NASCAR SPRINT CUP SERIES
DUCK COMMANDER 500
TEXAS MOTOR SPEEDWAY
TEAM CHEVY RACE NOTES AND QUOTES
APRIL 11, 2015
JIMMIE JOHNSON CONTINUES DOMINANCE AT TEXAS
Chevrolet SS Finishes 1-2-3
FT. WORTH, Texas – April 11, 2015 – Jimmie Johnson added to his impressive resume at Texas Motor Speedway (TMS) by winning the Duck Commander 500 NASCAR Sprint Cup race in his No. 48 Lowe’s Pro Service Chevrolet SS in dominating fashion. After a late caution in the 334-lap race, Johnson vaulted from seventh to first to collect his second straight and fifth victory in the Lone Star State; more than any other driver in the sport. The six-time champion led a race high of 128 laps during the 500-mile event.
Johnson held off a strong charge from Kevin Harvick, defending Sprint Cup champion, driver of the No. 4 Budweiser/Jimmy John’s Chevy SS, and Dale Earnhardt Jr., behind the wheel of the No. 88 Nationwide Chevrolet SS. Harvick and Earnhardt Jr. battled for position behind Johnson, with Harvick finishing in the runner-up slot and Earnhardt Jr. coming home in third place to give Team Chevy a 1-2-3 finish.
This was Johnson’s 72nd career victory, and second of the 2015 season. His first win of the year came at Atlanta Motor Speedway. It was Harvick’s 13th top-10 finish and Earnhardt Jr.’s 15th top-10 finish at Texas Motor Speedway.
“Chad (Knaus, crew chief) and the crew made the right adjustments and a great call for four tires on the last stop,” said Jim Campbell, U.S. Vice President, Performance Vehicles and Motorsports. “Jimmie drove great all night with a really strong run after the last pit stop and put the No. 48 Chevy SS in Winners Circle.” “I’m really excited to have Team Chevy drivers Jimmie Johnson, Kevin Harvick and Dale Earnhardt Jr. finish 1-2-3 at Texas Motor Speedway.”
Smart race strategy by Jamie McMurray and his No. 1 Cessna/McDonald’s Chevy crew; as well as by the No. 24 Panasonic Chevy SS team and Jeff Gordon, enabled those Chevy teams to finish sixth and seventh, respectively.
Kasey Kahne brought his No. 5 Great Clips Chevy SS across the line in eighth place and Martin Truex, Jr., was ninth in his No. 78 Furniture Row/Visser Precision Chevy SS. In all, seven Chevrolet SS race cars finished in the top ten.
Rounding out the top five were Joey Logano (Ford) in fourth, and Brad Keselowski (Ford) in fifth place.
The circuit heads to Bristol Motor Speedway for Round 8 on April 18.
JIMMIE JOHNSON, NO. 48 LOWE’S PRO SERVICES CHEVROLET SS AND CHAD KNAUS, CREW CHIEF
RACE WINNER PRESS CONFERENCE TRANSCRIPT:
LOUIS MORA: We’re going to continue with our post‑race press conference. We’re now joined by the winning crew chief of tonight’s Duck Commander 500, Chad Knaus. This is the team’s fifth win at Texas Motor Speedway, the seventh for Hendrick Motorsports here at Texas Motor Speedway. If you could talk about that late surge that Jimmie had in the race and then what you guys have found here that’s made you so successful at Texas.
CHAD KNAUS: Yeah, you know, as far as how we perform here at Texas, I think it’s ‑‑ this is a racetrack that definitely falls into Jimmie’s liking. It’s a track that you’ve got to be able to as a driver to search and try to find a different line. Obviously 500 miles here there’s a huge swing in track conditions, and I think with the way that Jimmie is able to describe what he’s feeling in the race car and with what our guys are able to do from our engineering standpoint, being able to keep up with the racetrack and adjust to the racetrack and try to get the car better throughout the course of 334 laps around here. It’s a good race for us. It’s a lot of fun. We like coming out here. Obviously it’s cool to see the confetti and the fireworks and all that stuff.
