DENNY HAMLIN, No. 11 FedEx Freight Toyota Camry, Joe Gibbs Racing How has the Chase been so far for you? “It’s not been a good Chase so far for us, but kind of at the point where we have opened up some different ideas and obviously with the testing and all that we had these last few days I feel like we’ve found some good stuff and we should be heading in the right direction here in the next few weeks.”
What will it take to get the second groove at Phoenix International Raceway after the repave? “It’s going to take a lot. Goodyear is in a very, very tough box because NASCAR has a certain tire that they like for them to run and we have a certain speed that they like for us to run. Goodyear is in a spot where they’ve tried some softer tires and they failed in the test, but I think the track has rubbered up quite a bit since that initial test and I think that it’s going to be about a year before you’re really going to see some great racing at that track. But I like the design. I think it’s a very racey type of race track. I think that initially I wasn’t a big fan of it, but as we got going and the car started to take to the race track a little better I thought that it was very unique. It’s unlike any other race track that we’ve got on our schedule.”
Will the information from Kansas Speedway in June help you this weekend with different weather conditions? “It’s not Sunday yet. We bring rain. Just wait until Sunday and we’ll talk about that. When we come here it’s typically very, very warm but obviously having a couple dates on the schedule it seems like this time around it does seem to be better. Setups will be very similar to what we had here in the spring. I know we ran extremely well here earlier on this year. I’m looking forward to the weekend. I think that we do have a good outlook as far as the weather is concerned. I think it’s not going to play a huge role other than the wind will play a factor today in qualifying and it will play a factor if it’s here in the race as well.”
Does your position in the points allow your team to go for more race wins and not worry about consistency? “We’re not worried about consistency at all at this point. I’m sure you’re going to see us very spiky over these next few weeks trying a lot of different things to work on different packages to get better. I feel like there’s some stuff within our cars and stuff that we need to work on, but we’re not going to get to that until next year. It takes a long process to develop cars the way — when drivers want to change them it takes a long time to get it done. So, I feel like we’ve got some good things in the works. As long as everyone is open-minded at the shop these next seven weeks to a bunch of radical changes, I think that we have the potential to head in the right direction. I think that you’ll see in the next two to three weeks that we will be heading in the right direction.”
