TEAM CHEVY POST RACE RECAP – TEXAS MOTOR SPEEDWAY
FT. WORTH (April 13, 2013) – With a sixth-place finish tonight at Texas Motor Speedway, five-time NASCAR Sprint Cup Series champion Jimmie Johnson, No. 48 Lowe’s Dover White Chevrolet SS, continues to lead the point standings following the seventh race of the 2013 season.
Other Team Chevy drivers scoring finishes in the top-15 are: Ryan Newman, No. 39 Quicken Loans Chevrolet SS – 10th, Kasey Kahne, No. 5 Time Warner Cable Chevrolet SS – 11th, and Kevin Harvick, No. 29 Rheem Chevrolet SS – 13th.
Kyle Busch (Toyota) was the race winner. Martin Truex, Jr. (Toyota – 2nd), Carl Edwards (Ford – 3rd), Greg Biffle (Ford – 4th) and Joey Logano (Ford – 5th) were the top-five finishers of the night.
The next race is at Kansas Speedway on Sunday, April 21, 2013. Live coverage will be on FOX TV, MRN Radio and Sirius NASCAR Radio Channel 90 at 1:00 p.m. EDT.
NASCAR SPRINT CUP SERIES
TEXAS 500
TEXAS MOTOR SPEEDWAY
TEAM CHEVY DRIVER RACE NOTES & QUOTES
APRIL 13, 2013
JEFF GORDON, NO. 24 CROMAX PRO CHEVROLET SS – Sidelined on lap 306 with front suspension issue. FINISHED 38TH:
ON THE SUSPENSION FAILURE:
“I’m not sure maybe a burned wheel bearing or something. No signs just went down the back straightaway and went to go to the brake and the brake pedal was spongy and the car just didn’t turn. I thought I had a left-front tire going down. Man that was unfortunate. That Cromax Pro Chevy was awesome fast. It was so much fun to drive and what a great job this team has done to prepare for this weekend and hopefully more to come on these mile and a half’s with more cars like that. We’ll learn what happened and we’ll try to make sure it doesn’t happen again. Most importantly, we know we have a fast race car and we know we can put another fast race car out there on the track.”
WHAT DO YOU KNOW FOR SURE WHAT HAPPENED?
“I don’t know for sure. We won’t ever know for sure until we pull it all apart. It’s just unfortunate for it to happen that close to the end and to be running that good. I’m pretty upset. This team has just worked so hard to try to claw ourselves back into the points; and we had a great weekend last weekend and we were having a great day. The racing in the passing is difficult when you’ve got three cars all running the same speed out there. I’ve never seen three cars just sit there and run the same lap time after the same lap time; and run in the same line, too. I was trying to deviate from my line and made a few gains on Kyle (Busch), so I thought I might have a shot at him before this thing was over. I don’t know about Martin (Truex, Jr.), but we won’t know.”
KURT BUSCH, NO. 78 FURNITURE ROW/SERTA CHEVROLET SS – FINISHED 37TH:
“When you’re running solidly in the top-five and then to have a parts failure knock you out of contention it’s very frustrating. We came in here with a fast race car, qualified on the front row and continued the strong performance until we had a part on the fuel injection system break. What’s done is done and we have to put tonight behind us and focus on getting these problems rectified sooner than later. I feel confident that we’ll have another fast Furniture Row Chevrolet SS in Kansas next week.”
DALE EARNHARDT, JR., NO. 88 NATIONAL GUARD CHEVROLET SS – FINISHED 29TH
WAS THAT JUST A PERFECT STORM OF THINGS GOING WRONG THERE FOR A COUPLE OF LAPS FOR YOU GUYS? ”We just had a battery go dead and didn’t diagnosis it correctly to just switch it. We have two batteries in there we have a switch in the driver’s seat that goes from one to two. I didn’t know it was a battery until we got down on pit road and I got to looking at the gauges and really understanding. At that point we had lost a couple of laps. I couldn’t control my speed on pit road because the motor was not running coming on. So we sped there and we came down pit road to serve the penalty but Steve (Letarte, crew chief) wanted to get tires. You can’t get tires serving a penalty so we had to come back and then serve the penalty.”
INAUDIBLE:
“It’s just I don’t know what else we could have done different aside from me understanding better what was going on with the car and diagnosing it on the race track and switching to the second battery and not losing any laps. That was just my mistake. You know things break on these cars; you don’t know right away what it is and it’s just real easy to have hindsight and say ‘man you know that was pretty simple’. When the motor quits running you don’t really know why. You just have to diagnosis it. It took us more than a few seconds. I couldn’t coast past pit road if it was something I couldn’t fix in the car we were going to be stalled on the track and lose a ton of laps that way anyways.”
FROM YOUR PERSPECTIVE FROM THE DRIVER’S SEAT DID EVERYTHING JUST GO OUT?
“Yeah, all the gauges went bad. All the gauges just went haywire and so I couldn’t read the gauges to really diagnosis what was happening, but once you start to think about it you are like, ‘well if all the gauges are going bad we have electrical issues’. Then you go right to the battery. The thing quit running going into (Turn) three and I couldn’t stay on the track if it wasn’t the battery we would have stopped on the track and lost all those laps. I came down pit road, sped, no motor, no tach (tachometer); figured out by the time I got to the pit stall it was the battery. We changed the switch over to battery two, get fired up, take off, come down pit road change tires, came down pit road serve the penalty and that was the night.”
HOW HAVE YOU DEALT WITH THE LAST COUPLE OF WEEKS?
“It has been rough, but we had a really good car tonight. If we were running bad and having these kinds of nights we would have a hard time making that Chase, but running good eventually things will turn back around for us. We will get going. We have a lot of confidence. We’ve got a lot of positive attitude and feel like we will have no problem rebounding.”
RYAN NEWMAN, NO. 39 QUICKEN LOANS CHEVROLET SS, FINISHED 10TH:
ON HIS RACE: “We had a tough day in the pits for the most part; and got a lap down. Long green flag runs kept us a lap down for a while there. We got lucky and got the Lucky Dog. We never got the car balanced quite right, but the guys did a good job of coming back. We were probably our best at the end of the race there. We did not have a 10th place car all weekend until there at the end of the race. ”
JIMMIE JOHNSON, NO. 48 LOWE’S DOVER WHITE CHEVROLET SS – FINISHED 6TH:
“We fought hard all day but we just didn’t quite have enough to pull off a win in the Lowe’s Chevy tonight. It was a great effort by (crew chief) Chad (Knaus) and everyone. We just came up a little short.”
DANICA PATRICK, NO. 10 GODADDY.COM CHEVROLET SS – FINISHED 28TH:
“It was a tough night. The car was just kind of all over the place at the beginning. Tony Gibson (crew chief) and the GoDaddy guys kept working on it all night and we made some improvements on it. The pit crew did a good job on the stops. We just need to get better on the 1.5-mile tracks. I know the team will keep working at it. We’ll see what we can do in Kansas.”
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