As far as the race, it went really well. We were very happy and very pleased with the tempo and how things were going, pit stops were solid, all was working well two thirds of the way through the event and then we had that caution after a short run and that kind of mixed up everything. I opted to pit from the lead. That was probably a mistake at that point. Kind of got stuck in traffic but then we were fortunate enough to get a couple quick cautions shortly after that and we were able to adjust to the race car and make it better in traffic and Jimmie as able to drive up there, and we did a great job. That’s it.
Q. Fifth win here, but first I think in the spring race. Is there anything about the spring race and fall race that are different?
CHAD KNAUS: You know, not ‑‑ I don’t know, do we always race at night in the spring?
Q. No, not last year. Last year we raced on Sunday because of the conflict with the Final Four.
CHAD KNAUS: No, I think that it’s just circumstances. We’ve ran very, very well here in the spring race. I looked back over my notes and saw all that. I think it was just circumstances that we hadn’t been able to pull it off here in the spring previously. Yeah, I don’t think there’s anything specific that stands out, sorry.
Q. I don’t know if you guys had any loose lugs tonight, but seemed like at the beginning of the season we were going through the media tour and everything and NASCAR announced that they weren’t going to police the lug nuts, a lot of people were thinking crew chiefs were going to gamble and put three or four on there. It hasn’t seemed to be the case through the first races of the year. Is it just too dangerous out there to do that?
CHAD KNAUS: Well, there’s definitely teams out there that aren’t hitting all five lug nuts. We know that. We all see that, but you’ve got to be able to get some tight. That’s the key. We work off the conservative standpoint with the 48 car.
(Whistling).
Did you guys hear that? It wasn’t in my head, right? Wow. I thought Tony just walked in.
(Laughter).
But we work from a conservative standpoint and we go after four. These guys, they’re really fast. Our guys on the 48 team are doing a really great job right now. We’ve had some fantastic pit stops. They’re turning high‑11 pit stops doing what it is they need to do. There’s some guys out there that are ‑‑ yeah, I think that there are some guys taking advantage of that. But look, I’m going to be straight with you. NASCAR shouldn’t be policing that. That’s not their job. They shouldn’t be telling us how much camber to run. They shouldn’t be telling us anything like that. They should just be focusing on what’s within the guidelines and what isn’t. So I think it’s all working out well.
Q. I mean, you guys and the 4 have won, I think, like the last six mile‑and‑a‑half races now, dating back to I think Charlotte.
CHAD KNAUS: Yeah.
Q. Does anybody not in Hendrick equipment have something for you at these tracks?
CHAD KNAUS: I hope not. Yeah, I wouldn’t say that. You go back and you look at the performance of the 22, Kentucky last year, they were very, very strong. I think Brad has been super solid. I think you’re going to see these Pontiacs ‑‑ Pontiacs ‑‑ that shows my age here a little bit. These Toyotas come up here pretty soon, so I think you’re going to see a shift. I can tell you from my standpoint and what we’re doing at Hendrick Motorsports within our group, we’ve got a full‑court press on right now to get our performance where we feel like it needs to be, and we’re not even close to where I want to be yet.
Q. Those other teams don’t feel like (No microphone.)
CHAD KNAUS: They may feel like they’re pretty far off, but man, there’s only a whisper away from what’s good and what’s bad anymore. The days of having an advantage to where you’re two, three tenths faster than somebody consistently is really difficult to maintain, the restrictions that NASCAR puts on us right now. You watch qualifying, how close it is, how close the times are. It only takes a little bit of something to get everybody where they need to be. I’d much rather see the field spread out more, and I think that’s better, but we’re not quite there yet.
Q. We’ve heard you and Jimmie on the radio before. Tonight when he got up front early, there was some interesting conversations. Was he not following a strategy that you were thinking? Was he kind of getting out there?
CHAD KNAUS: I don’t know.
Q. What was the plan with that?
CHAD KNAUS: I don’t know. What did I say? Did I piss him off?
Q. Yeah, you did.
CHAD KNAUS: Yeah, it happens. I don’t remember what it was. That was four hours ago, man. I don’t know.
Q. Was there a plan that ‑‑
CHAD KNAUS: Oh, I remember what you’re talking about now. Yeah, I was just shocked. He had committed to the bottom of the racetrack. The 4 car had jumped up to the top about eight laps into a run, and Jimmie stayed at the bottom. I asked him, why did you stay on the bottom, and he just felt like it was too early to go up there and defend and start blocking the 4, so he was being a gentleman racer. I wasn’t really worried about him being a gentleman racer, but I was just like, well, I think you’d be faster if you moved up top, so that’s what I was talking about at that point in time, yeah.
