DENNY HAMLIN, No. 11 FedEx Express Toyota Camry, Joe Gibbs Racing
How aggressive were drivers in practice?
“People say in practice that you can’t make aggressive moves, but we also have to put ourselves in decent positions where we’re going to have to figure out what our car is doing. I went through the middle and it was really wide – it just closed as soon as I had already got inside of her (Danica Patrick) and the lane closed. It knocked me into the 13 (Casey Mears) and we had some attrition after that.”
How much damage was sustained to your Camry?
“It’s nothing that we have to go to a backup car for, but it messed up other cars. That’s the tough part about it. You always have to give a little bit extra room in practice. There’s typically not a whole lot of blocking in practice and things like that – that you’ll see in the race. Also, you do have to go three-wide in those situations because you have to figure out what your car is going to do. That’s just a miscalculation one way or another on one of our parts. Unfortunately some cars got torn up.”