Logano, Ragan, Edwards, Gilliland, Almirola and Stenhouse

Ford Racing NSCS Notes & Quotes:
Aaron’s 499 – Talladega Superspeedway
Sunday, May 4, 2014

JOEY LOGANO – No. 22 Shell/Pennzoil Ford Fusion – “The 48 just started spinning out in front of me and when he caught it and had to save it, it’s Talladega. All of us are in a pack so when one car gets free then we all kind of get jumbled up there. I think a product of a lot of it was just old tires when people came in for fuel only and their cars were getting really loose when that happened both times I think is when you’ve seen the bigger crashes. That’s Talladega. You come into this race almost expecting something like that to happen. It’s unfortunate. We had a really fast car. Our car was booking along at the beginning of the race and we just lost our track position with about 50 to go and that’s what we get.”

DAVID RAGAN – No. 34 KFC Ford Fusion – “It looked like someone got turned in the middle or the bottom lane and we were just kind of minding our own business up top and all I saw was some cars coming up toward us. There was nothing you could do. Everyone is running real hot, and I think everyone is kind of ducking in and ducking out and if I would have to guess I would think that someone was probably moving in and out and just got clipped and turned him around.” HOW WAS THE RACING? “I thought the racing was pretty hard. I thought it was good, clean racing. Everyone was giving some other cars some consideration. It looks like tires are finally starting to wear a little bit here and they’re important. You can really tell if you were on a couple runs on lefts or rights, your car was a little tight or a little loose. All in all, I thought the racing was great. There was a lot of passing, but usually when wrecks like that happen somebody makes a mistake and it’s just a shame that when somebody makes a mistake it takes out a bunch of race cars.”

CARL EDWARDS – No. 99 Fastenal Ford Fusion – “I lost a tire. I tried my best to get out of the way, but I couldn’t hang on to it. I couldn’t keep the speed up and hang on to it, but all those guys did a really good job of avoiding me. The car just got too wide and too sideways and Ryan got me, but overall we were having a pretty good day. We didn’t get caught up in any wrecks and that got us. I think that would have got us no matter what we were trying.” HOW WAS THE RACING? “It was crazy, but everybody did a really good job. I think everybody did a great job with what we had to work with. The racing was pretty good. It was really intense, but safe I thought relative to what we’ve seen in the past.”

RICKY STENHOUSE JR. – No. 17 Zest Ford Fusion – “It was really good. Our car was super-fast, especially when I could hook up with the 22 and the 21, we went to the front. I pushed the 9 to the front with the 16. I would have liked to get up there and help Biffle. He was kind of stuck out there as the only Ford, so I wish we could have got up there and helped that. We were on our way back up there when the 48 got into the right-front when he was spinning and we had to pit, so we had to restart at the tail end. That kind of ruined our day, but we got a really good restart on that last restart and was able to come home with a decent finish. We’ll get one of these speedways soon. We keep running up front. Our cars are fast. The horsepower was good and I look forward to working on this car and get ready for Daytona and hopefully have another good showing.”

ARIC ALMIROLA – No. 43 Gwaltney Ford Fusion – “I expected a few of the big wrecks and tried to avoid those and did exactly that. I don’t know. At the end with so few laps the track position is really tough to go anywhere because they fan out three and four-wide, but all in all it was a solid day. We didn’t end up on our roof or anything and back there where we’re at in points we certainly want to win a race, but we can’t afford to have 43rd–place finishe like we’ve already had this year, so it was a solid day and we’ll go on.”