NASCAR CUP SERIES
DARLINGTON RACEWAY
THE REAL HEROES 400
FORD PERFORMANCE DRIVER – POST RACE QUOTES
SUNDAY, MAY 17, 2020
ARIC ALMIROLA, No. 10 Smithfield Ford Mustang — “It was a decent day for us. When we had track position we ran up front. That was nice. Then we lost a little bit of our track position and then had a penalty where we got put to the back of the field. We just had to fight and climb our way back up towards the front for the rest of the race, but I’m really proud of my guys and I thought we had a top-10 car and finished 12th.. We scored some stage points in stage one and had a solid day. I’m proud of everybody. I’m proud of NASCAR and our sport for being the first sport to get back going. It was kind of eerie to walk out to pit road and not see anybody sitting in the grandstands, but it sure felt good to get back in the race car and that thrill of competition was much needed. I hope everybody enjoyed it, and I hope everybody got a little fill of their sports entertainment through watching us today in the race and hope everybody is doing well. We’re one step closer back to normal. We’ll try again here Wednesday night back in Darlington and see if we can’t get it done. Congrats to my teammate Harvick and we’ll try again on Wednesday night.”
COLE CUSTER, No. 41 HaasTooling.com Ford Mustang — “Definitely wasn’t the day we wanted at Darlington. We started off the race really good. We were in the top-10 and I was pretty confident with the car, but I think I probably started out too conservative. I didn’t want get that Darlington stripe and ruin our day my first time here in a Cup car. I think I put us too far behind and it was so hard to come back from there. I’m looking forward to Wednesday. I think I learned a lot and we’ll be a lot stronger, so I’m looking forward to it.”
CHRIS BUESCHER, No. 17 Fastenal Ford Mustang — “It was exciting to get back to racing after a long time off. We started off just working on the race car aggressively to try to get it to turn better. I got wrecked twice today, which was unusual and very frustrating and pretty much ruined any chance we had at having a good finish today, but we’re making good steps and good progress on the Fastenal Ford and we’re getting it going in the right direction. It just wasn’t meant to be today.”
