookie standings in the Nationwide Series.

DARIO FRANCHITTI, No. 40 KENNAMETAL DODGE: HOW DO YOU FEEL? “I feel good. I’ve been walking around it without the crutches since Monday I guess. I went to see the doctors the same day and they told me exactly what’s wrong with it. I’m very lucky the fact, there’s a lot of bruising and stuff but there’s no displacement and there’s a very small fracture so we should be good to get back in the car pretty quick.”

HAVE THEY GIVEN YOU A DATE YET? “It’s really going to be up to me at this point when I feel comfortable getting back in the car. I’m going to talk to the guys on the team today and we’ll see about that. I would say pretty soon. I have a carbon fiber brace that I’m getting made back in Indy. I’ve got to go back there Monday and have that fitted so hopefully soon we’ll be back in. Really, I think it’s going to be about comfort and how hard I can push the pedal.”

HOW HARD HAS THIS BEEN FOR YOU MENTALLY? THIS IS YOUR RAYBESTOS ROOKIE SEASON AND THIS KIND OF PUTS THE BRAKES ON EVERYTHING. “What are you going to do [laughs]? I mean, really, there’s no point in getting mad or upset or frustrated about it. There’s really nothing you can do. I’m happy that I’m in one piece and I’ll get on with it. As soon as I get back in the car hopefully we’ll continue the progress that we started, particularly the Nationwide stuff has been going pretty well all year but Phoenix we really felt we made a step on the Cup side too. Timing wasn’t great but it never is, is it? [laughs].”

ARE YOU ON A LOT OF PAIN WALKING AROUND? “No. If I was I wouldn’t be doing it. I’ve been walking around quite a bit and putting more and more stuff on it but I still elevate it a lot if I can. I’ve got this boot that cycles water through it to keep the swelling down. I’m doing everything I can right now to prepare to get back in the car as quickly as possible.”

WHAT WERE YOUR THOUGHTS WHEN THE INITIAL IMPACK HAPPENED? “I was a little dazed. But I got myself out of the car with the help of some of the safety guys there and I knew right away this is broken for sure. I broke that foot before I knew kind of what it felt like [laughs]. I actually thought my elbow was worse than it is. It’s just bruised from the bars coming in. The amount of time that the team spends on making these cars just that little bit safer, just that extra attention to detail really helped me. These seats that we run, these are carbon seats which Chip and Felix have paid for which are horrendously expensive, little things like that made the difference I think.”

WHAT WILL YOU BE DOING THROUGHOUT THE WEEKEND? “I’ll be up on the pit box some. We’ll get the radios on and especially having a guy like Ken Schrader in the car, I want to listen and see what I can learn. He’s a very, very experienced and a great race driver so I’ll do that. I learned a lot from listening to Stremme last week watching what he did. I think he did a fabulous job for the team. It’s a real shame it ended the way it did because he deserved a lot, lot better than that.”

WHEN WOULD YOU LIKE TO BE BACK IN THE CAR? “I’d like to be in the car now but as soon as I can. As soon as I can safely come back and do a good job we’ll do it.”

ARE YOU EXCITED TO BE A PART OF THE ALL-STAR WEEKEND? “Yeah. I haven’t even thought about it, to be honest. The way I’ve been looking this year, I haven’t looked too far ahead of the schedule. The all-star race is a fabulous thing to watch first of all but it’d be real fun to be a part of it. We’ll see if we can do that.”

ARE YOU STILL GOING TO RUN THE BULK OF THE NATIONWIDE SERIES SCHEDULE? “I think so. The plan is to be in the Fastenal car and keep doing what we’re doing.”

STEVE LANE, CREW CHIEF, No. 40 KENNAMETAL DODGE: “When we sit down and look at the driver situation of who we’re going to put in it, we’ve got to make sure that we put somebody in there that’s going to run a good, clean race. Our goal is we’ve got to get 100 points every race. If we can get a hundred points we can get inside the top-35 and stay in it and when we look around and try to find guys that can do that. And Schrader seemed to be the best pick because you know he’s solid, you know he’s been here a million times, he knows his way around here. He’s going to get you on and off pit road without tearing anything up, just all the little things that you look at. It just seemed like a great pick. And Dario can talk to him and we think that he could help him some because that’s the biggest thing. Dario misses this race and we have to come back and run it in the fall again without him and a guy like Schrader can help him. He can say ‘Listen, the car done this’ or ‘When you come back here be looking at all these things’ and that was another fit for putting Schrader in the thing.”

HOW MUCH CAN DARIO LEARN THIS WEEKEND VIEWING THINGS FROM A DIFFERENT PERSPECTIVE? “I think he can learn a lot. It’s just like Bristol. If you remember, when we unloaded at Bristol, we were terrible. And he said ‘Just let me go up on top of the truck for a minute and watch.’ He went up on top of the truck and he comes back down and the guy picks up three-quarters of a second. It was unreal and he said ‘I figured some stuff out. I need to see where everybody is at.’ He picks up on stuff fast and I think as long as you’ve got somebody that can communicate with him and tell him what to do and how to do it and where to do it, and Schrader can help him with that kind of stuff. It was a good fit for Schrader to be in it.”

EVERYONE ON THE TEAM MUST BE PROUD OF THE CARS THAT YOU BUILD. “Absolutely, especially after you look at that wreck last week. That’s a testament to the carbon seat. And when you look inside that car, it was scary. If I’d have looked in the car before I seen Dario, I would have sworn up and down he would have had broke legs. To only have a fractured ankle, that’s good. It’s great.”

