Austin Dillon and the No. 3 Lucas Oil Chevrolet Team Finish 25th at Las Vegas Motor Speedway
“Today just wasn’t our day. We didn’t qualify all that well on Friday and battled from behind from the beginning. That flat right-front tire on lap 132 didn’t make things better. We got behind and had to take the wave-around a few times to get our laps back, but never seemed to get a caution when we needed it most. Then on the last lap we had another tire go down. We’ll try to put this race behind us and move on. I’m sure we learned a few things that we can correct and hopefully finish out this NASCAR goes West tour strong. I appreciate all the support from Lucas Oil this weekend – it was cool to have their logo on the No. 3 car this weekend.”
– Austin Dillon
Paul Menard and the Valvoline / Menards Team Finish 19th at Las Vegas Motor Speedway
“My guys fought hard today and never gave up. I have to thank them for that. The balance of our car was actually not bad. Matt Borland (crew chief) made calls for good adjustments, but I think we were fighting something different than balance today. So there wasn’t much we could do about it. This obviously wasn’t the result we wanted this weekend as a whole. We qualified decent and learned some things in practice but fell off in the race.”
– Paul Menard
Cutdown Tire Foils Ryan Newman’s Top-10 Run at Las Vegas Motor Speedway
“We made some major improvements to the Caterpillar Chevrolet last night after running a simulation that showed a behavioral problem with a rear spring. As soon as the green flag dropped, we made up ground and just missed the top 10 at the conclusion of Stage 1 and from there on, we never raced outside the top 10 until our final pit stop. At that point it felt like something broke underneath the car, but we found out it was actually a tire that was slowly losing air throughout our run. We were fortunate that the caution came out, and we were able to pick up four spots in the end. Like last week, we had a fast car. We just need to stay focused and do everything we can to avoid issues.”
– Ryan Newman
