FORD RACING NOTES AND QUOTES
Advocare 500 Qualifying
September 3, 2011
Atlanta Motor Speedway
Ford Qualifying Results:
6th – Matt Kenseth
7th – Carl Edwards
11th – AJ Allmendinger
15th – Greg Biffle
18th – Marcos Ambrose
19th – David Ragan
30th – Scott Speed
31st – J.J. Yeley
36th – David Gilliland
40th – Mike Bliss
41st – Travis Kvapil
42nd – Andy Lally
43rd – David Starr
MARCOS AMBROSE – No. 9 Kwikset Ford Fusion – “We don’t want it to get too cool here because this track is so temperature sensitive. We’re really looking to start decent on Sunday night and give ourselves for that $3 million bucks. We’ve got a good car. You can pass here, but I tell you what, it’s a much easier night if you can start at the front. Tire wear is critical here and you can get in someone else’s trouble in a hurry, so we want to start somewhere in the first 15 if we can.”
CARL EDWARDS – No. 99 Aflac Ford Fusion – “It’s hard to decide where to run on this race track because it’s so wide and there’s so much grip all over. I think we’re gonna see some really good times coming up. I think the track is cooling off and I hope we can hold on to our top seven or eight starting position. It’s a long enough race and we’ve got a fast Aflac Fusion.”
MATT KENSETH – No. 17 Crown Royal Ford Fusion – “We’ve got good speed.
The car didn’t drive like I was hoping, but we had good speed so I hope that will be in the top 10. This is a four-hour race and we’ve got a really wide track with a lot of grooves, so if you have a good car, no matter where you start, you should be able to work your way to the front.”
AJ ALLMENDINGER – No. 43 Best Buy Ford Fusion – “I’m a little disappointed with it. Times are so close though. This has never really been my best place to qualify at, so you think it could have been a little bit better. Overall, it was decent. The car has been pretty solid ever since we unloaded, so I think we’ll have a good car for the race. We just needed a little bit more and I think we would have been right there.”
GREG BIFFLE – No. 16 3M Ford Fusion – “I feel really good about tomorrow night. I feel my car is really good. I overdrove turn one a little bit. I anticipated it being more turn down there, but we had never had the car, we changed dramatically in race trim in the final practice, so then we modified our qualifying setup to meet that new race trim, so we were quite different than the way we did our qualifying runs before. We’ve got to start in the back anyway because we changed an engine, but it was still a pretty good run. I liked the way the car drove.”
SCOTT SPEED – No. 46 Property Masters Ford Fusion – “I think that will be good. We’ve locked ourselves in and that’s the only thing we’re really worried about. We made some good improvements to the car.
It’s tough when you have five guys working on it all weekend. Your resources are very limited and a lot of times you have to take a lot of educated guesses because we don’t have the tools a lot of other teams have and we made some great decisions before qualifying, so I’m real pleased with the effort.”
TRAVIS KVAPIL – No. 55 Lazy Days RV Ford Fusion – “We kind of struggled with the handling on this car all weekend, and right toward the end of practice, we got it. We were fighting a really loose condition and then we got it to the other side where it was too tight.
So, we went back a little bit and made it better, and we were actually still just a little too tight in our qualifying lap there.
But, I’m proud of these guys. They worked really hard and we’re in the show. That’s all that matters.”
FORD RACING NOTES AND QUOTES Advocare 500 Qualifying, Page 5
September 3, 2011 Atlanta Motor Speedway
J.J. YELEY – No. 38 Vampt Ford Fusion – “I had a little bit of pressure. The race track just didn’t have the grip in practice. I drove down and never had a chance of making it. Luckily, the wall stopped me or I’d have been somewhere in Florida by the time I made the turn, but we made a ton of changes. These guys worked really, really hard in practice. I felt bad that I made them work so hard, but the lap was pretty good.”
DAVID GILLILAND – No. 34 A&W All American Food Ford Fusion – “We were way too loose. We didn’t really do too much in qualifying trim.
We’re saving a lot of our tires for race stuff, but we still wanted to qualify a lot better than that. We were just way too loose. I couldn’t get back to the gas the way I needed to, but I expect good things out of our A&W Ford Fusion for the race.”
