NASCAR Cup Series

Good afternoon. This is day 3 of the 2014 Ford championship weekend here as we wrap up what has been another exciting and successful NASCAR racing season. You know, we couldn't do it without the support, the professionalism, and the collaboration between three outstanding partners. We thought that we would let you men and women hear from them today.

Jamie Allison, director, Ford Racing, participated in a press conference this afternoon with counterparts from Chevrolet and Toyota. Below is a transcript of Allison’s remarks.

Jeff Gordon, who fell out of championship contention last week, scored his first ever pole at Homestead-Miami Speedway and the 200th pole for Hendrick Motorsports. And with that he also announced that he fully intends to pursue the spoiler role in the NASCAR race season finale.

Jeff Gordon: Yeah, I'm just blown away right now. To me this has been one of the toughest places for qualifying for me over the years, and that's why we've never sat on a pole. I think having the three rounds of qualifying actually helped me a lot, and the team did an excellent job with the tuning to get it ready for that last round.

Matt Kenseth, No. 20 Dollar General Toyota Camry, Joe Gibbs Racing - Starting Position: 3rd - How strong is your race car for Sunday? "We just worked on qualifying today so we'll get into race practice a little bit tomorrow. Then we'll have a little better idea about Sunday. Today went well -- we had good speed the first lap on the track. I thought qualifying went pretty good."

“We had a great Drive to End Hunger Chevrolet but the bottom just wasn’t the perfect place for us to run. I could feel the tires going away and then we needed to move up. So when we saw some of those guys running fast laps a little bit higher up, I was looking forward to making that last lap. The guys made some great adjustments. We unfortunately had a tire going down on the left front, so I don’t know if that helped us or hurt us, but it was pretty nice to get that pole. That’s awesome.”

Brad Keselowski – No. 2 Miller Lite Ford Fusion – “I’m not happy with fourth, but I’m happy with how strong we’ve been all day. We had decent runs. Our first qualifying run was really strong and then our second and third just weren’t quite where we wanted to be. I’m not sure what we were missing there, but we were close.”

Kyle Larson, driver of the No. 42 Target Chevrolet and the likely Rookie of the Year, took a moment to reflect on rookie lessons learned as he met with the media at Homestead-Miami Speedway, the site of the last NASCAR racing of 2014.

KYLE LARSON, NO. 42 TARGET CHEVROLET SS, met with members of the media at Homestead-Miami Speedway and discussed the potential to wrap up the Rookie of the Year title, his conversation with Ryan Newman this week and many other topics.

Fans continue to count the days until M&M’S® Crispy Milk Chocolate Candies return to stores – but for one fan, that moment arrived faster. A LOT faster.