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From YourSITE.com NASCAR KASEY KAHNE (No. 9 Dodge Dealers/UAW Dodge Charger) – The Winner “We had a really great racecar. The Dodge Charger was awesome. We started out really loose and fell back to sixth or seventh. We just kind of let the car come to me. It took a little while and we finally started reeling in the leaders and ended up in second before the first pit stop. I was real happy with it. We made some changes to tighten it up some and got it good. Then we lost it back a little bit. The track changed a lot. I knew going into the race it was going to take fine adjustments to make the car right because the car was so slick, whether it was the front of the car or the back of the car. We were just fortunate enough to hit the adjustments right late in the race and made ‘em better on that final stop and had a great racecar those final 20 laps.” KENNY FRANCIS (Team Director No. 9 Dodge Dealers/UAW Dodge Charger) “It seemed like we started off good and everything was going along good, and we were actually leading and had a restart and just seemed like then we just lost the handle. It got really loose, and we had to figure out what was wrong with it. It took us a couple of stops to get it back right. Luckily at the end there it was pretty good on a long run and he ran Tony down and got the lead. We had a good last pit stop and held on to the end.” RAY EVERNHAM (Owner, CEO Evernham Motorsports) “He’s very committed and he’s extremely talented. For whatever things he’s worked on this year, he’s done really well giving feedback. If we can just keep him in the cars I believe he can race with anybody out there. We’re a little bit concerned about some of the road course stuff coming up, and Boris Said is going to help us with that because that’s where Kasey has the least experience. Again, I think the first time at KASEY KAHNE (No. 9 Dodge Dealers/UAW Dodge Charger) COMMENT ON THE DIFFERENCE A YEAR MAKES “I might have crashed it (last season). Who knows? Today I was able to stay calm enough. Five hundred miles is a long time, and we were able to make a lot of adjustments to try to make the car better, similar to COMMENT ON WHY YOU DIDN’T PASS STEWART WHEN HE CAME UP ON YELEY “That was just wondering. I wasn’t sure what to do in that situation. I thought I could block him in behind J.J., but knowing Tony, that might make him mad. I didn’t want to mess with that. I was racing Tony. It wasn’t about J.J. why I got to take the lead. J.J. would do what he could to help Tony, but he wasn’t helping either one of us. He was just trying to stay out of the way. I was thinking about blocking behind him, but I thought better of it. When we got to turn three, Tony made it three wide and got real close to me. I actually got a little loose there and couldn’t pick up the throttle as hard as I wanted and we were side by side off four, but it was probably just a little respect. There’s no need to force something like that and try to trap somebody. It’s not about lapped cars why we take the lead. It was about having a better racecar and doing the right things at that time. I thought we could get him, just be calm and don’t have any contact.” KENNY FRANCIS (Team Director No. 9 Dodge Dealers/UAW Dodge Charger) DO YOU THINK THIS WILL END THE CHARGER-INTREPID DEBATE? “I think we ended that question in RAY EVERNHAM (Owner, CEO Evernham Motorsports) ANY CONCERN ABOUT THE 19 TEAM? “Absolutely. It’s like having three kids and two of them are doing really well, but you’re more concerned about the one who isn’t. We know our equipment is good. We know our engines are good. We know we’ve got the formula. We’ve just got to figure out what’s going on with our recipe, why they’re struggling hitting it some. The good news is that inside our own house we have the answer. All we have to do is follow it and work on it.” KASEY KAHNE (No. 9 Dodge Dealers/UAW Dodge Charger) WERE YOU SHOCKED THAT YOU WERE ABLE TO PULL AWAY FOR A FIVE-SECOND VICTORY? “Yeah, I thought I had my hands full taking the green flag. I thought I definitely had my hands full with those guys, and I knew I definitely needed to get by Robby Gordon and not let anybody else get by him before I did. I finally cleared him. Kenny made the right call to tighten the car up, and the car was really good those last laps.” COMMENT ON LOSING THE CLOSE ONE HERE TWO YEARS AGO “I’ve learned a ton since 2004. I was really new to the stuff, and I feel like I’ve got a lot more experience, and I’m a better, more mature Nextel Cup driver now. I was hoping we didn’t have to get in a position to make it a photo finish or anything like that and take that chance. We just tried to get out there and when I heard the times Matt and Tony were running behind me, I just tried to keep it where it was. We kept opening it up just a little bit.” DO YOU THINK THIS IS YOUR BREAK OUT TIME? “I hope so. You work as hard as you can whether you’re in a mini-sprint or sprint car or the Busch Series and just try to learn every time you’re on the track. Right now this is the best race team, and I feel like I’m doing the best driving that I’ve ever done, and I think the race team is doing the best setting up the cars and giving me the best cars possible to drive. We’re getting some victories because of that and getting some good finishes when we don’t win, so I think it’s just a great team effort. It’s all coming together