DOES DARIO’S INJURY PUT THE TEAM WAY BEHIND? IS THIS A MAJOR SETBACK? “That’s a good question. If you put the right guy in it to get us back in the top-35 so when he comes back we’re back in the top-35, maybe it helps us. If we miss here and Darlington and obviously missed Talladega, we still have to go back to those racetracks and we don’t have anything to pull from, a notebook for Dario. It’s 50-50. It’s hard to say. We’ve looked at it from both ends.”

THERE HAVE BEEN SOME CHANGES AT CHIP GANASSI RACING AT FELIX SABATES OVER THE LAST COUPLE OF WEEKS. WILL THE CHANGE IN TEAM CHEMISTRY HELP THIS TEAM? “A lot of people asked that question. I think the first thing that everybody says is ‘Man, I couldn’t believe it wasn’t something on the 40 getting changed’ [laughs]. Looks like I dodge that bullet, first off. I think the good thing is Jimmy and Donnie and myself, we get along really good. We share the same office. We eat together in the motorhomes. I spend a lot of time with those guys so I’ve got support from them no matter what car they’re working on. If they move those guys over to the Busch program I still know that I have that support and I communicate well with those guys. And trust me, when we unload we’re never far off from one of those two cars if not both of ‘em. No matter which team they’re working on, I mean, to me, I see Jimmy and I see Donnie. I don’t see the 41 or 42 crew chief and there’s a lot to pull from there. I know Donnie is over there with the 41 now and a lot of people have talked about that and to me Donnie is one of the most underrated crew chiefs in this garage. I mean a lot of knowledge there. That’s what I see when I look at those two guys.”

Regan Smith owns the best finish by a Raybestos Rookie on a short track this season, a 14th-place effort in the Goody’s Cool Orange 500 at Martinsville (Va.) Speedway (race No. 6). Smith and Sam Hornish Jr. are tied for the lead in the Raybestos Rookie standings entering Saturday’s race at Richmond.

REGAN SMITH, No. 01 STEAK-UMM BURGERS CHEVROLET: “I’m happy to be back at a short track and it’s in the state of Virginia, too, so I guess it’s got a lot in common right now with Martinsville [smiles]. This place here for me, generally speaking, has not been one my stronger racetracks. I felt like I had a good car here last year. Last year was the first time I actually left here and was happy and thought I was starting to figure it out. Hopefully we can build on that with the Car of Tomorrow this year and have a good day today, get a good qualifying spot and see what happens tomorrow night. It’s a long race and a lot of stuff will happen.”

DOES THE SHAPE OF THIS TRACK THROW YOU OFF? “No, it’s not the shape. For the longest time I just struggled here and I can’t explain why. Come up here and test and do everything you can to get better and last year was the first time we really hit on some stuff in the test that felt good for me and that I really liked and still was able to get off the corners with it too. It’s not the shape. I think it’s just something about it. I know you talk to about 40 out of 45 drivers in this garage area and they all love it and I’m one that kind of in the middle right now. We’ll see how this weekend goes. I might love it after this weekend, it just depends.”

WHAT CAR ARE YOU RUNNING HERE THIS WEEKEND? “I believe this is the Martinsville car. We’ve got a new color scheme with Steak-umm on there for the first time this year so we’re excited about that and we’re looking to get them a good run and get them some good exposure. It sticks out a little bit more so than the other cars that I’ve had this year.”

MOST MEMBERS OF THE RAYBESTOS ROOKIE CLASS ARE RUNNING AROUND EACH OTHER EVERY WEEK. WHY IS IT SO CHALLENGING FOR EVERYONE TO RUN INSIDE THE TOP-10? “If I had the answer to that I’d be the guy running in the top-10 right now [laughs]. I think it’s a combination of a lot of things with the new car number one, a lot of inexperience when it comes to these cars and these tracks. It’s a tough year. You can look at it and there’s a lot of veterans that are struggling too and with it being so finicky I think that’s where some of the experience is really showing up right now is the fact that a half round can take a good car to junk and vice versa. We might come in and not know exactly what we’re looking for, what we’re wanting, and that’s why some of us have been struggling.”

WHAT ARE YOUR THOUGHTS ON THE UPCOMING TEST SESSION AT LOWE’S MOTOR SPEEDWAY? “I can’t speak for the other teams, I can speak for our team here and it’s a much needed test. Our mile-and-a-half stuff has not been good. There’s no denying that. We’ve been 35th or worse at all the mile-and-a-halfs I think. It’s much needed and we’re going to work through a ton of stuff. I don’t plan on getting out of one of two race cars the entire time that I’m there. Wear me out and give me as many laps as you can.”

DO YOU EVER FOCUS ON QUALIFYING RUNS? “It’s fine line. Right now we’re fortunate that we’re locked in so no, we’re not going to focus on qualifying at all. But you’ve got to keep in mind, okay, we might not be locked-in when we go there to race so don’t forget about qualifying either. It just depends on your situation. Somebody that’s not locked in and doesn’t look like they’re going to be locked in come Charlotte time, I’m sure they’re going to be doing a lot of qualifying trim stuff. But if you get your balance good in race trim a lot of times it’s easier to get it good in qualifying trim, too.”