Q. I know you guys sometimes make fun of us for wondering if you guys are in a slump or whatever, but kind of from your comments, obviously Vegas you guys ran well until you had the tire issue, but Auto Club didn’t look that ‑‑
CHAD KNAUS: We were in Fontana.
Q. Are you concerned at all about your intermediate program coming into here?
CHAD KNAUS: I had a lot of confidence coming into Texas based off of where we had been in Fontana, where we were in Las Vegas and where we were in Atlanta. I did. I felt like we were going to be okay. You know, we did ‑‑ we’ve done a lot of hard work, and I felt like we were going to be okay. Our intermediate program, again, it’s probably as good as it’s been in the last year. We’re making huge, huge gains, but we need to be a lot better yet. I was talking with Mr. Hendrick yesterday and unfortunately, I wish he could have been here tonight. He had to get back to Charlotte to do some deals HAG, but we’ve got to press hard to get to where we need to be, where the 48 was a few years ago, and with the rules and the guidelines that they’ve put out there right now, it’s definitely to do.
Q. (No microphone.).
CHAD KNAUS: No, not really worried about the 4. I’m worried about the field in general. He’s just a part of the mass that we’re trying to stay ahead of, or be ahead of I guess I should say. Qualifying, you see some very, very strong efforts from the Penske guys, you see the 4 car, and actually a lot of the Stewart‑Haas cars here this weekend were really fast in qualifying. We’ve got to do a better job of leapfrogging those guys. If we’re two, three tenths behind the 2 and the 22 and a couple of those other guys, we’ve got to figure out how to ellipse that. We have to get that two tenths and then we have to be two tenths ahead of them, and so we’ve got a long ways to go.
Q. Chad, I guess many people would say Martinsville was very uncharacteristic for the 48 team. Tonight looked very ‑‑ compared to your recent performances, a really typically dominant performance by the 48 team on a track that you’ve done really well. On paper it would look like night and day between the two weekends. I wonder how you would characterize the last two races.
CHAD KNAUS: How did we qualify in Martinsville? Fifth, right? Yeah, so actually Martinsville, I thought it went really smooth. We had a really solid Friday. We had a really good Saturday. We started the race, the car wasn’t exactly how we wanted it to be, but we had a mechanical problem, and when you have a mechanical problem like that, then it’s difficult to overcome.
We’ve had some really, really atrocious starts in Martinsville and made some good changes once the track comes to us, and actually won. To have a mechanical the first 100 laps of a 500‑lap race it’s kind of difficult to make something like that happen. It wasn’t like we raced 35th, you know what I mean? We would have been pretty good, I think, last week. But this week was great, man. It was fantastic. Jimmie came in, he was ready to go. He was energized. The guys came in ready to go and energized. A weekend off I think was good for everybody in the industry, and we came in here on our tiptoes and we’re ready to go.
LOUIS MORA: We’re joined by our winner of tonight’s Duck Commander 500, Jimmie Johnson, driver of the No. 48 Lowe’s Pro Services Chevrolet. It’s his fifth career NASCAR Sprint Cup Series win here at Texas Motor Speedway, most by any driver. It’s his 72nd win of his career. Your first win in the Duck Commander 500. Talk about that late push there at the end and just the success that you found here at Texas Motor Speedway.
JIMMIE JOHNSON: Yeah, I think that the end of the race was nutty. I think those last three restarts with the varying tire strategies that were going on, everybody was just driving so hard. Our car didn’t handle like it was when we were up front leading, so the first restart we were pretty concerned and made some changes. The second one we got a little better. The third one, our car was really, really good and able to work our way forward.
Unfortunately the 4 was having some trouble getting by the 1, and they slid up high through 3 and 4 and left the bottom wide open for me, and I thought I’d at least get the 4 car, and when I came off of Turn 4, I was alongside the 1, and I thought, man, we’re going to get them both here. So that worked out well. And then I thought I had it under control. 88 had something working on the bottom, so I got the bottom sorted out and then the 4 was flying around the top and started working on my line around the top, and I looked up in the mirror and I saw smoke and sparks and figured that was the end of the 4 and the next straightway I saw him door to door with the 88 still going at it. Just a fun race. I hope everybody enjoyed it. I know from where I was sitting and the competitors, tonight was a very good night for our sport, a lot of great racing. The surface of this racetrack really allows that all to happen, and we’re happy that we’re able to come out here and put on a great show.