at the same time.” EVERYTHING IS BIGGER IN KENNY FRANCIS (Team Director No. 9 Dodge Dealers/UAW Dodge) ON TEAM STRUCTURE “I don’t think I’d want to sit up there all alone. It’s nice to have a couple of guys you can bounce ideas off of. I think that helps me a lot. If definitely helps your confidence when you can all three agree on the same thing. I’d really rather work with somebody. It’s more satisfying to get a group of guys together and work as a team rather than as a one-man dictatorship. It’s a lot more satisfying and I think you get a lot more done.” RAY EVERNHAM (Owner, CEO Evernham Motorsports) WHY DID YOU STICK WITH THE CHARGER? “I don’t that we voluntarily spearheaded it. We represent the Dodge Dealers and the Dodge Dealers sell the Dodge Chargers. That’s our choice of car, but I’ve relied heavily on what Kenny and the rest of our engineering staff tells us. When we back-to-backed the car against the (’04) at IS THIS A CHAMPIONSHIP TEAM? “I don’t think we could sit up here and do what we do if we didn’t consider ourselves championship contenders. I’m really proud of Kenny and Kasey both. They have both matured quite a bit over the last couple of years, and I think right now they are as good as anybody out there. We are going to have some Achilles Heels here and there. As we’ve said, we’ve got road courses that we’ve got to get a little stronger at, but with the job they’re doing now, they’ve certainly got their sights set on that championship chase.” KASEY KAHNE (No. 9 Dodge Dealers/UAW Dodge Charger) “The Evernham power was great, and the pit stop was good enough to get us out front. I knew I had to hold on for our team, and it ended up working for us. We came so close to winning at SCOTT RIGGS (No. 10 “This was good for us, but we had a lot better car than a seventh-place car. We worked our tails off all day long to get up there and we kept trying to get good track position. We needed the good track position there at the end and we didn’t get it. We came in on that last pit stop and got four tires and all day long the car just wouldn’t get going on restarts. I was a good long run car. We played with air pressures and stuff like that and nothing would help it. Kasey’s car got going on that last restart and he won the race. I don’t know what happened to us. We just couldn’t get going. I’m proud of all the guys, but I’m still disappointed because I thought we had a car that could have won the race. “We were really strong on the long runs. I wish we could have had a long green flag run there at the end. If it had stayed green we would have had a shot at it, but you never know what’s going to happen. We’re getting better every week, but it’s frustrating when you’ve got a good car. We didn’t qualify very well, but we had a good, solid run going and I wish we could have finished up there where we deserved to be. That was closer to the front. “On the long run, they said we were a tenth or two better than Kasey. That’s what I wanted, the long run, not those restarts. Those restarts killed me. Two top 10s in a row is all right, but we were looking for a top five here for sure. Not getting it is just not any good.” KURT BUSCH (No. 2 Miller Lite Dodge Charger) – 34th “I don’t know what he (Greg Biffle) was doing. I was a lapped car trying to get out of the way. He had trouble passing the 21, and he checked up down the straightaway. I tried not to get into him. I had nowhere to go. He had a fast racecar. He caught me from like 20 car lengths back in like a lap, so I don’t know why he couldn’t pass the 21. I was just trying to get out of the way.” BOBBY LABONTE (No. 43 Cheerios/Betty Crocker Dodge) – 10th “We had a good car. It was in and out of the top 10 all day. We just couldn’t get some of the track position we needed, and it wasn’t quite as fast as we needed it to be at times. The guys did a good job. We could have had four top 10s in a row if things had gone a little more our way, but this is the best I’ve run on a big track in a long time, so I’m real excited about what we did today.” KYLE PETTY (No. 45 Schwan’s Home Service Dodge Charger) – 39th “We had engine trouble, and I think it’s the same thing that happened last week, too. It’s something in the valve train. We all sat down and discussed it, and I don’t think any of us thought it would be an issue at a place like this. We started off too tight today, and then we got good. We got our lap back, and I think we were going to be really good.” RYAN NEWMAN (No. 12 Alltel Dodge) – 40th “Something happened in front of us. I saw Casey Mears get sideways, but I’m pretty sure Sterling Marlin’s hair piece just got in his eyes and he couldn’t see what was going on. It was unfortunate. The Alltel Dodge, we were just minding our own business, staying in the back. We didn’t have a good enough car to be up there in the top five or the top 10. We were just trying to stay clean and keep our nose clean. He pretty deliberately stuffed us. “ “I wouldn’t say it’s real rough, but you’ve got a few attitudes out there. We haven’t run good most of the year. We were trying to stay on the lead lap, and we were doing that and doing just that, and trying to put ourselves in position to get track position at the end, but “The car was probably the best it’s been on the mile and a half tracks so far this year. I guess that’s a good thing to say, but we’ve still got a lot of work to do.” © Copyright 2001 by YourSITE.com |