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[/media-credit]Brad Keselowski (No. 2 Miller Lite Dodge Charger R/T) Finished 9th
YOU STRUGGLED DURING THE MIDDLE STAGES OF THE RACE BUT FINISHED NINTH.
“I don’t know; I’ll have to go back and watch TV and see how it worked. We had a pretty decent car tonight. I don’t think we were the fastest, but we had a decent Dodge, just needed a little bit more. Had some issues that we’ll have to get fixed, but a great job on pit road, great job with strategy and decent speed. I was happy with our ninth. Obviously you want to win whenever you can but I thought we showed a lot more speed than we had here last year in the spring and fall.”
HOW IMPORTANT IS THIS FINISH AS YOU POSITION YOURSELF FOR THE CHASE? “Well, we got a win, which was helpful, so we need to bank top 10s to make sure that we’re in the top 10 in points. So, that’s a solid night.”
Paul Wolfe (Crew Chief, No. 2 Miller Lite Dodge Charger R/T)
FINISHES LIKE THIS PUT YOU IN POSITION TO MAKE THE CHASE. “Absolutely, just keep knocking top 10s out. Obviously it’s not what we wanted. I mean, we came here to win and we feel we’re a good enough team that we should be able to do that. You know, we just weren’t good enough tonight; didn’t have enough long-run speed in our car and had a couple bad restarts there. He was fighting with the rear end locker popping on ‘em a good bit and we would lose track time over that. It was just a hard fought battle all night, really. The team has been doing a great job and we’ve been able to take bad races and turn ‘em into decent finishes. That’s what we need to do to continue to gain points right now and put ourselves in position to get into the Chase.
“We were really good the first run of the race, moving forward. The second run, we adjusted on it and wasn’t very good. We were trying some things there through the middle part and just weren’t really able to make anything happen. We kind of went back on some stuff and gave it our best shot. In the end, it seemed to somewhat recover.”
A.J. Allmendinger (No. 22 Shell/Pennzoil Dodge Charger R/T) Finished 16th
“Our Shell/Pennzoil Dodge was great, fast on the short runs. But on the long runs the tires went away so quickly. The car was like a light switch – it was great, then immediately got bad. We couldn’t keep from grinding the front tires. It was so bad on one of the early runs, we pitted early because it felt like I had a front tire going down. We couldn’t seem to adjust for it. I tried driving differently and nothing seemed to work. Then that second to last run was long and the tires went away 35 laps into it. So after running in the top 10 all day, we didn’t have a yellow fall when we needed it. So we have to take 16th.”
Todd Gordon (Crew Chief, No. 22 Shell/Pennzoil Dodge Charger R/T)
“We struggled in practice to start with. First practice, we really kind of struggled to find rhythm around here and what we needed to work on. We thought we built decent balance in the race car there. We struggled when we got to the back half of the fuel run, struggled with losing some front grip. The long green-flag run there, coming to just about the whole fuel run, we short pitted about like everybody did other than Carl (Edwards) when the caution came out at lap 309. We were good to finish from there, but that forced us to take a wave around and start at the back on scuffs. For all intents and purposes, that kind of bit us. We lost too much time there. That last run, we just lost the front end worse than we lost it all day and got ourselves down a lap.”
