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[/media-credit]Friday, April 13, 2012
NASCAR Nationwide Series
Race Final Quotes
Texas Motor Speedway
Dodge PR
Sam Hornish Jr. (No. 12 Würth Dodge Challenger R/T) Finished 11th IT LOOKED TO BE A SOLID NIGHT BEFORE THE CAR GOT TIGHT LATE IN THE RACE: “I think that we started picking up enough speed from the track cooling off and the air getting cooler that we started to get down on the splitter a bit. Something went on and we’re not quite sure. I feel like we went from going really loose in and off to being really tight in the center and off. Our car just wasn’t where it needed to be at the end of the race. The good part was that for the first 150-laps our Würth Dodge Challenger was pretty good. We raced hard and fought back from the wave around that we had to take after the first caution; worked our way up from 19th all the way to fourth. The car was really good during that stint. We need to be better. We’re not at where we need to be yet. We’re getting closer, but we’re just not there.”
YOU HAD THE RUN WHERE YOU RACED UP TO FOURTH AND THEN BEGAN TO FEEL A VIBRATION, WAS IT TIRES? “Yeah. We corded a tire and it really slowed our momentum down. I think that we dropped six or seven spots but that’s part of racing here. Tires are really important and if you’re hard on them, you can use them up pretty quick. All in all we when we got tight, we tried to fix it and just couldn’t get the car to loosen up. I’m proud of all the guys on the team. We made some gains, we just need to make some more.”
Chad Walter (No. 12 Würth Dodge Challenger R/T) YOU LOOKED TO HAVE A TOP-FIVE CAR AT ONE POINT IN THE RACE. HOW WOULD YOU ASSESS YOUR NIGHT? “It’s Friday the 13th isn’t it? These guys on this Penske Racing Dodge did a great job all day. They worked their butts off all week. We finished 11th but I think that we were a top-five car. I’m proud of Sam. He gave us good feedback all night. I feel like this was our most complete race but we didn’t get the results and we’re 11th. We’ve got a little bit of work to do but this is a step in the right direction.”
YOU MADE SOME MINOR ADJUSTMENTS WITH AIR PRESSURE AND WEDGE THAT SEEM TO HELP THE CAR, IT JUST WASN’T ENOUGH THOSE LAST 50 LAPS: “Yeah. We’re still scratching our head a little bit. The car was going free and at some point it just stopped. Sam did a great job giving us feedback but we just couldn’t get the car like we wanted to the last 50 (laps). Everything is going in the right direction. We just need to start making 11th-place finishes into eights and eights into five and so on. There are a lot of races left. We’re getting closer.”
Brad Keselowski (No. 22 Discount Tire Dodge Challenger R/T) Finished 35th “Just one of those weird days of racing. We never have problems with our Discount Tire Dodge mechanically and tonight it got us. I don’t know, maybe it was Friday the 13th to blame. The car was fast. We didn’t qualify great (13th) but we worked our way up front and inside the top five or six when we had a distributor malfunction. I felt the car start to miss, then it shutoff so we had to come to the garage to see what the heck happened; nothing that you can do. I thought that we had a competitive car. The guys did a good job finding the problem and getting us back out there to run some laps.”
