TREVOR BAYNE – No. 21 Motorcraft/Quick Lane Ford Fusion – “At the beginning of the race we didn’t really have a plan of who we were gonna work with. The other Ford cars had teammates already and we were gonna work on whoever we found and we worked with the 33 car at first and we were really fast. We only got a couple laps to prove that, but he dropped off to find the 31, which we knew he was gonna do, and as I was kind of falling through the field, we found the 2 car. I wanted to be a pusher because I know that these things can happen. He got to us and was pushing us down the frontstretch. I was still kind of lifting a little bit, letting him get to my bumper, and then I got back to the gas wide-open. I don’t know if I turned down more getting in or if he kind of came up across our bumper, but, either way, our bumpers caught wrong and it sent us spinning. You know that can happen here. It happens all the time, but it’s tough that it was our car. I hate tearing up a good race car and they duplicated what we had here in February, which is hard to do, so I’m thankful for the Wood Brothers standing behind me through everything I’ve been through this year, and for Ford and Quick Lane and Motorcraft and Ford Parts.com and everybody that’s been around all year long for everything. It’s good to have people like that around.”
WHAT DOES IT FEEL LIKE WHEN IT GOES AWAY? “It’s not fun, I can promise you. It takes about a half-second and you say, ‘Oh, here it goes,’ because you get sideways and you know the point of correction. You know at what point you can still correct and then you know when it’s too far. I watched a little bit of it and it looked like I slowed down and I was kind of sliding sideways, and then when it finally slowed down enough it just hooked and went right. That happens when you’re at these high-speed places, so, like I said, I just hate that it was us. It’s gonna happen again tonight, I’m sure, but it’s just really unfortunate for us. I wanted to back-up what we did here in February, obviously, but we aren’t gonna get the chance to do that.”
WHAT’S THE RANGE OF EMOTION LIKE? “I can’t explain what I’ve been through this year. It’s tough at times and it’s good at times, but I just know that I’ve got really good people behind me and that’s why I say that about Ford and everybody at the Wood Brothers and Roush Fenway on the Nationwide side. I’ve got great people behind me, so that gives me confidence. If I didn’t have that and I didn’t have my faith and everything else, right now that would be a pretty bad blow I can promise you that.”
WERE YOU WORRIED ABOUT NOT HAVING A PARTNER COMING IN? “This time was different because last time we didn’t know how extreme this would be, so they didn’t work it out before they got here. They didn’t have their teams all set up. This time, they already had that planned before they got here, so you don’t even have a chance if you have a single-car team. You just have to wait on another guy to crash out and pick him up, but I was just planning on riding at the beginning. There’s no reason we should have already been out of this race with the mindset that we had. We were just gonna ride it out and keep the car in one piece until the end.”
DID YOU HAVE A CAR THAT COULD WIN? “Well, it was fast there at the beginning. The four Hendrick cars had to team up on us to get by me and Clint Bowyer, so I knew we had a good race car and it qualified really well. If it was gonna be a winner, we’ll never know, but I think it could have been for sure.”