Q. Jimmie, were you aware that Harvick thought you were blocking in the late stages of the race, and he threatened to do to you what he did to the 22 earlier in that run?
JIMMIE JOHNSON: No, I didn’t know, but I certainly ran the line that he wanted, so blocking, sure, you can call it whatever it is. There were numerous times earlier in the race that I just pulled down and let him go and didn’t run his line, but for a race win I’m going to run whatever line I need to to try to win the race.
It’s unfortunate that he’s upset like that, but when it comes time to win a race, you’ve got to do what you’ve got to do.
Q. Jimmie, what is it about Atlanta and Texas that kind of makes it kind of your type of track?
JIMMIE JOHNSON: I think the tracks with high wear, bumps, all those types of things, have just always been a good surface for the 48. You think back to the old Charlotte racetrack, the old Pocono, even the new Pocono has turned out pretty well for us. You go through the older racetracks, I think you can see some type of ‑‑ there’s some statistics there that would support my thought that we just do better on those kinds of tracks.
Atlanta has seemed to have maybe slipped away from us a little bit until the last trip or two there where we’ve got it back where we need it, but Texas has just kind of grown for us. The spring race has always been tough results‑wise, but we’ve had fast cars, and in the fall we come here and get the finish we hope for. It’s nice to get one done in the spring. I think the surface fits my style, fits Chad’s, what our team does together. Our cars just perform well on those tracks.
KEVIN HARVICK, NO. 4 BUDWEISER/JIMMY JOHN’S CHEVROLET SS – FINISHED 2ND
LOUIS MORA: We’re now joined by tonight’s second place finisher of the Duck Commander 500, Kevin Harvick, driver of the No. 4 Budweiser / Jimmy John’s Chevrolet. This is his ninth top‑two finish in the last ten races dating back to last November’s race at Texas Motor Speedway, the AAA Texas 500 and he tied a career‑best finish here with the second place finish at Texas. Can you talk about your evening?
KEVIN HARVICK: Yeah, just really proud of my team for the battle that we had this weekend with the car, through practice and even at the beginning, really all night, just trying to battle the balance of the car and that’s pretty typical as you come to Texas. In position to win. Everybody is doing a great job, and just kind of got hung up behind the 22 and the 1 car there. Just lost a little bit of time and tried to make too much of it up in too many chunks and about spun out and got in the fence trying to make up ground. All in all, it was a lot of fun. Fun to race that way.
Q. You kind of expect guys to be blocking with 20 or 25 laps to go, right? That’s pretty much the way it’s going to be isn’t it?
KEVIN HARVICK: Yeah, it’s fine. Like the 22, you knock them out of the way, and that’s the chance you take when you block.
Q. Any idea what makes Jimmie so strong like here and Atlanta but he wasn’t necessarily all that strong at Vegas and California?
KEVIN HARVICK: That will be a great question when he comes in here.
Q. Does his car look differently here and in Atlanta compared to maybe at California?
KEVIN HARVICK: Maybe they drilled more holes in their tires than we did. I don’t know. (Laughter.) I really don’t know. They just have a really good setup for here for sure, and I think as you look at the history, this is just a racetrack that fits everything that they do, so they just know ‑‑ he knows the feel that he wants in the car, and that changes as to what’s underneath the car, and they just do a really good job and make it happen when it’s time to get to the race.
I think when you look at those two racetracks, he’s got a pretty good track record, as you look back at them. There’s just those racetracks that you have those types of feels for, and obviously for him those are just a couple of them. He’s won quite a few of them.
Q. You didn’t win but you keep alive this streak of incredibly long streak of high finishes. You can’t be too disappointed with tonight?
