NASCAR SPRINT CUP SERIES
DUCK COMMANDER 500
MARTINSVILLE SPEEDWAY
TEAM CHEVY DRIVER PRESS CONF. TRANSCRIPT
APRIL 10, 2015
KURT BUSCH, NO. 41 HAAS AUTOMATION CHEVROLET SS – POLE WINNER
WAS THIS A GREAT EXAMPLE OF HOW YOU, TONY GIBSON AND YOUR GUYS KEPT UP WITH THE TRACK? “Everything is so tight in qualifying. I wanted to run the same time each time out. With the track continuing to change, with the sun and the shade, then the track rubber built up, air pressures are changing and tires are dropping off… everybody chipped in. The guys at the track, the guys at the shop, the tire guy, the engine guy, everyone chipped in. That’s what this is all about – getting that little extra. We did that with our Haas Automation Chevrolet today. Thanks to Gene (Haas). The second pole of the year feels good. Now we need to dial it in and get that long-run speed out of the car.”
YOU WERE FOCUSED ON RACE SETUP AND NOT QUALIFYING. HOW WAS THE CAR?
“The car feels good. Our Budweiser/Jimmy John’s team did a really good job. We stuck to our plan, and that’s what exactly what we had planned to do in practice. Everything worked out good. We made one qualifying run and spent the second half of practice really concentrating on race runs and make sure we can run the long hauls. I feel really good about that. I’m just really proud of everyone at Stewart-Haas Racing, on the 41 team for getting a pole and my team for doing a solid job every week. Look at lineup in the top-12 and you can see the Hendrick engines and chassis that are in that top-12 is really impressive. I’m excited for tomorrow.”
JIMMIE JOHNSON, NO. 48 LOWE’S PRO SERVICE CHEVROLET SS – QUALIFIED 5TH :
“We knew we had a fast car and I maybe conserved a little too much on the opening session and barely transferred through and kind of made my guys nervous. And then we got into the second round and went on to the third and had a nice top five there. It’s nice to have just raw speed in the car. I feel like that will translate to what we need in the race.
HOW IS THE CAR FOR SATURDAY’S RACE?
“We felt real good about everything in our race practice today. It was nice to see our race concept transfer over to qualifying as well.”
RYAN NEWMAN, NO. 31 CATERPILLAR CHEVROLET – QUALIFIED 7TH
ON HIS QUALIFYING RUN AND WHAT MORE HE NEEDED TO GET THE POLE:
“Just a little bit of speed to get the pole. We felt like the car was pretty good. The Caterpillar Chevrolet was probably the best it was there at the end competitiveness wise. Other than that I feel like we were pretty competitive in race trim as well. We will see how it all shakes out tomorrow night.”
JEFF GORDON, NO. 24 PANASONIC CHEVROLET SS – QUALIFIED 12TH
ON HIS QUALIFYING RUN:
“The first run was unbelievable. We struggled in practice and that lap I don’t know where it came from. The car was just amazing did everything I wanted it to do. We made an adjustment for the second run and the car went the exact opposite way. I got really loose. We tried to tighten it up and then I got really tight. That has kind of been our day we have had a lot of inconsistency today. But the car has good speed so hopefully we will get it figured out for tomorrow. Twelfth is better than I thought we were going to be actually when the day started.”
MARTIN TRUEX JR., NO. 78 FURNITURE ROW/VISSER PRECISION CHEVROLET SS – QUALIFIED 15TH
“Turn 2 is where I lost the most time. I just couldn’t just quite hit the corner just right. We missed the last round by two-thousandths or something crazy. If I could have done a little better job. I missed my line a little bit, didn’t get the car where I needed it and then slid the rest of the way off of Turn 2. I missed it a little bit today but feel like we had a pretty good race car for the longer runs today and we’ll get ‘em tomorrow night.”
DALE EARNHARDT, JR., NO. 88 NATIONWIDE CHEVROLET SS – QUALIFIED 25TH
CAN YOU PINPOINT WHAT THE STRUGGLE WAS TODAY AT TEXAS?
“Well we just didn’t have the speed in our package. We like our car a lot in race trim. We should be fine there. I surely would like to have qualified better the car wasn’t very good in practice and qualifying trim. We just didn’t have the speed those other guys had. We will have to go home and work on it. We have confidence we can do it because we have done it already this year at a couple of race tracks we have had good speed. We will just have to go work on it.”
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