CARPENTIER: “I’m really happy. We’re getting better in the race time and that’s important. We need to get those points and a couple of top-30s there so I’m pretty happy about that. When you spend so much time qualifying it takes the whole race to get the car to work properly, you know, just sliding and sliding and sliding and fixing it and fixing it. You get in the race and we made some changes this morning and the Valvoline Dodge was pretty good at the end. I decided to go out the back. I didn’t want to risk it and just get the points. We’re still in a safe mode as we say. I don’t want to race anybody so I just wave them by. I can’t wait to start racing. We need the points.” HOW MUCH DID YOU LEARN TODAY? “A lot. I’m learning that whatever you’ve got in the car, if it’s push or tight and it took me a while but every time I could find a way to still come back to similar lap times and know there’s a way to get even faster than that. I was happy with too tight then I found a way to still keep going on the track and too loose I found another way so that’s good. I’ve never had that before.” HOW BIG IS IT TO HAVE SOMETHING POSITIVE HAPPEN FOR YOU AND THE TEAM? “It’s been good. Valvoline has been great and I love those colors. They belong in the winner’s circle so hopefully we’ll bring them back up there. I’m very happy for them and especially this weekend with the new sponsor, LifeLock. They signed on for eight races. Everybody is looking for sponsors and the guys in marketing did a great job and got eight more races and that’s pretty good.” TODAY WAS A WARM DAY. HOW PHYSICAL WAS THIS RACE? “No, it was easy. I only lost seven or eight pounds and almost passed out [laughs]. It was hard. We lost the AC there for a while and it’s tough. I’ve got to keep training so we want to stay focused.” IS IT DECEPTIVE HOW PHYSICALLY DEMANDING THIS FORM OF RACING IS? “I think it’s hard because it’s so hard mentally. You’ve got to stay in it so much. The car is always sliding sideways and you’ve always got to be on top of it otherwise you just spin out. That’s what’s really hard and we tested it yesterday with a heart monitor. And the heart was at a 145 average so it’s up there, it’s pretty high. For three hours that’s pretty good.”

MIKE SHIPLETT, CREW CHIEF, No. 10 VALVOLINE DODGE: “Very good day for the Valvoline Dodge. Just real pleased at how Patrick hung in there. We had to work on the car all day. We started out loose-in tight in the middle and then we fixed the loose-in and then we went after the tight in the middle and he was pretty happy there at the end. We found some things to give us a little bit of head start heading into Charlotte next time we come to a mile-and-a-half.” HOW IMPORTANT IS IT TO HAVE SOMETHING POSITIVE HAPPEN TO THE TEAM? “It’s real good. For him, even starting last week, you know, we made Martinsville. We finished Martinsville. We made Texas. We finished Texas. Just start that momentum going, you know, making races and finishing races and get us out of the hole that we that we got in because of weather at the start of the year.” CAN YOU GET IN THE TOP-35? “I think, honestly, we could be in the top-35 by the end of June. We just keep running the way we’re running; just keep bettering ourselves every time we got out on the racetrack I don’t see why we can’t be there. We can go and test every day of the week, you can go test for a month and you wouldn’t get the same experience you get in one race, just racing people and knowing how to pass people, knowing how your car changes in balance, all those things you don’t learn when you’re testing.” ARE YOU LOOKING FORWARD TO PHOENIX? “That’ll be the first time that he’s actually going back to a track that he’s run because we ran there in the fall race so I’m really looking forward to it.” DID YOUR TEST GO WELL THERE? “Test went pretty good. We needed to work on it quite a bit from the test but overall the test went good.”

SAM HORNISH, JR., No. 77 MOBIL 1 DODGE: YOU GOT 500 MILES OF EXPERIENCE BUT YOU HAD A TOUGH DAY. “Yeah, a real tough day. We got hit by another car as we were trying to pass ‘em and they just wanted to block so that tore the splitter all up and it was a real fight after that. The Mobil 1 guys did a great job in the pits. It’s just unfortunate. We should have been a top-25 car again but we’ll keep working at it.” COMMENT ON THE INCIDENT WITH DAVID REUTIMANN. “He saw that I got a run on him and went to go to the inside and he tried to block me and we got together. And then I got a little bit mad and decided to bump him. It was an interesting half a lap.”

MICHAEL MCDOWELL, No. 00 AARON’S DREAM MACHINE TOYOTA: “I like those ARCA races that are only 150 miles, that’s for sure. I don’t think it would have been so bad, I ran 500 laps at Martinsville last week and wasn’t too bad but starting the race out sore and kind of starting out the race in pain anyways it didn’t take very long before I felt it. If we had had our car a little bit better we probably would have not felt the pain so much but I was pretty busy all day long. But I just want to thank our crew. I put them in this situation by going to the backup. Our race car was really good and it’s just sometimes what you get when you wreck in qualifying.” YOU ARE DRIVING AS HARD AS YOU CAN EVERY LAP. “Yeah and these cars, there’s a lot less limit of the tire and you’re sliding around a lot more. You’d think that you’d have to drive less but you’re actually driving a lot more. This new car is definitely on top of the racetrack and you’ve got to wheel the thing pretty hard but I’ll take that before giving up safety any day.” THIS IS YOUR FIRST 500-MILE SPRINT CUP RACE ON A SUPERSPEEDWAY. WHAT DID YOU LEARN? “You’ve just got to have a good car, you really do. And for me, for sure, I need to get better on new tires. That was a big thing. We’re just in the beginning stages. We’re going to keep plugging away and we’re going to make our cars better on the mile-and-a-halfs and I’m going to get better every race we go to. This isn’t a peak for us. We’ve still got a lot of room to go and we’ll keep plugging away.”