KEVIN HARVICK: I’m not disappointed at all. Racing for wins is what we’re here to do, and just really proud of everybody, and when you can get out there and race like that and come home with stripes down the side of it, everybody is out there hopefully enjoying the show with everybody racing as hard as they did tonight. That’s just what we come to do is to try to be competitive every week, and we hadn’t put it together at this particular racetrack, but with this team and this group of guys, we’ve led a bunch of laps the last three times that we’ve raced here and finished second twice. Maybe we’ll just save the first‑place finish for the Chase race. Hopefully that’ll come sooner rather than later, but they’re doing a great job. There’s nothing at all to hang your head about. There’s no way you’re going to win them all, that’s for sure.
Q. Do you feel a different spirit here at Texas than anywhere else that you race? We feel it. I wonder if you and your team feel it here at Texas.
KEVIN HARVICK: I’m not much into spirits, but Texas is a place where you just ‑‑ you can feel the fact that, I guess the old saying of everything is bigger in Texas and obviously you have Eddie promoting everything in sight to try to make the show good. So yeah, it’s definitely exciting to come with the effort that they put into everything.
DALE EARNHARDT, JR., NO. 88 NATIONWIDE CHEVROLET SS – FINISHED 3RD
LOUIS MORA: We’re now joined by Dale Earnhardt Jr., driver of the No. 88 Nationwide Chevrolet. He scored his fifth top‑5 finish at Texas Motor Speedway and his fourth top‑5 finish of the season. Take us through your night.
DALE EARNHARDT JR.: Oh, man. It was a long one. You know, this race is real long. It’s one of the 500‑mileers that actually seems to need to be a 500‑miler. We started out a really quick car. We were happy with our car in practice so I anticipated being competitive, and I think we drove up inside of top 10 there. We had a couple lug nuts that didn’t get on the left rear on the first stop, so we had to come back down. That was real good on our guys to make that call. When it comes down to NASCAR letting us police these lug nuts, our crew guys need to be up front and honest, and that’s definitely better than the alternative for sure.
We got back down pit road and got that sorted out, got back up there to 10th again, somewhere around there, and I don’t remember what happened next. But it just seemed like everything was going against us, and we were having trouble sort of beginning our race and getting into a rhythm, and we had to pass a lot of cars tonight. But once we finally got the track position, I thought we were a top‑5 car for sure. We didn’t have quite enough for the 4 or the 48 until right at the end. I think from 20 to go to 10 to go we were the best car. If I had been able to get in front of the 4, I had him cleared off of 2, but he was right on my corner and I really didn’t know for sure whether he was there or not. I passed him on the bottom and I didn’t like the top early in the run, so I wanted the bottom in 3 and 4, so I stayed down there, and he beat me around 3 and 4. But if I maybe could have pulled in front of him there, maybe I could have held him and the 48 off because the 48 was still behind us at that time. Because the next 10 laps I thought, damn, I’m stuck behind them, they’re holding me up a little bit. Eventually with 10 to go, they were quite a bit quicker than us.
Once you get that clean air, I don’t know what we could have done with it. I had the car I anticipated I would have. So many pit stops, so many ‑‑ a lot of great stops, a lot of good stops that maintained track position. Pit road was pretty cut and dried. We come down, get four tires, there was some opportunities for us to stay out or get two, you never really fool with that, it’s good to be on offense with good rubber under the car all the time. We made some good adjustments. We seemed to have a good pattern of what was working for us and I think by the end of the race we had our car as good as we had it all night, so that’s a good job on the crew chief when the car is the best on the last run.
I just like racing here. I think it was a good show. It was raining debris out there for a while, and we were needing some green‑flag runs to get some of the track position back that we were having trouble keeping, and finally the rain shower of debris ended and we were able to finish the race.
It’s a long race, and you get mentally prepared for it because it’s pretty tough. It feels almost like the 600 in some ways. It’s a slick old track, and the pace slows down. You work your guts out in there driving that car around there because the track is so slick, so it’s a very physical race, and I had a blast.
Q. You mentioned the vibration and the crew guys being honest about the lugs not being on. Going into the season it seemed like a lot of the talk was since NASCAR is not policing this now, crew chiefs might gamble but yet today we saw a ton of guys come in with vibrations. Is it just this track? What’s your thoughts on that?
DALE EARNHARDT JR.: I think we all were a little worried when NASCAR said we were going to have to police it because that’s just a big change from the norm and what we’ve done in the past. The question is can we police ourselves. NASCAR doesn’t have the officials on pit road to do it anymore, so they made a change and put it on our laps. You’ve got understand how serious a situation is. You get out there on the race track and we got the corner speeds are 18 miles an hour faster at Vegas, 18 miles an hour faster in the middle of the corner, and if you lose a wheel going that fast, it’s going to be very good. So you have to have guys that are up front and honest that you trust. If your tire guy done makes a mistake, if he makes a mistake and raises his hand and says look, man, I made a mistake, you catch it right then, right under the caution, you get it fixed, you get a chance to get back going. Otherwise if you don’t speak up, you get a bad vibration, the driver is going to come in, and he ain’t going to knock his head against the fence out there when you think the tire is coming off and you lose a lap. Then you’re in big trouble.
It’s a bit of a process, but I think that the guys, the tire guys that are honest and feel confident about what their decision ‑‑ feel confident about I got them tight or didn’t get them tight, that’s the kind of guys you want coming over the wall to help you. You need them guys looking out for you the same way you look out for them. I think over time it’ll be a good system, and it’ll be fine. It was probably like this before when racing started, before there were 43 officials up and down pit road.
Q. Jimmie or Harvick has won the last I think six mile‑and‑a‑half races now dating back to I think Charlotte last year or something. If you’re not driving a Hendrick‑powered car right now, what kind of chances do you have out there?
DALE EARNHARDT JR.: Yeah, I don’t know. I’m glad I’m driving them. And we go to Bristol next, so I guess that’s a better opportunity for me because my name is not Jimmie and my name ain’t Kevin.
Our cars are really good. Our motors are amazing. I’ll be honest, I mean, I’ve been a lot more competitive over the last couple years. We’ve got a lot of great people working at that organization, but my resurgence or whatever you want to call it is mainly due to how good the cars are, how fast the cars are, how well prepared we are, how much work we do. We do a lot of work. It ain’t ‑‑ you put in a lot of work, and there’s some other guys out there that show speed, and Harvick, them guys are unstoppable right now. I was surprised he didn’t win tonight, but he’s at Texas and Jimmie is very strong here. It could have been either one of them.
Yeah, Jimmie is a six‑time champion. He’s got a hell of a résumé.
But I’m glad I’m where I’m at. I wouldn’t want to be anywhere else because it doesn’t look like them other cars are much fun to drive.
Q. You said on pit road something about being conservative a little bit I guess without having a win. I assume that means that you just need to be cognizant of points and stuff, and I’m curious since you won the Daytona 500 last year you didn’t have to go through this early stretch without a win, so can you just talk about how different the mentality is when you don’t have that early win?
DALE EARNHARDT JR.: Yeah, it’s different. It’s not a real serious situation that’s kind of bugging you, but it’s in the back of your mind. One thing I don’t know about this new system is will we have 16 winners this year? I don’t know. It don’t look like it the way Harvick’s running. If he wins enough races, the odds are not really good to have 16 winners, and if we don’t win a race, I think we’re a good enough team to put enough points together to get one of them spots in the back, so I’m probably worrying for nothing.
But I don’t want to assume anything, and nothing is a sure thing. I want to win to know I’m in. I don’t want to wait all the way to Richmond or whatever to count points, and once you get that win, I’ve talked about it before, you get to do things with fuel mileage, you get to be aggressive and try to ‑‑ if you’re a couple laps short you stretch it. We won some races last year doing that, because of that. Just mentally you don’t have as much pressure on you to make a call, right, so a lot of the calls Steve ‑‑ I’ll tell you, and Steve will probably admit it, last season is probably the easiest season he had to call because of that win. It really took the pressure off him having to worry about, man, do I take four, two, do I don’t stop? Hell, just come on in, let’s try to win. We’ve got a win. If we finish 10th, who cares, second, who cares? We’ve already got a win, we’re locked in. Let’s go put tires on and win the race or let’s stay out and make the fuel last and win the race. You can be really aggressive. I don’t know what it’s like to be a crew chief, but I imagine it seems pretty hectic, and once you get them wins, the pressure really releases a little bit.
Q. Dale, you said after the race I’m disappointed with myself for not making a move I should have made. What move was that?
DALE EARNHARDT JR.: I had Harvick cleared off of 2. I should have pulled out in front of him, but I didn’t and if I’d have pulled in front of him, I don’t know if he would have went to the inside or just pushed me down the straightaway. I think I was fast enough and a little bit better than him and Jimmie right then at that moment just for about 10 laps, and if I could have got him behind me and I don’t know how their cars would have reacted to the dirty air. Maybe I could have gotten by that 1 pretty quickly and won the race. No matter if you come third, second, you come close, you always think there was something you should have done different. That’s one that’s going to bug me for a few hours. The other side of it is we’ve had a couple tough weeks. We’ve had very fast cars but the results haven’t been very good and we’ve been frustrated, so it was good to get a good finish in the bank to reassure ourselves that this is where we need to be running and should be running every week.
Q. You mentioned a few times this year and again today that you’re happy with where the cars have been this year. What about your relationship with Greg? Has that progressed to the point that you’d like so far this season?
DALE EARNHARDT JR.: Yeah, it’s good. He’s not Steve. They don’t have the same personality, not that one is better than the other. Me and Steve became such great friends, so it was like working with your best friend every day. Me and Greg are working on that relationship. I’ve got a lot of respect for him. He’s a great family man, and he’s ‑‑ we all swap advice, and he’s real honest and I trust what he ‑‑ knowing the things he’s done to get to where he is, I trust his judgment.
I need that relationship. That’s a relationship I want to have with my crew chief. I want to be best friends. I want to be good pals. I want to enjoy working together, look forward to ‑‑ I need things to motivate me to make the racing enjoyable. When that relationship is really good, it really, really ramps everything else up, and it’s going great. He’s putting together some great cars. I know he’s doing that. He’s doing some great things and I’m glad to have the opportunity to work with him early in his career because he’s really great. He’s one of the best crew chiefs, I think, in the garage.
Q. To follow up on that, it seemed like with Steve, he had more of a cheerleader role for you, keeping you up, and listening to you and Greg, it’s kind of the opposite. Would you agree that you tend to try to pick him up?
DALE EARNHARDT JR.: No, I don’t. I think that he ‑‑ he actually does a good job of saying a thing or two about ‑‑ like tonight, we had a couple good restarts, and he’s like, man, you’re making a lot of people proud of here what you’re doing out there, working hard, we see it and we’re real proud of you. There’s been moments away from the spotlight where he’s put his arm around me and said, man, we’re going to fix this or this is going to get better, trust me. He’s actually ‑‑ he sees when I’m concerned or when I’ve got a little ‑‑ when there’s a question in my mind. We’ve got that kind of chemistry, and it’ll get better and better the more we get to know each other. But at the same time he obviously isn’t the cheerleader that Steve was, and what I did ‑‑ I thought about it in the off‑season, what I wanted to do was try to take it upon myself to be a better motivator. Instead of sitting there and waiting on ‑‑ I used to just sit there and let Steve motivate me, motivate the team, and I thought, you know, I can’t always depend or count on that, and maybe I need to step up and just have a better attitude, let the guys ‑‑ we had some trouble tonight on pit road. Let the guys know it’s not a big deal, it’s a long race, we’ll get it fixed, because I don’t want them carrying around that on their backs for the next stop. I want them to shake it off.
Steve was really, really good at controlling that stuff. I don’t really know what goes on inside the pit box right now with Greg. I don’t have a lot of experience being in the pits with him. But I think he’s a great leader, and like I say, our relationship is getting better and better.
The cheerleader that Steve was really, really good, but it also let me off the hook a lot. And now working with Greg, I’ve got to be more accountable for carrying my own emotions and taking care of myself.
Q. Dale, last night after the XFINITY race you said you were going to go over and talk to Greg about changes you wanted to make for tonight. Did running the XFINITY race last night help you?
DALE EARNHARDT JR.: One thing I was surprised about that race was how loose the car was. I did talk to Greg about that and we did make some more adjustments to the car. I gave him some persuasion to do some things that he was on the fence about doing. We had a great car when we unloaded, but it definitely safeguarded us against some things that I thought we faced tonight. Yeah, it always helps. I think he was able to be in the pits and learn a lot about air pressure. He also watched the adjustments we made on the XFINITY car and learned from those, and he has a great relationship with Dave Elenz and was able to conversate with him quite a bit about some of those adjustments, so that certainly helps. It helps Greg if he has any kind of doubt or any questions about an adjustment or preparation for the car, it definitely helps him.
FastScripts by ASAP Sports
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